, and meant what he said, in the
hardest sense his words can bear. _His_ matter was not even
gravitating, much less living; it had no property except that of
retaining and transmitting the motion received from without by
pressure and impact. And _his_ animals were automata, not merely in
the sense of being governed by sensation and instinct, but precisely
in the sense that a watch is an automaton. Henry More cries out
against the ruthless consequence with which he develops his principles
to this result. "In this," he says, "I do not so much admire the
penetrative power of your genius as I tremble for the fate of the
animals. What I recognize in you is not only subtlety of thought, but
a hard and remorseless logic with which you arm yourself as with a
sword of steel, to take away life and sensation with one blow, from
almost the whole animal kingdom." But Descartes was not the man to be
turned from the legitimate result of his principles by a scream. "Nec
moror astutias et sagacitates canum et vulpium, nec quaecunque alia
propter cibum, venerem, aut metum a brutis fiunt. _Profiteor enim me
posse perfacile illa omnia ut a sola membrorum conformatione profecta
explicare._"[14]

Nature of sensation.

The difficulty reaches its height when Descartes attempts to explain
the union of the body and spirit in man. Between two substances which,
when clearly and distinctly conceived, do not imply each other, there
can be none but an artificial unity,--a unity of composition that
still leaves them external to each other. Even God cannot make them
one in any higher sense.[15] And as it is impossible in the nature of
mind to see any reason why it should be embodied, or in the nature of
matter to see any reason why it should become the organ of mind, the
union of the two must be taken as a mere empirical fact. When we put
on the one side all that belongs to intelligence, and on the other all
that belongs to matter, there is a residuum in our ideas which we
cannot reduce to either head. This residuum consists of our appetites,
our passions, and our sensations, including not only the feelings of
pain and pleasure, but also the perceptions of colour, smell, taste,
of hardness and softness, and all the other qualities apprehended by
touch. These must be referred to the union of mind with body. They are
subjective in the sense that they give us no information as to