Journalist Henry Blanchamp begins his Fortnightly Review article “Thoughts of a Human Automaton” (1892) with these pronouncements:

The hypnotized subject, acting automatically and without agency, becomes representative of all human behavior. Two decades after Thomas Huxley’s “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata” (1874), responses and sequels to it were still rolling in.

Solutions to the mind/body problem rarely escape the insulating bubble of philosophy to become common cultural vocabulary. In this chapter, I show how Thomas Huxley’s proposed answer to the mind/body problem – that humans are conscious automata – spread through the culture, significantly influencing conceptions of consciousness, freedom, responsibility, and human nature.² Huxley’s argument, which had remarkably strong appeal in late Victorian culture, lurks in the shadows behind a surprising range of thought and writing. We have lost contact with the effects of that argument and the responses it prompted. Huxley’s ideas crucially shaped the background for thinking about the place of the mind and the representation of consciousness in literary and nonliterary texts, as well as in the larger culture, in the final decades of the Victorian period.

Influences and Responses

Consciousness and its relation to the living body became a topic of critical interest in the late Victorian periodical press, pointing toward a widespread cultural engagement with the ways in which developments in science were forcing a reimagining of human mentality. To use Victorian terms, it had been well established that molecular changes in the brain are accompanied by changes in consciousness, but how to account for that association remained unclear. Theories of automatism, growing from theories of reflex action, were central to the new scientific psychology. Those theories acknowledged that some behavior and cognition that previously had been understood as volitional was unconscious and automatic. But what of a more extreme view, one that that regards all cognition as automatic and explains consciousness as no more than subjective feeling, wholly inefficacious in human behavior?

Ideas about both mechanism and unconscious action had been important in the culture for some time before Huxley delivered his somewhat misleadingly titled address “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” at the 1874 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where it was read alongside John Tyndall’s infamous Belfast address supporting scientific materialism.³ Huxley traces the view back to Descartes’ seventeenth-century discussion of animal automatism, in constructing a genealogy that lends authority to his account. The idea that humans could sometimes behave as automata had been well established by discussions of mesmerism, sleepwalking, and other abnormal states of mind. Huxley gave another turn to the screw, radicalizing and extending the discussion for the Victorian public. Rather than trying to preserve a place for volition, he suggests that consciousness might not influence anything.

Conscious automatism understands consciousness as an inefficacious accompaniment of neurophysiological events, a mere by-product of mechanical physical processes. The causal relation between body and mind moves only in one direction: material processes affect the mental, but the mental does not act on the physical. The body, that is, is a machine and it operates without any influence from conscious cognition. We take conscious thought and volition to be directing the show, but they are in fact only like shadows, along for the ride. It is a dualist conception of mind – the mental and the physical are metaphysically distinct from one another – but the consciousness Huxley makes room for in his theory is limited to registering the “what it feels like to me,” what current philosophers call phenomenal consciousness. We are, Huxley concludes, “conscious automata.”⁴

Despite being a theory that was widely discussed, it is a difficult theory to wrap one’s head around. It seems easier to understand, in rough ways, the implications of the theory of evolution in its decentering of the human species than to understand the idea that consciousness does nothing. In a series of metaphorical articulations of the view, Huxley figures consciousness as the ringing of the bell or as “symbols” of brain states.⁵ In the best known of his analogies, he explains that consciousness has no influence on the physical world just “as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery” (575). The Victorian comparative psychologist George Romanes – although he opposed the theory – sums it up in this way:

Proponents of the view appealed to the conservation of energy for support; this principle, they argued, would be violated if the immaterial (consciousness) could produce physical effects. From the start, however, it was noted that Huxley’s steam-whistle metaphor did not work, given that at least some small amount of energy from the system must go to making the whistle shriek. Even if the whistle has no effect on the working of the steam engine, it has effects on other parts of the world: it uses steam, it produces sound, perhaps sending messages and even warnings. As philosopher James Ward protested: “Even shadows and sounds involve work.”⁷ The metaphor already suggests the difficulties of the view: how to conceive of a consciousness that does nothing? But the metaphor also points to the contexts of Huxley’s theory: the increasingly mechanical view of society brought by industrialism, the analogizing of steam power and mental work common in the period, and the mechanistic understanding of time that developed alongside the railway network. Perhaps Huxley, who acknowledged the early influence of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1831) on his thought, was implicitly answering a more than “indeed” to Teufelsdröckh’s hypothetical in the “Natural Supernaturalism” chapter: “unless, indeed, I am a mere Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steam-engine.”⁸ James Paradis has persuasively argued that Huxley’s coining of “scientific naturalism” is a response to Carlyle’s “natural supernaturalism.”⁹

Drawing on laboratory research on the functions of the nervous system, Huxley reminds readers that psychophysiology has established that many cognitive processes are automatic, carried out without consciousness by something like reflex action, just as a frog continues to kick when placed in water after much of its brain has been removed.¹⁰ Huxley also dwells on the medical case of a soldier who, after suffering a brain injury, periodically began to act in ways that make him appear to be “a senseless mechanism” with no consciousness of what he is doing. Yet he was able to carry out complex behaviors, such as writing a letter, in an automatistic state.

Huxley’s theory that humans are automata was lent support by developments in scientific instrumentation and laboratory technologies. “Sensitive” apparatuses measured psychological processes and recorded the speed of nervous impulses involved in perception and other cognitive functions, bringing human mentality into the laboratory. Newly invented devices registered heat and light. Automatic registering instruments graphically recorded movement and sound. Machines seemed to be capable of sensing – hearing, seeing, and feeling – and able to do that better than humans, with “superior sensitivity.”¹¹ An 1879 article describes plans for an apparatus “which is to be to sound what the microscope is to sight, and will enable a whisper to be heard miles distant.”¹² Those advances in what seemed to be intelligent machines helped to give Huxley’s argument purchase in the culture of the time.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, conscious automaton theory came to be called epiphenomenalism, a term borrowed from medicine. The use of the term has been widely attributed to William James (who was also mistakenly credited for the term “stream of consciousness” for a number of years). In fact, others refer to consciousness as epiphenomenal at least as early as the 1880s.¹³ In one sense, conscious automatism is a theory that, like other metaphysical theories, has no real practical import. That is, if volition is an illusion, if consciousness in fact does nothing, there are no consequences for how we experience life. People will still feel that thought causes things.

In regard to our self-conception, it is an unsettling theory, in opposition to a Romanticism that would make the “human mind’s imaginings” central.¹⁴ It also takes a distinctly different turn from the mesmerism that enthralled the Victorian public and that, while acknowledging the force of automatisms, also posited mental causation at a distance. There have been many arguments against conscious automatism (though philosophers like Frank Jackson have recently defended versions of it and Huxley is always invoked in those contemporary discussions). For my purposes, what is important is that despite the decentering nature of the view, Huxley’s presentation of it gripped the Victorian imagination for the remainder of the century. Huxley is a wonderful stylist, and his prose no doubt contributed to the influence of his work. His use of metaphor was much remarked on by his contemporaries, and his rhetorical skills have been commented on by literary critics at least since Walter Houghton’s 1949 article.¹⁵ He was also a shrewd publicist, and arranged for his paper to appear in three separate journals, The British Medical Journal, Nature, and, with a few changes, the influential Fortnightly Review. Even before the outcry that developed in response to Huxley’s automata paper,¹⁶ he had made related claims in articles in widely read periodicals. It was not that others were not making similar arguments; the philosopher Shadworth Hodgson and Douglas Spalding, editor of the journal Nature, were committed epiphenomenalists. But Huxley’s public standing and his marshalling of the automaton metaphor worked to crystalize the debate, and made his version the one that it was de rigueur to answer. As William James put it his Mind article, “Are We Automata?” (1879): “Everyone is now acquainted with the Conscious-Automaton-theory to which Prof. Huxley gave such publicity in his Belfast address.”¹⁷ Huxley’s paper gave rise to literally hundreds of discussions in books and articles. The intense interest, and the perception that Huxley’s conclusion had to be addressed in any related discussion, continued into the early part of the next century. His arguments were supported by the mathematician W. K. Clifford, at least for a time, the psychologist Henry Maudsley, and the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, among others.

The theory was also opposed by many, including the psychologists G. H. Lewes, William Carpenter, George Romanes, and William James. Carpenter, remembered now for his theorizing of “unconscious cerebration” (or automatist cognition), rejected the theory primarily on moral grounds.¹⁸ He conceded that automatisms play essential roles in mental life, but held on to the importance of conscious volitional agency and moral responsibility, considerations central to much Victorian psychological theory. Carpenter famously figures the mind’s “Volitional direction” as a skillful rider in control of a horse that represents the automatic mechanism.¹⁹ A horse will sometimes direct its own motions, plodding home without guidance while the rider daydreams, but the will can intercede to direct automatic activities by establishing habits. Carpenter’s arguments against conscious automatism are more measured than some notably agitated responses from those wanting to defend a traditional view of the soul. W. S. Lilly’s strident, circuitous article, “Materialism and Morality,” which appeared in the Fortnightly Review over ten years after Huxley’s article, charges that Huxley’s view undercuts not only morality, but also the unity of the self; it “reeks of the brothel, the latrine, and the torture trough.”²⁰ In the late 1890s, the idealist Ward expresses similar distaste in his Gifford Lectures (later collected in Naturalism and Agnosticism [1899]), attacking scientific materialism. He devotes a lecture to wrestling with Huxley’s “shallow and perverted psychology,” a psychology that makes mind “impotent” and reduces thinking to an “orderly raving” that “shadows” physiological processes.²¹ Ward exploits the language of disability and nervous system disorder to describe the theory: “A conscious automaton is thus like a paralytic and epileptic rolled into one, the impotent volitions of the first keeping step with the motor discharges of the second” (56).

For James and Romanes, the most compelling argument against conscious automatism is an evolutionary one: consciousness would not have developed if it had no efficacy. In his beautiful literary prose, James explains the theory in a series of compelling metaphors, which remind us that we always talk about consciousness in other terms: “Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging.”²² For James, ultimately, we have no reasoned grounds for deciding for or against the epiphenomenal view of consciousness; instead, we make “an aesthetic choice.” “And now,” he asks “who shall decide between rival aesthetic needs?” (3).

Others opposed the theory by appeals to subjective feeling: we are convinced that our thought and volition matter. Even Romanes, employing a narrative that seems to borrow from George Eliot’s that I discuss later in this chapter, advances such an objection:

The painter John Collier, who married two of Huxley’s daughters (not simultaneously, of course), expressed a similar contention in a letter to Charles Darwin:

The force of the conscious automata theory, however, is that the subjective feeling that one is acting freely does not guarantee its truth. Henry Maudsley pointed that out with his typical expressiveness, in words that Thomas Hardy copied into his literary notebooks. Drawing an analogy with the unreliability of visual perception, Maudsley writes: “Consciousness tells [a person] indeed that he is a self-sufficing individual with infinite potentialities of freewill; it tells him also that the sun goes around the earth.”²⁵

Conscious automatism was not only the focus of philosophical and scientific discussion, but also entered into popular culture. Fraser’s Magazine published a satirical poem in 1875 that begins “Conscious Automata, we nothing can.”²⁶ The hero of Morley Roberts’ minor novel The Colossus: A Story of Today (1899) is described, in a splendidly nonsensical mishmash of discordant views, as feeling “like a conscious automaton, like one mote in a moving tide that was yet himself, like the solitary soul seated, a remote uplifted Teufelsdröckh, in the pineal gland of the brain.”²⁷ Cosmo Monkhouse, a late-century poet and critic, wrote a satirical three-act play, The Automaton, in which his characters test out the conscious automata theory and find it wanting. The play – a comedy involving jealous husbands, marriages threatened by arguments over free will, and a central character named “Fad” who supports the theory – does not demonstrate a subtle understanding of the view, although the invented scientific articles included in the play draw on vocabulary from current periodical discussion. “I abhor, detest, and utterly denies that abominable tomaton theory,” says Fad’s manservant.²⁸ (Incidentally, the play seems to have had only a one-night run.) Punch Magazine, of course, also joined in the fun, with the poem “Address to an Atom. By an Uncomfortably Conscious Automaton.”²⁹ The theory was more cleverly parodied in a piece titled “British Automaton: A Strange Case of Intermittent Unconsciousness” that appeared in Punch in September 1874, that is, even before Huxley’s publication of his article in The Fortnightly. In the spoof, Mr. Punch presents to Professor Huxley the case of Mr. John Smith Robinson who yearly “passes into a totally abnormal existence” when on his annual family holiday. His “actions are purely mechanical,” the whims of his wife and daughters rendering him a volitionless automaton.³⁰ It is a misogynist piece, but one that is based on good knowledge of Huxley’s soldier example, and the joke depends on the audience being acquainted with those details as well.

Major literary writers engaged Huxley’s ideas in more thoughtful ways, deliberating on them in serious considerations of psychology and the role, workings, and representation of consciousness. Before looking more closely at conscious automatism in connection to two literary works, “The Book of the Machines” from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and “Shadows of the Coming Race” from George Eliot’s The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, I want to point to several other Victorian literary authors who were influenced by the theory, to demonstrate again that the ideas saturated the society becoming part of a shared consciousness. Thomas Hardy was fascinated with consciousness, moving from a view similar to Huxley’s automatism in his early career to a later one in which an immanent will slowly achieves consciousness. In the 1880s, Hardy copied in his notebooks published discussions of conscious automatism. One entry notes that “another hypothesis” “represents mind as never interfering in the course of physical events, but at best representing a mere inner aspect of the outward frame of things – a sort of backwater from the stream of physical forces.”³¹ Another entry transcribes a passage from Alfred Fouillée’s “L’Homme automate”: “le desir et l’aversion, le plaisir et la peine, sont les simples indices psychologiques de mouvemens corporels qui ont seuls l’efficacite.”³² In an 1881 entry in his Life, Hardy contemplates writing a historical drama that shows: “Action mostly automatic, reflex movement, etc. Not the result of what is called motive, though always ostensibly so, even to the actors’ own consciousness.”³³ Hardy’s “mostly” perhaps suggests only partial agreement with Huxley’s conscious automatism, but in those years Hardy frequently describes his characters acting as automata, not only when they enter into unusual mental states, such as Angel Clare’s somnambulism, but even in their quotidian activities.

George Bernard Shaw was similarly absorbed by these debates, as he developed his neo-Lamarckian theory of creative evolution that asserts the operation of creativity, intelligence, and free will in the evolutionary process. In Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1922), Pygmalion creates “a pair of human creatures who are all reflexes and nothing else” and denies as a “man of science,” in opposition to the “mystic” Martellus, that one can draw “a line between an automaton and a living organism.”³⁴ In “The New Theology” (1907), Shaw connected conscious automata theory to what he took to be the “blind mechanism” of natural selection:

Wanting to preserve a role for consciousness in evolution, Shaw, like many others, was aghast at the suggestion that what have been considered the highest aesthetic achievements would be possible without sentience playing a role. On Huxley’s account, as opposed to Shaw’s in the passage quoted, the creators would be conscious of what they were doing. That consciousness, however, would play no actual role in the production. But Shaw’s interpretation points to an implication of the view, also picked up by others: if consciousness is no more than an epiphenomenon, why not eliminate it altogether?

Robert Louis Stevenson was also influenced by the new psychology, as evident in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson endorses the conscious automaton theory in his discussion of the “automaton-dog”:

Stevenson’s image of consciousness as an onlooker shut away in the mill garret (mechanical body with brain) is yet another metaphorical spin on the idea that consciousness is the inefficacious byplay of mechanical physical processes. His literary rendering, like the philosophical ones, expresses the view in concrete terms, but adds to it a description of the felt experience of the subject. Even writers for whom the topic of consciousness was not of intense interest responded to Huxley’s theory. Matthew Arnold copied into his notebook a passage from the Fortnightly publication of Huxley’s article on the connection between brain and conscious mental states.³⁷ As late as 1890, Andrew Lang devotes most of a number of his monthly Longman’s feature “At the Sign of the Ship” to rather unskillfully contesting Huxley’s theory.³⁸ The list goes on.

The situation is not too different from what we are experiencing today, when there is a great interest in consciousness across disciplines. Consciousness has come in contemporary philosophy to be known as “the hard problem,” but it is worth noting that Huxley had already articulated that idea in 1879, referring to consciousness as “the metaphysical problem of problems.”³⁹ Consciousness feels to us to be the most significant aspect of human life, yet it is something that, despite our increased knowledge of the workings of the brain, we cannot explain. Almost every Victorian commentator makes a version of “the gap” argument, admitting that we must recognize that we are unable to bridge the seeming chasm between brain and mind and acknowledging the difficulty of translating the mind talk of introspection into the language of science. The scientific naturalist Tyndall, another beautiful stylist among the scientific popularizers, concedes that while “accepting fearlessly the facts of materialism… I bow my head in the dust before the mystery of mind.”⁴⁰ So, it makes sense that this fundamental problem that challenges both our conceptual and linguistic resources would trouble fiction, which has long been understood to be one of our primary modes of exploring the mind.

Conscious and Unconscious Automata in Samuel Butler and George Eliot

The texts that I will examine by George Eliot and Butler take as their subject matter the mechanistic model and its implications for our understanding of the mind.⁴¹ Butler’s “Book of the Machines” from his utopian novel Erewhon, appeared in 1872, two years before Huxley’s paper. The book was not, then, influenced directly by Huxley’s conscious automata paper, but points to the cultural contexts of Huxley’s hypothesis. Although Huxley had not yet presented his conscious automaton analogy, he had made controversial statements in journal articles about the reduction of the mental to the physical. Huxley concluded his Fortnightly Review article “The Physical Basis of Life” (1869) by asserting that “thought may be regarded as a property of matter.”⁴² In an address, “On Descartes’ Discourse,” delivered to the Cambridge Young Man’s Christian Association and published in Macmillan’s Magazine in May 1870, Huxley provocatively claimed: “I hold that … the human body … is a machine, all the operations of which will sooner or later be explained on physical principles. I believe that we shall, sooner or later, arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness.”⁴³ The journalist Richard Holt Hutton, who challenged Huxley’s views repeatedly in The Spectator, responded to his address in an article titled “Professor Huxley as a Machine,” which makes clear that even before the automata paper Huxley was widely understood to be advocating a mechanistic view of human mentality. Hutton depicts a “Huxley-clock” (a conception that Huxley had himself offered in his talk, saying that he would happily accept the cost of being a machine for the benefit of getting things right⁴⁴) in which Huxley’s powers of speculation are replaced by “the infallible response of a calculating machine, striking the oracular answer to our scientific and moral questions with as much certainty as that with which the observatory clock at Greenwich strikes the mean time.”⁴⁵ Hutton’s grumpy but charming retort draws on Babbage’s calculating engine, William Jevons’ “Logical Piano,” and even the mechanism of global standard time. Such an “automatic arrangement for indicating the truth, and for ensuring right action” (550), Hutton protests, results in an impoverished view; the language of science cannot capture qualities such as love or spirit. Hutton charges that Huxley’s notion of “freedom” (determinist) “would be worth just as much as the sense of involuntary power might be to a conscious locomotive, endowed with the capacity to know that as long as the stoker attended the fire, and the boiler remained in good order, it would generate so much momentum every hour” (550). One wonders whether Hutton’s imaginative narrative was the inspiration for Butler’s elaborately developed descriptions of conscious machines and Huxley’s steam-whistle locomotive metaphor.

Butler – brilliant, clever, but prickly and quasi-paranoid – in fact suggested later, when he had come to detest Huxley as part of his crusade against Darwinian accounts of evolution, that Huxley might have been influenced in formulating his theory “by the machine chapters in ‘Erewhon,’ which were still recent.”⁴⁶ Butler writes in Luck, or Cunning that Huxley led off the project of ejecting “consciousness and sentience from any causative action in the working of the universe” with his essay “‘On the hypothesis that animals are automata’ (which it may be observed is the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are animated).”⁴⁷ Butler turns his bitter, chip-on-the-shoulder irony onto Huxley, while aptly describing the negligible effects of the theory on lived experience: “Men and animals must be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it has no effect upon the result” (156). Butler’s point that Huxley’s scenario is the opposite of the one he represents in Erewhon is worth pausing over: Butler imagines a wider role for consciousness in thinking machines, while Huxley instead ever decreases its sphere.

In the “Book of the Machines,” Butler’s first Erewhonian philosopher, a professor of “hypothetics,” contends that if humans are themselves machines with consciousness, then by analogy inorganic mechanism could develop consciousness. And even now, he asks, “who can say that a vapour-engine has not a kind of consciousness?”⁴⁸ Blending Carlyle’s and Huxley’s terms, the professor predicts that “a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible” from “molecular action” (201). As machines develop they gain “self-regulating, self-acting power” (209) (pace Lewes later in this chapter) and even become self-reproducing. Machines outperform humans already in calculation and precision. Hence, the professor predicts that people’s dependency on machines will sooner or later result in the development of a “mechanical consciousness” (199) in superior machines that will enslave humans.

Butler takes the evolutionary view of the development of consciousness and pushes it to extremes. His machine consciousness, however, will be efficacious. The first Erewhonian philosopher (a second philosopher will briefly contest his views in the final chapter) admits objections to free will, but assumes that consciousness, if not free, is part of the causal nexus. In Butler’s early version of the narrative, “Darwin among the Machines” evolved machine feeling is denied: “No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them.”⁴⁹ The Erewhonian philosopher, on the other hand, predicts that machines will come to make their wants known and that already even a potato possesses its own form of desires and emotions.

It is hard to know whether Butler’s chapters are meant to be a satire on Darwinian theory, as has often been suggested, but which Butler explicitly denied. He had not yet rejected natural selection as he was later to do so extravagantly, when he began to fiercely defend a neo-Lamarckian account of the mechanism of evolution, on which the mind plays a directing role. In discussing his intentions in composing “The Book of the Machines” in Unconscious Memory (1880), he claims that he was at the time considering whether “being alive was not simply the being an exceedingly complicated machine.”⁵⁰ Butler conflates questions of life and mind in his consideration of complex machinery. If, he continues,

Even if Butler was in fact testing out the mechanism hypothesis in Erewhon, in this passage he cannot let go of the notion that there must be some other vitalistic sense of “being alive” against which the mechanical picture falls short. He writes: “I do not suppose I at that time saw that this view comes to much the same as denying that there are such qualities as life and consciousness at all” (22). The machine argument, he came to believe, degrades the concepts of life and consciousness. But rather than moving to reassert a distinction between the organic and the mechanical, Butler chooses instead in his subsequent work to break down that opposition, adopting the view that everything, the inorganic and the organic, must possess consciousness and volition to some degree or other.

It is not a surprise that a novelist would resist the diminishing of consciousness. George Eliot, the great Victorian novelist of the “inward self,” to borrow one of her favorite phrases, did exactly that in a letter that she wrote in December 1874.⁵¹ The letter appears to respond to Huxley’s recent automaton paper, and picks up the very terms that Huxley had employed defending his views. Scientific progress, Huxley says, works “to reduce all scientific problems, except those which are purely mathematical, to questions of molecular physics.”⁵² Eliot writes:

Resisting science’s totalizing aspirations, Eliot asserts that the subjective human view – emotion, art, morality, anything that involves values – can never be reduced to scientific fact.

The above letter was written at the time Eliot was beginning to write Daniel Deronda (1876), her novel most concerned with the problem of knowing other minds and most innovative in its representations of consciousness. Lewes was at the same time writing the third volume of Problems of Life and Mind, The Physical Basis of Mind (1876), a book that devotes seven chapters to refuting Huxley’s conscious automaton theory (Huxley’s paper was delivered “to the great scandal of the general public,” says Lewes).⁵⁴ Lewes’ title even plays a riff on Huxley’s title “The Physical Basis of Life.” (Lewes treads lightly, however, suggesting that the ideas he contests must be misinterpretations of Huxley’s views; perhaps Lewes was still smarting from Huxley’s devastating review of his book on Comte.) The dual aspect theory of mind that Lewes endorses maintains the causal efficacy of consciousness, and Lewes refuses to reduce the mental to the physical: “Consciousness as a subjective fact cannot be a material or objective fact.”⁵⁵ Lewes, in fact, contends that all action is in some measure voluntary. Extending the concept of reflex action into a general theory of automatism is a mistake, he argues, because reflex action, even if unconscious, is “sentient”; that is, it depends on sensory responses, and sentience is found only in living organisms not in machines. Huxley’s theory, Lewes maintains, is representative of the current overemphasis on mechanical explanations: “In pursuance of this mechanical point of view to the exclusion of the biological, Thought and even Consciousness have been eliminated from among the organic agencies” (383). For Lewes, “Consciousness is an Agent” (406). The actions of Huxley’s soldier are not evidence that his behavior is entirely automatic; rather they indicate “disordered mental action” (401), a catch-all term emphasizing the connection between body and mind. An automaton can never be made to display the fluctuations of sense-guided actions” (400), Lewes contends, as the injured soldier clearly does. Mechanism, in contrast to organism, “is regulated, not self-regulating” (385). Lewes concludes: “An automaton that will learn by experience, and adapt itself to conditions not calculated for in its construction, has yet to be made; till it is made, we must deny that organisms are machines” (385).

But in “Shadows of the Coming Race,” in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot also wades directly into the debate and imagines, through the voice of her narrator, the development of exactly such self-regulating and adaptive machines.⁵⁶ Recasting Butler’s scenario, her evolved race of machines supplants humans not because machines have developed consciousness, but because they do not possess that “futile cargo of consciousness” (141). Melding Huxley’s and Butler’s hypotheses, Eliot represents evolved machines that act, produce, and create without the unnecessary and inefficacious collateral product of consciousness. She makes no mention of Butler, who later accused her in a notebook entry of cribbing the chapter from his book.⁵⁷ “I ought to be highly flattered,” he gripes.⁵⁸ He may have a point, because although Eliot develops the Huxleyan view of consciousness, her narrative parallels Butler’s in several ways. Like the Erewhonian professor, Theophrastus suggests that machines may “evolve conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction.”⁵⁹ Like Butler, Eliot introduces a debate between contending views, and Theophrastus’ friend Trost, whose name in German means consolation, contends, as does Butler’s second philosopher, that machines “obey the mandates of our consciousness” (139). Machines should be conceived of as extra-corporeal limbs, maintains that philosopher. Trost similarly argues: “They are simply extensions of the human organism” (138). Theophrastus draws attention to the word play of Trost’s name, noting that although Trost tries to console him by suggesting that monotonous, harmful manual labor will soon be accomplished by machines, Trost “neutralises the consolation by extending it” (137) to a vision of society in which technical innovations will result in the automation of all labor. Perhaps Trost’s maintaining of the belief that feeling motivates action is to be regarded as similarly consolatory.

Erewhon includes discussion of machines that are able to register responses to stimuli, machines that no longer “receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses.”⁶⁰ Eliot frames her description of the imagined coming race with discussion of the impact of new “[w]onderously delicate machines,”⁶¹ indicating that those intelligent technologies inspire Theophrastus’ forecasting of evolved machines. She pictures recently developed inscription devices, “cunning wires and wheels and needles” that “register your or my quickness,” and sensitive machines that record sound and even thought: “a microphone which detects the cadence of the fly’s foot on the ceiling and may be expected presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they soliloquise or converse in our brains” (138). Such devices suggest that thoughts have the sort of material realization that would allow them to be measured or imaged by machines, and that recording machines behave like organisms, sensing the things they measure or image. Trost seems to be a stand-in for Lewes, advancing views Lewes advocates in his writing. For Trost, such apparatuses do not show that machines possess sentience or intelligence. Their graphic inscriptions are useful for science but reductive; they are “only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we decipher and make use of” (138).

Psychologist Granville Stanley Hall published a “letter” on “The Graphic Method” (1879) shortly after the appearance of Theophrastus Such that reads “Shadows of the Coming Race” as participating in current debates on machine theories of consciousness, mechanized intelligence, and the explanatory range of automatic recording devices. Hall, who later established the first psychological laboratory in the United States, was studying in Berlin before working with Wilhelm Wundt at his Leipzig psychological laboratory. The new laboratory-based experimental psychology attempted to measure dynamic qualities (amounts and speed), such as the intensity of conscious sensations. The graphic method involved the use of automatic recording apparatuses that mechanically inscribe representations of physical and mental processes, and was touted as surpassing messier, nonprecise human language in its production of objective inscriptions.⁶² Hall acknowledges the achievements associated with those methods, but questions their reach: “I cannot believe that psychological phenomena will be ever to any great extent reproduced from any combination of the curves they trace.”⁶³ He illustrates his points by alluding to Eliot’s narrative, tellingly assuming there is no need to mention the author’s name:

Hall’s image for a reductive material understanding of the mental, “the whirl of molecules engaged in composing an epic” comes not from Theophrastus’ vision, but rather from Trost, who forecasts that “delicate machines” will “give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the production of epic poems.”⁶⁴ Eliot imports the term “spiral vortex” from thermodynamics in an evocative metaphorical image that suggests a specific physical explanation of brain activity discernible in patterns in a recursive system. Trost, however, understands the representation of brain events as only one part of the story, and agrees with Hall on the limitations of the mechanistic view of consciousness.

Eliot had herself years before critiqued the goal of a universal scientific language: a “language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance …., which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs.”⁶⁵ Such a “language may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal more than science,” she writes.⁶⁶ I take Eliot still to reject such a reductionist view at the time she writes “Shadows.” Nevertheless, the ideas presented in the narrative are so thoughtfully treated that it is hard not to believe that she was at least considering their validity. “Shadows of the Coming Race” pictures a future in which this “immensely more powerful unconscious race” will have surpassed humans, held back by the subjective experience of emotions, by irrationality and inaccuracy, and by the sometimes delusory nature of conscious thought: most importantly by the illusion that they possess free will and the conviction that consciousness has causal efficacy.⁶⁷ Eliot writes: “Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished” (141). Consciousness, useless and costly, will have disappeared in a machine race whose adaptive advantage is the elimination of sensibility. If consciousness was understood by some of Eliot’s contemporaries to be the highest development of evolution, Theophrastus suggests that we might regard it instead as an evolutionary mistake (reminding one of Hardy’s depiction of consciousness as “nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal”),⁶⁸ bound to disappear like the eyesight of cave-dwelling creatures. In an evocative turn of phrase, Eliot overturns Carpenter’s previously discussed horse and rider image in which the conscious will of the rider controls the reflex action of the horse. Theophrastus instead depicts consciousness as “like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of a swift horseman.”⁶⁹

Eliot’s forecasting of the disappearance of consciousness was not only the creature of her imagination. In response to the charge that consciousness could not be useless on an evolutionary account, some suggested that consciousness had now outlived its use. Commentators pointed out that many actions that once were conscious are now performed unconsciously. The idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley in an 1895 article on conscious automatism, which, he said, “seems to grow every day more in fashion,”⁷⁰ develops and rejects a hypothetical argument along those lines: “Thus habits of action and of perception … become automatic more and more and with that unconscious. From which we conclude that, when on the whole adaptation has grown perfect, consciousness will become superseded wholly.”⁷¹

“Shadows of the Coming Race” repeatedly emphasizes the benefits of doing without consciousness. The machine race will be “free from the fussy accompaniment of that consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme governing rank, when in truth it is an idle parasite.”⁷² The superior machines will not only perform better than humans “but with the immense advantage of banishing from the earth’s atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like performance … with a ridiculous sense of being effective” (139). It is hard not to notice that here in the voice of her second first-person narrator Eliot’s language takes on a tone and emotional stridency similar to that of her early first-person work, “The Lifted Veil” (1859), in which her narrator Latimer develops the disturbing ability to experience the consciousnesses of others. Consciousness in both texts, experienced and described, is screaming, petty, trivial, parasitic, and insect-like.

Pushing the implications of automatism to an extreme, Theophrastus fills the planet with responsive mechanical beings that exercise cognitive capacities unconsciously, but are not endowed with the senses that Lewes reserves for organisms. Instead, these are

The coming race will be, in other words, unconscious automata, who mechanically continue to produce the things that consciousness values in a world empty of mind.

In an Oscar Wilde-like reversal, the narrator denies at the end of the piece that he accepts the reality of the vision he has offered, claiming that it is only one of “my melancholy fancies,” emerging from ideas “flying about in the air like other germs.”⁷⁴ His explanation alludes to controversies surrounding germ theory, which had only recently begun to be accepted by the medical community, after vociferous resistance. The reference may work to suggest, as some were then arguing in more than a metaphorical sense, that contagious ideas can infect the mind. Yet it could also imply, despite the narrator’s turnabout, that the automatist account might also in time be accepted. Further, there is something so compelling in George Eliot’s descriptions of the pain of consciousness that we might see in this text, beyond her contributions to the disputes on automatism, an Eliot who does appreciate the benefits of escaping conscious experience. Eliot, as we know, felt intensely. She suffered from severe depression as well as severe headaches, emotional and physical pain. While she was working on Theophrastus Such, Lewes was increasingly ill and was to die before the book’s publication. Eliot may have entertained the idea at times that sentience was more of a burden than a wonder. In an unpublished (and undated, but probably 1874) poem, Eliot writes about the illusions of consciousness, as she explores the idea that there is no reality to the “I”: “Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’/ Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,” she writes, endorsing the Huxleyan view she elsewhere rejects.⁷⁵ Abandoning the confidence expressed in her letter, she concedes that the “atom-whirl” (l. 7) of “consciousness” (l. 18) is in fact no more than “a bubble world” of “sense, pleasure, pain” (l. 19) and a “[p]hantasmal flux of moments” (l. 21).

Conscious Automatism and Aesthetics

Wherever Eliot ultimately stood on the question of the causal efficacy of consciousness, she dramatizes it in a way that forcefully points toward the consequences that an epiphenomenal view has for fiction. Eliot famously wrote that “the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”⁷⁶ What happens to that claim if aesthetic works have no causal power, and if “imaginings” and “feelings” are impotent by-products of mechanical processes?

As noted, the public debates on conscious automatism often focused on such questions of creativity and aesthetics. Opponents insisted that books matter, that they persuade, that they transfer ideas between minds and cause things to happen. Those who resisted conscious automatism believed that Huxley’s theory put us on a slippery slope to the total expulsion of subjectivity. Butler had charged that current science wanted to completely “eliminate mind,” and in an article on the new psychology, Ward famously wrote that: “It is not so long since the world was shocked… about a psychology without a soul, but the ‘modern’ psychology is a psychology without even consciousness.”⁷⁷ Regarding consciousness as an epiphenomenon can be seen as a step on the way to a thorough behaviorism. By 1913 John Watson proposed in his behaviorist manifesto that psychologists study behavior, not consciousness.

This polemic stands behind the literary writing of the late Victorian period. Is consciousness nothing? Is volition illusory? Or, is consciousness almost everything? One might expect Huxley’s theory to result in fiction’s turn to externalist representations of mind, and to the kind of literary determinism associated with Zola, with its focus on physiology, heredity, and environment. Late Victorian literature did have a brief flirtation with those modes. But, as I see it, what Huxley’s theory did was to turn consciousness over to literature, encouraging its increased focus on the internal workings of an individual mind – George Eliot’s “flux of moments” – as it progressed into a full-blown stream of consciousness.⁷⁸ As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”⁷⁹ Huxley, in fact, made claims that sound surprisingly close to Woolf’s. In an 1887 address to the Royal Academy on “The Interests of Science and Literature,” he described the desire “to say to the moment, ‘Stop,’ and to arrest in forms intelligible by the feeling or by the intellect the different phases of that astonishing and continually marvellous flux of phenomena which passes before the eyes.”⁸⁰ Compare Lily’s well-known realization in To the Lighthouse:

Huxley’s views ultimately contributed to a turn away from a thoroughgoing scientific approach to mind. His aim was to leave consciousness outside of the explanatory reach of science. “I cannot conceive,” he wrote, “how the phenomena of consciousness, as such and apart from the physical process by which they are called into existence, are to be brought within the bounds of physical science.”⁸² James reads Huxley’s theory as an attempt to escape from feeling: “In a word, feeling constitutes the ‘unscientific’ half of existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a ‘scientist’ will be too happy to purchase” a single set of terms for science “at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes it to the limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its part need ever be feared.”⁸³ Like Butler, James suggests that Huxley’s preservation of a small place for subjectivity was only a first step in expelling it entirely. As he was later to write in the chapter on “The Automaton-Theory” in his Psychology (1890), Huxley’s theory sought to “turn consciousness out of the door as a superfluity.”⁸⁴ Ed Block, writing in the late twentieth century, made an even stronger claim, charging that “Huxley hunts consciousness into a corner and claims to have defeated and obliterated the self.”⁸⁵

Huxley did not banish consciousness. Instead, his dualist account allowed consciousness to retain the special place it always had in any humanist or religious world view. Huxley gave consciousness to aesthetics, to literature. In an 1856 paper on natural history, Huxley had written, “living nature is not a mechanism but a poem,” and aspects of that view were retained in his later thought.⁸⁶ As Huxley writes in “On Science and Art in Relation to Education” (1882): “All the subjects of our thoughts … may be classified under one of two heads – as either within the province of the intellect, something that can be put into propositions and affirmed or denied; or as within the province of feeling … called the aesthetic side of our nature and which can neither be proved nor disproved, but only felt.”⁸⁷ Rather than eliminating consciousness, Huxley attempted, while admitting the truth of recent science, to carve out a space where feeling and aesthetics could be free from the encroachments of science. He wrote in “Science and Morals” (1886) in response to Lilly’s virulent attack on his theory: “Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world; and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation.”⁸⁸ Huxley’s view was not really so far from Eliot’s. In the same article, he wrote that beyond matter and force, it seemed to him “pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness” (794). When Charles Dickens included among the false book backs he commissioned for his Gadshill study one with the title “The Collected Poems of T. H. Huxley,” he no doubt meant to imply that scientific naturalism was disenchanting the world, rendering it a Gradgrindian fact mill, stealing from it its poetry, as Carlyle had asserted many years earlier in his denunciation of his “Mechanical age.”⁸⁹

I think Dickens and James both got it wrong. Darwin did not accept the conscious automaton theory; in a letter of 1882, he wrote regarding Huxley’s essay: “That on automatism is wonderfully interesting; more is the pity, say I, for if I were as well armed as Huxley I would challenge him to a duel on this subject.”⁹⁰ Nevertheless, Darwin came closer to understanding what Huxley was up to than many others. The final letter that Darwin’s son included in his collection of his father’s correspondence is one that Darwin sent to Huxley. Darwin was very ill, suffering from heart disease, and Huxley sought to arrange better care for him. Shortly before his death, in a letter that is as forceful and moving a representation of human consciousness as that in any novel, Darwin wrote to Huxley: “Once again accept my cordial thanks, my dear old friend. I wish to God that there were more automata in the world like you.”⁹¹