The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense.  There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.

No objection can lie to our supposing potential or elementary volition and consciousness to exist in atoms, on the score that their action would be less regular or uniform if they had free will than if they had not.  By giving them free will we do no more than those who make them bound to obey fixed laws.  They will be as certain to use their freedom of will only in particular ways as to be driven into those ways by obedience to fixed laws.

The little element of individual caprice (supposing we start with free will), or (supposing we start with necessity) the little element of stiffneckedness, both of which elements we find everywhere in nature, these are the things that prevent even the most reliable things from being absolutely reliable.  It is they that form the point of contact between this universe and something else quite different in which none of those fundamental ideas obtain without which we cannot think at all.  So we say that nitrous acid is more reliable than nitric for etching.

Atoms have a mind as much smaller and less complex than ours as their bodies are smaller and less complex.

Complex mind involves complex matter and vice versa.  On the whole I think it would be most convenient to endow all atoms with a something of consciousness and volition, and to hold them to be pro tanto, living.  We must suppose them able to remember and forget, i.e. to retain certain vibrations that have been once established—­gradually to lose them and to receive others instead.  We must suppose some more intelligent, versatile and of greater associative power than others.