Huxley's automata still have a kind of freedom
anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will.
A contemporary comparison makes the disputed meaning of freedom visible. In his 1874 essay on animal automatism, Huxley argues that human volition accompanies brain processes without causing bodily motion. But he also calls people free insofar as they can do what they wish. His example is a greyhound: released to pursue a hare, it acts freely even if its desire and movement have mechanical causes. The inspected Clark University transcription follows Collected Essays, volume I, pp. 240–245, rather than the essay's original periodical setting. Huxley, concluding argument.
Chesterton's objection therefore bears most directly on freedom understood as a power exceeding the complete mechanical sequence. It does not establish that every mechanist must deny ordinary voluntary conduct. Huxley also explicitly rejects the labels fatalist, materialist and atheist on pp. 245–246. The comparison exposes a compression in Chesterton's polemic: physiological mechanism, materialism and the impossibility of freedom need separate arguments. Huxley is a relevant interlocutor, already named earlier in this chapter, but this sentence does not identify him as its sole target.
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