Evolution and Its Consequences: A Reply to Professor Huxley (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Evolution and Its Consequences: A Reply to Professor Huxley

If this implies that sensations supply the conditions for the existence of our memory of sensations, or of our thoughts about sensations, it is a truism which it is hardly worth while to state so solemnly. If it implies that sensations supply anything else it is obviously erroneous. And if it means, as the context would seem to show it does, that sensations are the subject-matter of all thought or knowledge, then it is no less contrary to fact, inasmuch as our emotions, which constitute a large part of the subject matter of our thought or of knowledge, are not sensations.

It seems to me that this argument is quite unfair, and that it is a false dilemma. The reviewer's words evidently point to sensa tions as the condition of our knowledge of external objects, and this, at least, is no truism. F or my part, if I understand Professor Huxley rightly, I should assert that to be axiomatic which he says is obviously erroneous.

The short summary in the Quarterly Review of the psychical characters common to man and brutes on the one hand, and peculiar to man as a rational animal on the other, was evidently not intended as an exhaustive catalogue, but merely as a concise statement of certain leading and essential differences. Therefore emotion, as avowedly common to man and brute, and volition and memory, as beside the question, were reasonably left unnoticed.

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