Mechanical thought and the possibility of inquiry
if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting
Here the objection concerns the attraction of thinking before it concerns thinking's logical possibility. A pertinent contemporary comparison is Huxley, already named earlier in the chapter. In his 1874 essay on animal automatism, he extends his account to humans: bodily processes cause conscious states, while volition accompanies rather than initiates action. Yet he continues to demand careful reasoning and distinguishes his hypothesis from materialism. The inspected witness is the Huxley File's transcription of Collected Essays, volume I, pp. 199–250, especially pp. 244–45. Huxley, human automatism and its consequences.
This establishes neither the truth nor the consistency of Huxley's theory. It identifies the additional argument Chesterton would need if he wanted to move from mechanism to the impossibility of rational inquiry. This paragraph does not supply that argument: its deliberately modest conclusion is that the discouraging effect of such views remains uncertain. Nor should Huxley's mechanism simply be renamed materialism against his explicit disclaimer.
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