71. If the preceding attempt to disengage the question from the ambiguities of its terms has been successful, we shall find little difficulty in rationally interpreting all the facts adduced in favor of Animal Automatism, without having recourse to a mechanical theory of biological phenomena. The objections to that theory are that it employs terms which have very misleading _connotations_ even when they do not _denote_ phenomena of widely different orders; so that the moral repugnance commonly felt at the attempt to treat the animal organism as if it were a machine, is sustained by the intellectual repugnance at the attempt to explain biological phenomena on principles derived from phenomena of a simpler order. Remark, in passing, this piquant contradiction: the Automaton theory of Descartes, when applied to the animals, generally excited ridicule or repulsion; whereas the far more inconsistent and mechanical theory of Reflex Action has been almost universally welcomed as a great discovery, though it banishes the Sensibility which Descartes preserved. And further, the philosophers who most loudly protested against the idea that animals were machines, were the philosophers who most insisted that these animals were made, not evolved--planned by their maker, as a watch is planned by its maker, with a distinct purpose and prevision in the disposition of every part; whereas the philosophers who most emphatically reject this notion of organisms being made, are often those who liken organisms to machines. 72. The paradox propounded by Descartes loses much of its strangeness when we understand his meaning. Its terms are infelicitous because of their misleading connotations. When he says that all the actions of animals which seem to be due to Consciousness are in fact produced on the same principles as those of a machine, he means that animals have not souls to direct their actions; but since, on being questioned, he is ready to admit that animals have sensation, perception, emotion, and memory, his denial of their souls practically comes to much the same as the ordinary position that animals have not Thought nor Consciousness of Self.[220] The admission of sensation is, however, quite enough to mark the essential difference between an organism and a machine.