t category from matter and motion. The attitude of naturalism in
this crucial issue has never been fixed and unwavering, but there has
gradually come to predominate a method of denying to the inner life all
efficacy and real significance in the cosmos, while admitting its
presence on the scene. It is a strange fact of history that Descartes,
the French philosopher who prided himself on having rid the soul of all
dependence on nature, should have greatly contributed to this method.
But it is perhaps not so strange when we consider that every dualism is,
after all, symmetrical, and that consequently whatever rids the soul of
nature at the same time rids nature of the soul. It was Descartes who
first conceived the body and soul to be utterly distinct substances. The
corollary to this doctrine was his _automatism_, applied in his own
system to animals other than man, but which those less concerned with
religious tradition and less firmly convinced of the soul's originating
activity were not slow to apply universally. This theory conceived the
vital processes to take place quite regardless of any inner
consciousness, or even without its attendance. To this radical theory
the French materialists of the eighteenth century were especially
attracted. With them the active soul of Descartes, the distinct
spiritual entity, disappeared. This latter author had himself admitted a
department of the self, which he called the "passions," in which the
course and content of mind is determined by bodily conditions. Extending
this conception to the whole province of mind, they employed it to
demonstrate the thorough-going subordination of mind to body. La
Mettrie, a physician and the author of a book entitled "L'Homme
Machine," was first interested in this thesis by a fever delirium, and
afterward adduced anatomical and pathological data in support of it. The
angle from which he views human life is well illustrated in the
following:

"What would have sufficed in the case of Julius Caesar, of
Seneca, of Petronius, to turn their fearlessness into timidity
or braggartry? An obstruction in the spleen, the liver, or the
_vena portae_. For the imagination is intimately connected
with these viscera, and from them arise all the curious
phenomena of hypochondria and hysteria. . . . 'A mere nothing,
a little fibre, some trifling thing that the most subtle
anatomy cannot discover, would have made two idiots out o