Chapter 6 - “No Purpose, Heart or Mind or Will”

Summary

This chapter situates James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” in the midst of Victorian debates about psychological automatism, finding in the poem’s vision of mechanical life the materialistic and atheistic consequences to which conservative readers feared that theories like Thomas Huxley’s conscious automatism must lead. Thomson depicts not just the impotence of consciousness; he uses automatism to challenge the very possibility of free will. But while Thomson found in psychological automatism a confirmation of his own pessimism, this chapter notes that others in the 1870s articulated theories of the phenomenon that retained space for an immaterial and efficacious will (and the soul for which it seemed to stand). By considering how Thomson’s poem resonates with one key example of such conservative models, the work of William Carpenter, this chapter ultimately reveals the surprising endurance of an orthodox psychological dualism in the latter part of the nineteenth century.