Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/751

Rh of analogy—taking into account that great doctrine of continuity which forbids one to suppose that any natural phenomenon can come into existence suddenly and without some precedent, gradual modification tending toward it—taking that great doctrine into account (and every thing we know of science tends to confirm it), and taking into account on the other hand the incontrovertible fact that the lower animals which possess brains at all possess, at any rate, in rudiments a part of the brain, which we have every reason to believe is the organ of consciousness in ourselves, then it seems vastly more probable that the lower animals, although they may not possess that sort of consciousness which we have ourselves, yet have it in a form proportional to the comparative development of the organ of that consciousness, and foreshadow more or less dimly those feelings which we possess ourselves. I think that is, probably, the most rational conclusion that can be come to. It has this advantage, that it relieves us of the very terrible consequences of making any mistake on this subject. I must confess that, looking at that terrible struggle for existence which is everywhere going on in the animal world, and considering the frightful quantity of pain which must be given and received in every part of the animal world, I say that is a consideration which would induce me wholly to adopt the view of Descartes. Yet I think it on the whole much better to err on the right side, and not to concur with Descartes on this point. But let me point out to you that, although we may come to the conclusion that Descartes was wrong in supposing that animals are insensible machines, it does not in the slightest degree follow that they are not sensitive and conscious automata; in fact, that is the view which is more or less clearly in the minds of every one of us. When we talk of the lower animals being provided with instinct, and not with reason, what we really mean is that, although they are sensitive, and, although they are conscious, yet they do act mechanically, and that their different states of consciousness, their sensations, their thoughts (if they have them), their volitions (if they have them), are the products and consequences of the mechanical arrangements. I must confess that this popular view is to my mind the only one which can be scientifically adopted. We are bound by every thing we know of the operations of the nervous system to believe that, when a certain molecular change is brought about in the central part of the nervous system, that change, in some way utterly unknown to us, causes that state of consciousness that we term a sensation. It is not to be doubted that the impression excited by those motions which give rise to sensation leaves in the brain molecular changes which answer to what Haller called "vestigia rerum," and which that great thinker David Hartley termed "vibratiuncles," which we might term sensigenous molecular, and which constitute the physical foundation of memory. Those same changes gave rise naturally to conditions of pleasure and pain, and to those emotions which in ourselves we call