This chapter examines the conscious automata theory as advanced by Thomas Huxley in his controversial essay “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (1874), which posits that human consciousness is a mere byproduct of neural processes, not, as is widely thought, the initiator or controller of voluntary behavior. This chapter asks why a theory that denied the efficacy of consciousness strongly captured the Victorian cultural imagination, and considers the implications of the view for aesthetic production. It explores late nineteenth-century responses to conscious automatism in philosophy, psychology, literature, and popular culture, before looking more closely at the treatment of the ideas in Samuel Butler’s “Book of the Machines” and George Eliot’s “Shadows of the Coming Race,” alongside George Henry Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind. The chapter argues that rather than diminishing consciousness, Huxley’s theory removes consciousness from science and hands it over to aesthetics and, especially, literary texts.

This introduction argues that, together, conceptions of automata and automatism provided an expansive framework for expressing diverse, sometimes contradictory, ideas and values in Victorian culture. Introducing the contributions to the volume, this chapter considers the specific sites, uses, and meanings of automata and automatism in the nineteenth century. It examines human automatism in psychology, law, aesthetics, occultism, and science, and considers mechanical automata as entertainment, as commodity, and as racist objects. The introduction also looks at connections to factory and labor automata, and the beginnings of artificial intelligence and robotics. It additionally discusses the depiction of automata in and the influences of discourses of automatism on nineteenth-century literary works.

James Sully, founder of the first English philosophical journal Mind, wrote a study of “George Eliot's Art” for an early number of the journal. This piece stands out, in a periodical devoted to academic and professional philosophy, as the single article in the journal's history (published since 1876) to treat a novelist or poet. But this fact is not surprising, given how seriously Eliot's contemporaries took her status as a philosopher and a moral teacher. Sully observes of George Eliot that people “are apt to think and speak of her as a discoverer and enforcer of moral truth rather than an artist,” while George Cooke, in his 1884 study of her work writes, “she was an ethical prophet.” Such comments were standard among George Eliot's Victorian readers. Henry James, in fact, saw her work as too philosophical and intellectual, complaining that “the philosophical door is always open on her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught of ethical purpose draws across.”