Are We Automata?

The hypothesis we are advocating might, if confirmed, considerably mitigate one of the strongest objections to the credibility of the Darwinian theory. A consciousness which should not only determine its brain to prosperous courses, but also by virtue of that hereditary influence of habit (nowadays so generally believed in by naturalists) should organise from generation to generation a nervous system more and more mechanically incapable of wandering from the lines of interest chosen for it at first, would immensely shorten the time and labour of natural selection. Mr. Darwin regards animated nature as a sort of table on which dice are continually being thrown. No intention presides over the throwing, but lucky numbers from time to time fortuitously turn up and are preserved. If the ideas we have advanced concerning the instability of a complicated cerebrum be true, we should have a sort of extension of this reign of accident into the functional life of [p. 16] every individual animal whose brain had become sufficiently evolved. As his body morphologically was the result of lucky chance, so each of his so- called acts of intelligence would be another; and ages might elapse before out of this enormous lottery-game a brain should emerge both complex and secure. But give to consciousness the power of exerting a constant pressure in the direction of survival, and give to the organism the power of growing to the modes in which consciousness has trained it, and the number of stray shots is immensely reduced, and the time proportionally shortened for Evolution. It is, in fact, hard to see how without an effective superintending ideal the evolution of so unstable an organ as the mammalian cerebrum can have proceeded at all.