Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/431

Rh the emotion of making an effort, and which the unintelligent power, or agent, of course cannot know. Only an intelligent agent could know this; and, if the conforming of the effort to this want, knowledge, and preconception of the effect, must he referred to some intelligent being, it seems most reasonable to refer it to that which directly feels its own want, knows its own perceptions of the mode of gratifying the want, and its preconceptions of the effect to be produced, to all which the effort is to be conformed, and which, at the same time, is conscious of making the effort, and of thus conforming and directing it by its own knowledge. Between the sensation of making the effort, and the antecedent and subsequent knowledge of the subject of this sensation, there is a harmony which it seems hardly conceivable should be produced by any power not having this particular knowledge, and much less by a power incapable of knowing any thing.

As germane to the whole question of intelligent and material power, I will suggest that it would be unphilosophical to assume the existence of two primary powers, when one is sufficient to account for all the phenomena, and that as it seems hardly conceivable that matter should create intelligence with its phenomena—that what does not know should create a power to know—while, as already shown, it is quite conceivable that intelligence should create all that we know of matter and its phenomena, the hypothesis of power in matter should, on this ground, be discarded.

Let us now look at the very curious and interesting experiments upon which Prof. Huxley relies for his conclusion that animals, including man, are "conscious automata." He says that, if, when a man is so paralyzed that he is wholly unable to move his limbs, and has no sensation in them, "you tickle the soles of his feet with a feather, the limbs will be drawn up just as vigorously, perhaps a little more vigorously, than when he was in full possession of the consciousness of what happened to him." He also states that, in the case of a frog similarly paralyzed, the result of irritating the skin of the foot is the same: in both cases the foot being drawn from the source of irritation. This certainly bears a very close resemblance to the voluntary action of an intelligent being, conscious of the irritation, and seeking relief from it by its own efforts. Prof. Huxley, however, positively asserts that the animal could not feel or will, and this being so; he seems to be justified, by common usage, in calling the action "mechanical." But, as I have already suggested, this term is applied to material phenomena, whether they are results of matter in motion, or of the uniform modes of God's action.

Other experiments still more remarkable are presented. He says: "Take this creature (the same frog), which certainly cannot, feel, and touch the skin of the side of its body with a little acetic acid, which, in a frog that could feel, would give rise to great pain. In this case there can be no pain.... Nevertheless, the frog lifts up the limb on