a golden harvest calling for the human sickle. On the
other hand, our critics and satirists will continue to do well
in pointing out the illusions which beset us, the obstacles
which lie between us and our aims, and even the unpa-
latable concomitants which are bound up with these ends
themselves after they have been reached.

There seems much to augur that the future endeavours
of civilised mankind will be more and more directed by a
consciousness of the interests of the permanent race rather
than of those of the existing generation. The ideal which
will inspire social action is the lasting improvement of
human life by social and other agencies. Here, too, there
will be room for each of the opposing tendencies. The
advance of the race is a theme which easily lends itself
to a foolish over-confidence. We may only too readily
imagine that civilisation is swiftly bearing mankind to a
millennial bliss, and in the early enforcements of the new
ideal an exaggeration of its value is, one may safely say,
inevitable. Hence though the idea of progress will, I con-
ceive, supply the prime motor influence to future human
efforts, it will be for the safety and good of mankind that
it should ever and again be reminded of the other side of
the case; of the heaviness of the wheels of the advancing
chariot, of the huge granite-blocks which lie in its road, and
of the much arduous toil which must be cheerfully given
by the best of the race before the object of the journey will
be realised in fairer and balmier regions.

It seems well then that the encourager and the discourager of the human heart, the inspirer and the restrainer of human effort, should still ply their respective functions side by side. At the same time there will always be room

THE FUTURE OF PESSIMISM.

463

for a third party, for the man of philosophic mind with his larger and correcter vision, assigning to each function its right place, and preventing either order of worker from indecorously seeking to construct a perfect view of the whole out of his partial and fragmentary perception.

APPENDICES.

A.

MR. LEWES'S VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

6

MR. LEWES's important work The Physical Basis of Mind' appeared as the present volume was passing through the press; otherwise I should certainly have availed myself of some of the writer's conclusions. The reference to this work given in the foot-note on page 193, was written after I had read no more of the volume than the chapter there referred to. After a careful perusal of the whole treatise I feel it is due to Mr. Lewes to say that his theory of consciousness differs in appearance at least very considerably from that propounded by myself. He recognises mental phenomena (feeling or sensibility) as lying to a large extent, if not altogether, outside the limits of the personal consciousness. Thus he accepts the idea of cerebral reflexes (unconscious cerebration) with which he supposes perception and volition to be associated, and attributes feeling and volition to the lower centres in the spinal column.

Into the worth of the evidence brought forward in support of these views, I cannot here enter. What concerns us is the question whether such processes are strictly and absolutely unconscious. So far as I understand Mr. Lewes, these actions in the normal organism do somehow affect the personal consciousness, though the feelings or perceptions are not distinctly recognised. In this case, then, they are not absolutely unconscious, but only relatively so. Even supposing, however, that they are wholly detached from the personal consciousness, a further question arises whether they belong to some inferior sub-personal consciousness. That the spinal centres, for example, have a detached consciousness of their own

H H

is a supposition which is perfectly consistent with the view of consciousness taken in the present work. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Lewes does not discuss this question. It will thus be seen that Mr. Lewes's views, so far as they are clearly developed, do not necessarily involve what I conceive to be the essentially unpsychological and self-contradictory idea of unconscious mind.

In one other particular, however, Mr. Lewes does distinctly oppose the view of consciousness taken by me in this work. In his able discussion of the theory of animal automatism (problem III.) he argues that since feeling or sensibility is an invariable accompaniment of the action of nervous centres, it is more philosophical to regard the psychical and the physical event as two aspects of one reality, and consequently to view feeling as a coefficient, and not, with Professor Huxley, as a collateral result, of nervous process. I will frankly confess that had I read this criticism of the theory of automatism before writing the present work I should probably have put the teaching of the automatists less dogmatically than I have done (p. 202). At the same time, I must say that Mr. Lewes's argument appears to me to be far from a demonstration of his conclusion.

Without attempting to deal with the whole of this argument, I will simply point out what I regard as its principal defects. First of all, the alleged uniform connection of feeling (sensibility) with the action of nervous centres is not, I conceive, sufficiently proved. One of the arguments relied on here is the analogy of the lower (reflex) actions with the admittedly conscious ones. Here the writer seems to forget that the apparent spontaneity and new adaptation of means to ends manifested by decapitated animals may be accounted for as the result of organic connections depending on previous conscious co-ordinations and successive adaptations. Thus the close analogy might be explained without postulating present feeling. The other argument used is the identity of structure of all nervous centres. This physiological argument assumes, it is plain, that a psychical event, feeling, is as much a function of a nervous centre as the secretion of bile is a function of the liver. This is a considerable assumption, seeing that feeling, unlike bile, is not reducible to the same common terms as the organ (matter and motion). Yet waiving this difficulty, one may ask why Mr. Lewes should stop at the nervous centres and not rather predicate feeling of all parts of the nervous organism, e.g.