h burns continually within the heart, and which differs in no wise
from the fire existing in inanimate bodies.'[35]

Quite fairly it may be urged that the writer of passages like these
would, if writing in modern language, and with the aid of modern
conceptions, have expressed himself much as Professor Huxley does when,
declaring that the circulation of the blood and the regular movements of
the respiratory, alimentary, and other internal organs are simply
'affairs of mechanism, resulting from the structure and arrangement' of
the bodily organs concerned, from 'the contractility of those organs,
and from the regulation of that contractility by an automatically acting
nervous apparatus;' that muscular contractility and the automatic
activity or irritability of the nerves are 'purely the results of
molecular mechanism;' and that 'the modes of motion which constitute the
physical bases of light, sound, and heat are transmuted by the sensory
organs into affections of nervous matter,' which affections become 'a
kind of physical ideas constituting a physical memory,' and may be
combined in a manner answering to association and imagination, or may
give rise to muscular contractions in those reflex actions which are the
mechanical representatives of volition.' Quite fairly may a doctrine,
capable of being thus translated, be described as leading 'straight to
materialism.' Quite justly may its author be claimed by Huxley as joint
professor of a materialistic creed. True, Descartes lodges within his
human mechanism a _chose pensante_ or rational soul, whose principal
seat is in the brain, and who is treated as corresponding to a hydraulic
engineer stationed in the centre of waterworks for the purpose of
increasing, slackening, or otherwise altering their movements. But this
rational soul is a very needless appendage to either the Cartesian or
the Huxleian system, wherein, if its post be not a literal sinecure,
there is, at any rate, little or nothing for it to do which might not
quite as well be done without it. The hydraulic engineer, sitting in his
central office, has to wind up the whole machinery from time to time,
and to turn now this tap, now that, when he wishes to set this or that
particular machine in motion. But, as no one need be told, our _chose
pensante_ has nothing to do with the winding up of our digestive,
circulatory, or respiratory apparatus; and so far from internally
arranging those other internal organs from t