Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification
by Samuel Butler · English · Gutenberg #4967 · 506,919 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification
Author: Samuel Butler
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #4967]
Most recently updated: August 3, 2014
Language: English
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Credits: Transcribed from the 1922 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LUCK, OR CUNNING, AS THE MAIN MEANS OF ORGANIC MODIFICATION ***
Transcribed from the 1922 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
Luck, or Cunning
As the Main Means of
Organic Modification?
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
* * * * *
Jonathan Cape
Eleven Gower Street, London
* * * * *
_First Published_ 1887
_Second Edition_ 1920
_Re-issued_ 1922
* * * * *
TO THE MEMORY OF
THE LATE
_ALFRED TAYLOR_, ESQ., _&c._
WHOSE EXPERIMENTS AT CARSHALTON
IN THE YEARS 1883 AND 1884
ESTABLISHED THAT PLANTS ALSO ARE ENDOWED WITH
INTELLIGENTIAL AND VOLITIONAL FACULTIES
THIS BOOK
BEGUN AT HIS INSTIGATION
IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
Note
THIS second edition of _Luck_, _or Cunning_? is a reprint of the first
edition, dated 1887, but actually published in November, 1886. The only
alterations of any consequence are in the Index, which has been enlarged
by the incorporation of several entries made by the author in a copy of
the book which came into my possession on the death of his literary
executor, Mr. R. A. Streatfeild. I thank Mr. G. W. Webb, of the
University Library, Cambridge, for the care and skill with which he has
made the necessary alterations; it was a troublesome job because owing to
the re-setting, the pagination was no longer the same.
_Luck_, _or Cunning_? is the fourth of Butler’s evolution books; it was
followed in 1890 by three articles in _The Universal Review_ entitled
“The Deadlock in Darwinism” (republished in _The Humour of Homer_), after
which he published no more upon that subject.
In this book, as he says in his Introduction, he insists upon two main
points: (1) the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and (2)
the reintroduction of design into organic development; and these two
points he treats as though they have something of that physical life with
which they are so closely associated. He was aware that what he had to
say was likely to prove more interesting to future generations than to
his immediate public, “but any book that desires to see out a literary
three-score years and ten must offer something to future generations as
well as to its own.” By next year one half of the three-score years and
ten will have passed, and the new generation by their constant enquiries
for the work have already begun to show their appreciation of Butler’s
method of treating the subject, and their readiness to listen to what was
addressed to them as well as to their fathers.
HENRY FESTING JONES.
_March_, 1920.
Author’s Preface to First Edition
THIS book, as I have said in my concluding chapter, has turned out very
different from the one I had it in my mind to write when I began it. It
arose out of a conversation with the late Mr. Alfred Tylor soon after his
paper on the growth of trees and protoplasmic continuity was read before
the Linnean Society—that is to say, in December, 1884—and I proposed to
make the theory concerning the subdivision of organic life into animal
and vegetable, which I have broached in my concluding chapter, the main
feature of the book. One afternoon, on leaving Mr. Tylor’s bedside, much
touched at the deep disappointment he evidently felt at being unable to
complete the work he had begun so ably, it occurred to me that it might
be some pleasure to him if I promised to dedicate my own book to him, and
thus, however unworthy it might be, connect it with his name. It
occurred to me, of course, also that the honour to my own book would be
greater than any it could confer, but the time was not one for balancing
considerations nicely, and when I made my suggestion to Mr. Tylor on the
last occasion that I ever saw him, the manner in which he received it
settled the question. If he had lived I should no doubt have kept more
closely to my plan, and should probably have been furnished by him with
much that would have enriched the book and made it more worthy of his
acceptance; but this was not to be.
In the course of writing I became more and more convinced that no
progress could be made towards a sounder view of the theory of descent
until people came to understand what the late Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory
of natural selection amounted to, and how it was that it ever came to be
propounded. Until the mindless theory of Charles Darwinian natural
selection was finally discredited, and a mindful theory of evolution was
substituted in its place, neither Mr. Tylor’s experiments nor my own
theories could stand much chance of being attended to. I therefore
devoted myself mainly, as I had done in “Evolution Old and New,” and in
“Unconscious Memory,” to considering whether the view taken by the late
Mr. Darwin, or the one put forward by his three most illustrious
predecessors, should most command our assent.
The deflection from my original purpose was increased by the appearance,
about a year ago, of Mr. Grant Allen’s “Charles Darwin,” which I imagine
to have had a very large circulation. So important, indeed, did I think
it not to leave Mr. Allen’s statements unchallenged, that in November
last I recast my book completely, cutting out much that I had written,
and practically starting anew. How far Mr. Tylor would have liked it, or
even sanctioned its being dedicated to him, if he were now living, I
cannot, of course, say. I never heard him speak of the late Mr. Darwin
in any but terms of warm respect, and am by no means sure that he would
have been well pleased at an attempt to connect him with a book so
polemical as the present. On the other hand, a promise made and received
as mine was, cannot be set aside lightly. The understanding was that my
next book was to be dedicated to Mr. Tylor; I have written the best I
could, and indeed never took so much pains with any other; to Mr. Tylor’s
memory, therefore, I have most respectfully, and regretfully, inscribed
it.
Desiring that the responsibility for what has been done should rest with
me, I have avoided saying anything about the book while it was in
progress to any of Mr Tylor’s family or representatives. They know
nothing, therefore, of its contents, and if they did, would probably feel
with myself very uncertain how far it is right to use Mr. Tylor’s name in
connection with it. I can only trust that, on the whole, they may think
I have done most rightly in adhering to the letter of my promise.
_October_ 15, 1886.
Contents
Page
NOTE, BY HENRY FESTING JONES 6
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION 7
I. INTRODUCTION 13
II. MR. HERBERT SPENCER 28
III. MR. HERBERT SPENCER (_continued_) 42
IV. MR. ROMANES’ “MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS” 52
V. STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AT ISSUE 70
VI. STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AT ISSUE 80
(_continued_)
VII. MR. SPENCER’S “THE FACTORS OF ORGANIC 100
EVOLUTION”
VIII. PROPERTY, COMMON SENSE, AND PROTOPLASM 112
IX. PROPERTY, COMMON SENSE, AND PROTOPLASM 125
(_continued_)
X. THE ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE MIND 135
XI. THE WAY OF ESCAPE 147
XII. WHY DARWIN’S VARIATIONS WERE ACCIDENTAL 156
XIII. DARWIN’S CLAIM TO DESCENT WITH MODIFICATION 168
XIV. DARWIN AND DESCENT WITH MODIFICATION 177
(_continued_)
XV. THE EXCISED “MY’S” 202
XVI. MR. GRANT ALLEN’S “CHARLES DARWIN” 211
XVII. PROFESSOR RAY LANKESTER AND LAMARCK 225
XVIII. PER CONTRA 239
XIX. CONCLUSION 251
Chapter I
Introduction
I SHALL perhaps best promote the acceptance of the two main points on
which I have been insisting for some years past, I mean, the substantial
identity between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design
into organic development, by treating them as if they had something of
that physical life with which they are so closely connected. Ideas are
like plants and animals in this respect also, as in so many others, that
they are more fully understood when their relations to other ideas of
their time, and the history of their development are known and borne in
mind. By development I do not merely mean their growth in the minds of
those who first advanced them, but that larger development which consists
in their subsequent good or evil fortunes—in their reception, favourable
or otherwise, by those to whom they were presented. This is to an idea
what its surroundings are to an organism, and throws much the same light
upon it that knowledge of the conditions under which an organism lives
throws upon the organism itself. I shall, therefore, begin this new work
with a few remarks about its predecessors.
I am aware that what I may say on this head is likely to prove more
interesting to future students of the literature of descent than to my
immediate public, but any book that desires to see out a literary
three-score years and ten must offer something to future generations as
well as to its own. It is a condition of its survival that it shall do
this, and herein lies one of the author’s chief difficulties. If books
only lived as long as men and women, we should know better how to grow
them; as matters stand, however, the author lives for one or two
generations, whom he comes in the end to understand fairly well, while
the book, if reasonable pains have been taken with it, should live more
or less usefully for a dozen. About the greater number of these
generations the author is in the dark; but come what may, some of them
are sure to have arrived at conclusions diametrically opposed to our own
upon every subject connected with art, science, philosophy, and religion;
it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased, it can only
be at the cost of repelling some present readers. Unwilling as I am to
do this, I still hold it the lesser of two evils; I will be as brief,
however, as the interests of the opinions I am supporting will allow.
In “Life and Habit” I contended that heredity was a mode of memory. I
endeavoured to show that all hereditary traits, whether of mind or body,
are inherited in virtue of, and as a manifestation of, the same power
whereby we are able to remember intelligently what we did half an hour,
yesterday, or a twelvemonth since, and this in no figurative but in a
perfectly real sense. If life be compared to an equation of a hundred
unknown quantities, I followed Professor Hering of Prague in reducing it
to one of ninety-nine only, by showing two of the supposed unknown
quantities to be so closely allied that they should count as one. I
maintained that instinct was inherited memory, and this without admitting
more exceptions and qualifying clauses than arise, as it were, by way of
harmonics from every proposition, and must be neglected if thought and
language are to be possible.
I showed that if the view for which I was contending was taken, many
facts which, though familiar, were still without explanation or
connection with our other ideas, would remain no longer isolated, but be
seen at once as joined with the mainland of our most assured convictions.
Among the things thus brought more comfortably home to us was the
principle underlying longevity. It became apparent why some living
beings should live longer than others, and how any race must be treated
whose longevity it is desired to increase. Hitherto we had known that an
elephant was a long-lived animal and a fly short-lived, but we could give
no reason why the one should live longer than the other; that is to say,
it did not follow in immediate coherence with, or as intimately
associated with, any familiar principle that an animal which is late in
the full development of its reproductive system will tend to live longer
than one which reproduces early. If the theory of “Life and Habit” be
admitted, the fact of a slow-growing animal being in general longer lived
than a quick developer is seen to be connected with, and to follow as a
matter of course from, the fact of our being able to remember anything at
all, and all the well-known traits of memory, as observed where we can
best take note of them, are perceived to be reproduced with singular
fidelity in the development of an animal from its embryonic stages to
maturity.
Take this view, and the very general sterility of hybrids from being a
_crux_ of the theory of descent becomes a stronghold of defence. It
appears as part of the same story as the benefit derived from judicious,
and the mischief from injudicious, crossing; and this, in its turn, is
seen as part of the same story, as the good we get from change of air and
scene when we are overworked. I will not amplify; but reversion to
long-lost, or feral, characteristics, the phenomena of old age, the fact
of the reproductive system being generally the last to arrive at
maturity—few further developments occurring in any organism after this
has been attained—the sterility of many animals in confinement, the
development in both males and females under certain circumstances of the
characteristics of the opposite sex, the latency of memory, the
unconsciousness with which we grow, and indeed perform all familiar
actions, these points, though hitherto, most of them, so apparently
inexplicable that no one even attempted to explain them, became at once
intelligible, if the contentions of “Life and Habit” were admitted.
Before I had finished writing this book I fell in with Professor Mivart’s
“Genesis of Species,” and for the first time understood the distinction
between the Lamarckian and Charles-Darwinian systems of evolution. This
had not, so far as I then knew, been as yet made clear to us by any of
our more prominent writers upon the subject of descent with modification;
the distinction was unknown to the general public, and indeed is only now
beginning to be widely understood. While reading Mr. Mivart’s book,
however, I became aware that I was being faced by two facts, each
incontrovertible, but each, if its leading exponents were to be trusted,
incompatible with the other.
On the one hand there was descent; we could not read Mr. Darwin’s books
and doubt that all, both animals and plants, were descended from a common
source. On the other, there was design; we could not read Paley and
refuse to admit that design, intelligence, adaptation of means to ends,
must have had a large share in the development of the life we saw around
us; it seemed indisputable that the minds and bodies of all living beings
must have come to be what they are through a wise ordering and
administering of their estates. We could not, therefore, dispense either
with descent or with design, and yet it seemed impossible to keep both,
for those who offered us descent stuck to it that we could have no
design, and those, again, who spoke so wisely and so well about design
would not for a moment hear of descent with modification.
Each, moreover, had a strong case. Who could reflect upon rudimentary
organs, and grant Paley the kind of design that alone would content him?
And yet who could examine the foot or the eye, and grant Mr. Darwin his
denial of forethought and plan?
For that Mr. Darwin did deny skill and contrivance in connection with the
greatly preponderating part of organic developments cannot be and is not
now disputed. In the first chapter of “Evolution Old and New” I brought
forward passages to show how completely he and his followers deny design,
but will here quote one of the latest of the many that have appeared to
the same effect since “Evolution Old and New” was published; it is by Mr.
Romanes, and runs as follows:—
“It is the _very essence_ of the Darwinian hypothesis that it only seeks
to explain the _apparently_ purposive variations, or variations of an
adaptive kind.” {17a}
The words “apparently purposive” show that those organs in animals and
plants which at first sight seem to have been designed with a view to the
work they have to do—that is to say, with a view to future function—had
not, according to Mr. Darwin, in reality any connection with, or
inception in, effort; effort involves purpose and design; they had
therefore no inception in design, however much they might present the
appearance of being designed; the appearance was delusive; Mr. Romanes
correctly declares it to be “the very essence” of Mr. Darwin’s system to
attempt an explanation of these seemingly purposive variations which
shall be compatible with their having arisen without being in any way
connected with intelligence or design.
As it is indisputable that Mr. Darwin denied design, so neither can it be
doubted that Paley denied descent with modification. What, then, were
the wrong entries in these two sets of accounts, on the detection and
removal of which they would be found to balance as they ought?
Paley’s weakest place, as already implied, is in the matter of
rudimentary organs; the almost universal presence in the higher organisms
of useless, and sometimes even troublesome, organs is fatal to the kind
of design he is trying to uphold; granted that there is design, still it
cannot be so final and far-foreseeing as he wishes to make it out. Mr.
Darwin’s weak place, on the other hand, lies, firstly, in the supposition
that because rudimentary organs imply no purpose now, they could never in
time past have done so—that because they had clearly not been designed
with an eye to all circumstances and all time, they never, therefore,
could have been designed with an eye to any time or any circumstances;
and, secondly, in maintaining that “accidental,” “fortuitous,”
“spontaneous” variations could be accumulated at all except under
conditions that have never been fulfilled yet, and never will be; in
other words, his weak place lay in the contention (for it comes to this)
that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily wealth, more than of
wealth of any other kind, unless sustained experience, watchfulness, and
good sense preside over the accumulation. In “Life and Habit,” following
Mr. Mivart, and, as I now find, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I showed (pp.
279–281) how impossible it was for variations to accumulate unless they
were for the most part underlain by a sustained general principle; but
this subject will be touched upon more fully later on.
The accumulation of accidental variations which owed nothing to mind
either in their inception, or their accumulation, the pitchforking, in
fact, of mind out of the universe, or at any rate its exclusion from all
share worth talking about in the process of organic development, this was
the pill Mr. Darwin had given us to swallow; but so thickly had he gilded
it with descent with modification, that we did as we were told, swallowed
it without a murmur, were lavish in our expressions of gratitude, and,
for some twenty years or so, through the mouths of our leading
biologists, ordered design peremptorily out of court, if she so much as
dared to show herself. Indeed, we have even given life pensions to some
of the most notable of these biologists, I suppose in order to reward
them for having hoodwinked us so much to our satisfaction.
Happily the old saying, _Naturam expellas furcâ_, _tamen usque recurret_,
still holds true, and the reaction that has been gaining force for some
time will doubtless ere long brush aside the cobwebs with which those who
have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin’s reputation as a philosopher still
try to fog our outlook. Professor Mivart was, as I have said, among the
first to awaken us to Mr. Darwin’s denial of design, and to the absurdity
involved therein. He well showed how incredible Mr Darwin’s system was
found to be, as soon as it was fully realised, but there he rather left
us. He seemed to say that we must have our descent and our design too,
but he did not show how we were to manage this with rudimentary organs
still staring us in the face. His work rather led up to the clearer
statement of the difficulty than either put it before us in so many
words, or tried to remove it. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that
the “Genesis of Species” gave Natural Selection what will prove sooner or
later to be its death-blow, in spite of the persistence with which many
still declare that it has received no hurt, and the sixth edition of the
“Origin of Species,” published in the following year, bore abundant
traces of the fray. Moreover, though Mr. Mivart gave us no overt aid, he
pointed to the source from which help might come, by expressly saying
that his most important objection to Neo-Darwinism had no force against
Lamarck.
To Lamarck, therefore, I naturally turned, and soon saw that the theory
on which I had been insisting in “Life and Habit” was in reality an easy
corollary on his system, though one which he does not appear to have
caught sight of. I saw also that his denial of design was only, so to
speak, skin deep, and that his system was in reality teleological,
inasmuch as, to use Isidore Geoffroy’s words, it makes the organism
design itself. In making variations depend on changed actions, and
these, again, on changed views of life, efforts, and designs, in
consequence of changed conditions of life, he in effect makes effort,
intention, will, all of which involve design (or at any rate which taken
together involve it), underlie progress in organic development. True, he
did not know he was a teleologist, but he was none the less a teleologist
for this. He was an unconscious teleologist, and as such perhaps more
absolutely an upholder of teleology than Paley himself; but this is
neither here nor there; our concern is not with what people think about
themselves, but with what their reasoning makes it evident that they
really hold.
How strange the irony that hides us from ourselves! When Isidore
Geoffroy said that according to Lamarck organisms designed themselves,
{20a} and endorsed this, as to a great extent he did, he still does not
appear to have seen that either he or Lamarck were in reality
reintroducing design into organism; he does not appear to have seen this
more than Lamarck himself had seen it, but, on the contrary, like
Lamarck, remained under the impression that he was opposing teleology or
purposiveness.
Of course in one sense he did oppose it; so do we all, if the word design
be taken to intend a very far-foreseeing of minute details, a riding out
to meet trouble long before it comes, a provision on academic principles
for contingencies that are little likely to arise. We can see no
evidence of any such design as this in nature, and much everywhere that
makes against it. There is no such improvidence as over providence, and
whatever theories we may form about the origin and development of the
universe, we may be sure that it is not the work of one who is unable to
understand how anything can possibly go right unless he sees to it
himself. Nature works departmentally and by way of leaving details to
subordinates. But though those who see nature thus do indeed deny design
of the prescient-from-all-eternity order, they in no way impugn a method
which is far more in accord with all that we commonly think of as design.
A design which is as incredible as that a ewe should give birth to a lion
becomes of a piece with all that we observe most frequently if it be
regarded rather as an aggregation of many small steps than as a single
large one. This principle is very simple, but it seems rather difficult
to understand. It has taken several generations before people would
admit it as regards organism even after it was pointed out to them, and
those who saw it as regards organism still failed to understand it as
regards design; an inexorable “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther”
barred them from fruition of the harvest they should have been the first
to reap. The very men who most insisted that specific difference was the
accumulation of differences so minute as to be often hardly, if at all,
perceptible, could not see that the striking and baffling phenomena of
design in connection with organism admitted of exactly the same solution
as the riddle of organic development, and should be seen not as a result
reached _per saltum_, but as an accumulation of small steps or leaps in a
given direction. It was as though those who had insisted on the
derivation of all forms of the steam-engine from the common kettle, and
who saw that this stands in much the same relations to the engines, we
will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amœba to man, were to
declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the
ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a
future development, and were unable to understand that a piecemeal
_solvitur ambulando_ design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and
all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design, than
any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and even at times successful.
From Lamarck I went on to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin—better men both of
them than Lamarck, and treated by him much as he has himself been treated
by those who have come after him—and found that the system of these three
writers, if considered rightly, and if the corollary that heredity is
only a mode of memory were added, would get us out of our dilemma as
regards descent and design, and enable us to keep both. We could do this
by making the design manifested in organism more like the only design of
which we know anything, and therefore the only design of which we ought
to speak—I mean our own.
Our own design is tentative, and neither very far-foreseeing nor very
retrospective; it is a little of both, but much of neither; it is like a
comet with a little light in front of the nucleus and a good deal more
behind it, which ere long, however, fades away into the darkness; it is
of a kind that, though a little wise before the event, is apt to be much
wiser after it, and to profit even by mischance so long as the disaster
is not an overwhelming one; nevertheless, though it is so interwoven with
luck, there is no doubt about its being design; why, then, should the
design which must have attended organic development be other than this?
If the thing that has been is the thing that also shall be, must not the
thing which is be that which also has been? Was there anything in the
phenomena of organic life to militate against such a view of design as
this? Not only was there nothing, but this view made things plain, as
the connecting of heredity and memory had already done, which till now
had been without explanation. Rudimentary organs were no longer a
hindrance to our acceptance of design, they became weighty arguments in
its favour.
I therefore wrote “Evolution Old and New,” with the object partly of
backing up “Life and Habit,” and showing the easy rider it admitted,
partly to show how superior the old view of descent had been to Mr.
Darwin’s, and partly to reintroduce design into organism. I wrote “Life
and Habit” to show that our mental and bodily acquisitions were mainly
stores of memory: I wrote “Evolution Old and New” to add that the memory
must be a mindful and designing memory.
I followed up these two books with “Unconscious Memory,” the main object
of which was to show how Professor Hering of Prague had treated the
connection between memory and heredity; to show, again, how substantial
was the difference between Von Hartmann and myself in spite of some
little superficial resemblance; to put forward a suggestion as regards
the physics of memory, and to meet the most plausible objection which I
have yet seen brought against “Life and Habit.”
Since writing these three books I have published nothing on the
connection between heredity and memory, except a few pages of remarks on
Mr. Romanes’ “Mental Evolution in Animals” in my book, {23a} from which I
will draw whatever seems to be more properly placed here. I have
collected many facts that make my case stronger, but am precluded from
publishing them by the reflection that it is strong enough already. I
have said enough in “Life and Habit” to satisfy any who wish to be
satisfied, and those who wish to be dissatisfied would probably fail to
see the force of what I said, no matter how long and seriously I held
forth to them; I believe, therefore, that I shall do well to keep my
facts for my own private reading and for that of my executors.
I once saw a copy of “Life and Habit” on Mr. Bogue’s counter, and was
told by the very obliging shopman that a customer had just written
something in it which I might like to see. I said of course I should
like to see, and immediately taking the book read the following—which it
occurs to me that I am not justified in publishing. What was written ran
thus:—
“As a reminder of our pleasant hours on the broad Atlantic, will Mr. —
please accept this book (which I think contains more truth, and less
evidence of it, than any other I have met with) from his friend —?”
I presume the gentleman had met with the Bible—a work which lays itself
open to a somewhat similar comment. I was gratified, however, at what I
had read, and take this opportunity of thanking the writer, an American,
for having liked my book. It was so plain he had been relieved at not
finding the case smothered to death in the weight of its own evidences,
that I resolved not to forget the lesson his words had taught me.
The only writer in connection with “Life and Habit” to whom I am anxious
to reply is Mr. Herbert Spencer, but before doing this I will conclude
the present chapter with a consideration of some general complaints that
have been so often brought against me that it may be worth while to
notice them.
These general criticisms have resolved themselves mainly into two.
Firstly, it is said that I ought not to write about biology on the ground
of my past career, which my critics declare to have been purely literary.
I wish I might indulge a reasonable hope of one day becoming a literary
man; the expression is not a good one, but there is no other in such
common use, and this must excuse it; if a man can be properly called
literary, he must have acquired the habit of reading accurately, thinking
attentively, and expressing himself clearly. He must have endeavoured in
all sorts of ways to enlarge the range of his sympathies so as to be able
to put himself easily _en rapport_ with those whom he is studying, and
those whom he is addressing. If he cannot speak with tongues himself, he
is the interpreter of those who can—without whom they might as well be
silent. I wish I could see more signs of literary culture among my
scientific opponents; I should find their books much more easy and
agreeable reading if I could; and then they tell me to satirise the
follies and abuses of the age, just as if it was not this that I was
doing in writing about themselves.
What, I wonder, would they say if I were to declare that they ought not
to write books at all, on the ground that their past career has been too
purely scientific to entitle them to a hearing? They would reply with
justice that I should not bring vague general condemnations, but should
quote examples of their bad writing. I imagine that I have done this
more than once as regards a good many of them, and I dare say I may do it
again in the course of this book; but though I must own to thinking that
the greater number of our scientific men write abominably, I should not
bring this against them if I believed them to be doing their best to help
us; many such men we happily have, and doubtless always shall have, but
they are not those who push to the fore, and it is these last who are
most angry with me for writing on the subjects I have chosen. They
constantly tell me that I am not a man of science; no one knows this
better than I do, and I am quite used to being told it, but I am not used
to being confronted with the mistakes that I have made in matters of
fact, and trust that this experience is one which I may continue to spare
no pains in trying to avoid.
Nevertheless I again freely grant that I am not a man of science. I have
never said I was. I was educated for the Church. I was once inside the
Linnean Society’s rooms, but have no present wish to go there again;
though not a man of science, however, I have never affected indifference
to the facts and arguments which men of science have made it their
business to lay before us; on the contrary, I have given the greater part
of my time to their consideration for several years past. I should not,
however, say this unless led to do so by regard to the interests of
theories which I believe to be as nearly important as any theories can be
which do not directly involve money or bodily convenience.
The second complaint against me is to the effect that I have made no
original experiments, but have taken all my facts at second hand. This
is true, but I do not see what it has to do with the question. If the
facts are sound, how can it matter whether A or B collected them? If
Professor Huxley, for example, has made a series of valuable original
observations (not that I know of his having done so), why am I to make
them over again? What are fact-collectors worth if the fact
co-ordinators may not rely upon them? It seems to me that no one need do
more than go to the best sources for his facts, and tell his readers
where he got them. If I had had occasion for more facts I daresay I
should have taken the necessary steps to get hold of them, but there was
no difficulty on this score; every text-book supplied me with all, and
more than all, I wanted; my complaint was that the facts which Mr. Darwin
supplied would not bear the construction he tried to put upon them; I
tried, therefore, to make them bear another which seemed at once more
sound and more commodious; rightly or wrongly I set up as a builder, not
as a burner of bricks, and the complaint so often brought against me of
not having made experiments is about as reasonable as complaint against
an architect on the score of his not having quarried with his own hands a
single one of the stones which he has used in building. Let my opponents
show that the facts which they and I use in common are unsound, or that I
have misapplied them, and I will gladly learn my mistake, but this has
hardly, to my knowledge, been attempted. To me it seems that the chief
difference between myself and some of my opponents lies in this, that I
take my facts from them with acknowledgment, and they take their theories
from me—without.
One word more and I have done. I should like to say that I do not return
to the connection between memory and heredity under the impression that I
shall do myself much good by doing so. My own share in the matter was
very small. The theory that heredity is only a mode of memory is not
mine, but Professor Hering’s. He wrote in 1870, and I not till 1877. I
should be only too glad if he would take his theory and follow it up
himself; assuredly he could do so much better than I can; but with the
exception of his one not lengthy address published some fifteen or
sixteen years ago he has said nothing upon the subject, so far at least
as I have been able to ascertain; I tried hard to draw him in 1880, but
could get nothing out of him. If, again, any of our more influential
writers, not a few of whom evidently think on this matter much as I do,
would eschew ambiguities and tell us what they mean in plain language, I
would let the matter rest in their abler hands, but of this there does
not seem much chance at present.
I wish there was, for in spite of the interest I have felt in working the
theory out and the information I have been able to collect while doing
so, I must confess that I have found it somewhat of a white elephant. It
has got me into the hottest of hot water, made a literary Ishmael of me,
lost me friends whom I have been sorry to lose, cost me a good deal of
money, done everything to me, in fact, which a good theory ought not to
do. Still, as it seems to have taken up with me, and no one else is
inclined to treat it fairly, I shall continue to report its developments
from time to time as long as life and health are spared me. Moreover,
Ishmaels are not without their uses, and they are not a drug in the
market just now.
I may now go on to Mr. Spencer.
Chapter II
Mr. Herbert Spencer
MR. HERBERT SPENCER wrote to the _Athenæum_ (April 5, 1884), and quoted
certain passages from the 1855 edition of his “Principles of Psychology,”
“the meanings and implications” from which he contended were sufficiently
clear. The passages he quoted were as follows:—
Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive sequences are not
determined by the experiences of the _individual_ organism
manifesting them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they
are determined by the experiences of the _race_ of organisms forming
its ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless successive
generations have established these sequences as organic relations (p.
526).
The modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life
are also bequeathed (p. 526).
That is to say, the tendencies to certain combinations of psychical
changes have become organic (p. 527).
The doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by
experience must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the
connections established by the accumulated experiences of every
individual, but to all those established by the accumulated
experiences of every race (p. 529).
Here, then, we have one of the simpler forms of instinct which, under
the requisite conditions, must necessarily be established by
accumulated experiences (p. 547).
And manifestly, if the organisation of inner relations, in
correspondence with outer relations, results from a continual
registration of experiences, &c. (p. 551).
On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised
memory; on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of
incipient instinct (pp. 555–6).
Memory, then, pertains to all that class of psychical states which
are in process of being organised. It continues so long as the
organising of them continues; and disappears when the organisation of
them is complete. In the advance of the correspondence, each more
complex class of phenomena which the organism acquires the power of
recognising is responded to at first irregularly and uncertainly; and
there is then a weak remembrance of the relations. By multiplication
of experiences this remembrance becomes stronger, and the response
more certain. By further multiplication of experiences the internal
relations are at last automatically organised in correspondence with
the external ones; and so conscious memory passes into unconscious or
organic memory. At the same time, a new and still more complex order
of experiences is thus rendered appreciable; the relations they
present occupy the memory in place of the simpler one; they become
gradually organised; and, like the previous ones, are succeeded by
others more complex still (p. 563).
Just as we saw that the establishment of those compound reflex
actions which we call instincts is comprehensible on the principle
that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into
correspondence with outer relations; so the establishment of those
consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations
constituting our ideas of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the
same principle (p. 579).
In a book published a few weeks before Mr. Spencer’s letter appeared
{29a} I had said that though Mr. Spencer at times closely approached
Professor Hering and “Life and Habit,” he had nevertheless nowhere shown
that he considered memory and heredity to be parts of the same story and
parcel of one another. In his letter to the _Athenæum_, indeed, he does
not profess to have upheld this view, except “by implications;” nor yet,
though in the course of the six or seven years that had elapsed since
“Life and Habit” was published I had brought out more than one book to
support my earlier one, had he said anything during those years to lead
me to suppose that I was trespassing upon ground already taken by
himself. Nor, again, had he said anything which enabled me to appeal to
his authority—which I should have been only too glad to do; at last,
however, he wrote, as I have said, to the _Athenæum_ a letter which,
indeed, made no express claim, and nowhere mentioned myself, but “the
meanings and implications” from which were this time as clear as could be
desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering and myself to stand
aside.
The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. Spencer, or any
others that can be found in his works, show that he regarded heredity in
all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit that this
conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer’s writings, and that even
the passages in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible
till read by the light of Professor Hering’s address and of “Life and
Habit.”
True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as “the
experience of the race,” “accumulated experiences,” and others like them,
but he did not explain—and it was here the difficulty lay—how a race
could have any experience at all. We know what we mean when we say that
an individual has had experience; we mean that he is the same person now
(in the common use of the words), on the occasion of some present action,
as the one who performed a like action at some past time or times, and
that he remembers how he acted before, so as to be able to turn his past
action to account, gaining in proficiency through practice. Continued
personality and memory are the elements that constitute experience; where
these are present there may, and commonly will, be experience; where they
are absent the word “experience” cannot properly be used.
Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many. We now
see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no means the
whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is the race that
is one, and the individual many. We all admit and understand this
readily enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer wrote the
passages he adduced in the letter to the _Athenæum_ above referred to.
In the then state of our ideas a race was only a succession of
individuals, each one of them new persons, and as such incapable of
profiting by the experience of its predecessors except in the very
limited number of cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times,
writing, was possible. The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere said,
remorselessly shorn between each successive generation, and the
importance of the physical and psychical connection between parents and
offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost sight of. It seems
strange how this could ever have been allowed to come about, but it
should be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly
discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise
troublesome questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible
for what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the
generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody else is
on many grounds the most convenient. Every now and then, however, there
comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued personality side of the
connection between successive generations is as convenient as the new
personality side is for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes—some
of which are not unimportant—are obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to
the completeness with which the more commonly needed conception has
overgrown the other.
Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted every
hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to speak, in
stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our mental storehouse,
while the other was so seldom asked for that it became not worth while to
keep it. By-and-by it was found so troublesome to send out for it, and
so hard to come by even then, that people left off selling it at all, and
if any one wanted it he must think it out at home as best he could; this
was troublesome, so by common consent the world decided no longer to busy
itself with the continued personality of successive generations—which was
all very well until it also decided to busy itself with the theory of
descent with modification. On the introduction of a foe so inimical to
many of our pre-existing ideas the balance of power among them was upset,
and a readjustment became necessary, which is still far from having
attained the next settlement that seems likely to be reasonably
permanent.
To change the illustration, the ordinary view is true for seven places of
decimals, and this commonly is enough; occasions, however, have now
arisen when the error caused by neglect of the omitted places is
appreciably disturbing, and we must have three or four more. Mr. Spencer
showed no more signs of seeing that he must supply these, and make
personal identity continue between successive generations before talking
about inherited (as opposed to post-natal and educational) experience,
than others had done before him; the race with him, as with every one
else till recently, was not one long individual living indeed in
pulsations, so to speak, but no more losing continued personality by
living in successive generations, than an individual loses it by living
in consecutive days; a race was simply a succession of individuals, each
one of which was held to be an entirely new person, and was regarded
exclusively, or very nearly so, from this point of view.
When I wrote “Life and Habit” I knew that the words “experience of the
race” sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines and newspapers,
but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I should have given
their source. To me they conveyed no meaning, and vexed me as an attempt
to make me take stones instead of bread, and to palm off an illustration
upon me as though it were an explanation. When I had worked the matter
out in my own way, I saw that the illustration, with certain additions,
would become an explanation, but I saw also that neither he who had
adduced it nor any one else could have seen how right he was, till much
had been said which had not, so far as I knew, been said yet, and which
undoubtedly would have been said if people had seen their way to saying
it.
“What is this talk,” I wrote, “which is made about the experience of the
race, as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows
nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner it nourishes him and not his
neighbour; if he learns a difficult art it is he that can do it and not
his neighbour” (“Life and Habit,” p. 49).
When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the
father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the son was
fed when the father ate before he begot him.
“Is there any way,” I continued, “of showing that this experience of the
race about which so much is said without the least attempt to show in
what way it may, or does, become the experience of the individual, is in
sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, who repeats on
a great many different occasions, and in slightly different ways, certain
performances with which he has already become exceedingly familiar?”
I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the
expression in question, that it was fallacious till this was done. When
I first began to write “Life and Habit” I did not believe it could be
done, but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were, of my _cu de
sac_, I saw the path which led straight to the point I had despaired of
reaching—I mean I saw that personality could not be broken as between
generations, without also breaking it between the years, days, and
moments of a man’s life. What differentiates “Life and Habit” from the
“Principles of Psychology” is the prominence given to continued personal
identity, and hence to _bonâ fide_ memory, as between successive
generations; but surely this makes the two books differ widely.
Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost any direction, if the
change is brought about gradually and in accordance with the rules of all
development. As in music we may take almost any possible discord with
pleasing effect if we have prepared and resolved it rightly, so our ideas
will outlive and outgrow almost any modification which is approached and
quitted in such a way as to fuse the old and new harmoniously. Words are
to ideas what the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore
it—only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak, whereas ideas
are unseen until they don the robe of words which reveals them to us; the
words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit each other and stick
to one another in our minds as soon as they are brought together, or the
ideas will fly off, and leave the words void of that spirit by the aid of
which alone they can become transmuted into physical action and shape
material things with their own impress. Whether a discord is too violent
or no, depends on what we have been accustomed to, and on how widely the
new differs from the old, but in no case can we fuse and assimilate more
than a very little new at a time without exhausting our tempering
power—and hence presently our temper.
Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though _de minimis non curat
lex_,—though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,—yet too sudden a
change in the manner in which our ideas are associated is as cataclysmic
and subversive of healthy evolution as are material convulsions, or too
violent revolutions in politics. This must always be the case, for
change is essentially miraculous, and the only lawful home of the miracle
is in the microscopically small. Here, indeed, miracles were in the
beginning, are now, and ever shall be, but we are deadened if they are
required of us on a scale which is visible to the naked eye. If we are
told to work them our hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we
must do or die, we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If
we are required to believe them—which only means to fuse them with our
other ideas—we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds
being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have
fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds
swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and _pro tanto_
kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as
fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a
small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to
cease to work them is to die. And by miracle I do not merely mean
something new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension—I mean
something which violates every canon of thought which in the palpable
world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and
inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of
force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing. This,
which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and
drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the
ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as
consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life and
death.
Claude Bernard says, _Rien ne nait_, _rien ne se crée_, _tout se
continue_. _La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune création_,
_elle est d’une éternelle continuation_; {35a} but surely he is insisting
upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another which is just
as real, and just as important; he might have said, _Rien ne se
continue_, _tout nait_, _tout se crée_. _La nature ne nous offre le
spectacle d’aucune continuation_. _Elle est d’une éternelle création_;
for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and, indeed, the two
stand or fall together. True, discontinuity, where development is
normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the difference between
looking at distances on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have
even the smallest change without a small partial corresponding
discontinuity; on a small scale—too small, indeed, for us to
cognise—these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our
understanding goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the
phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall
normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out. Creations, then,
there must be, but they must be so small that practically they are no
creations. We must have a continuity in discontinuity, and a
discontinuity in continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the
help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It
comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and
harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no
conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by flying in
the face of every rule that professors of the art of thinking have drawn
up for our instruction. These rules may be good enough as servants, but
we have let them become the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy
is made for man, not man for philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower
of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into
the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—nor has
confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul
said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what
faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as
species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its own way
both living and saving.
All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is
miraculous. It is the two in one, and at the same time one in two, which
is only two and two making five put before us in another shape; yet this
fusion—so easy to think so long as it is not thought about, and so
unthinkable if we try to think it—is, as it were, the matrix from which
our more thinkable thought is taken; it is the cloud gathering in the
unseen world from which the waters of life descend in an impalpable dew.
Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or
things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon
our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted
that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should
vitiate the whole process _ab initio_, still, if we have faith we can so
work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world
into the seen again—provided we do not look back, and provided also we do
not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time. To think is to fuse
and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed. We can all
feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can fuse ideas; or
we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can
feed; we know not which comes first, the food or the ideas, but we must
not overtax our strength; the moment we do this we taste of death.
It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food fine
before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large lumps will
choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again, that that which
is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas. Food is very thoughtful:
through thought it comes, and back through thought it shall return; the
process of its conversion and comprehension within our own system is
mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and
evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross—that is to
say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale. Granted that
no one can draw a clear line and define the limits within which a miracle
is healthy working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he
can prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute our
food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and that at all
times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass themselves, still we know
as a general rule near enough, and find that the strongest can do but
very little at a time, and, to return to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two
such hitherto unassociated ideas as race and experience was a miracle
beyond our strength.
Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter to
the _Athenæum_ above referred to, we were not in the habit of thinking of
any one as able to remember things that had happened before he had been
born or thought of. This notion will still strike many of my non-readers
as harsh and strained; no such discord, therefore, should have been taken
unprepared, and when taken it should have been resolved with pomp and
circumstance. Mr Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never
either prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words
“experience of the race” sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the
result that his words were barren. They were barren because they were
incoherent; they were incoherent because they were approached and quitted
too suddenly. While we were realising “experience” our minds excluded
“race,” inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed
hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea
“race,” for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded
experience. We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien to one
another, without having had those other ideas presented to us which would
alone flux them. The absence of these—which indeed were not immediately
ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them—made
nonsense of the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one
against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer’s pages, only to find that they
had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we put down
his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know what to do with
his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly while he chastised us
with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, according to our
temperaments.
I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and the
sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are
one in principle—the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to
inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent
whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself
ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas—that is to
say, into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as their
neighbours do.
If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race are
_bonâ fide_ united by a common personality, and that in virtue of being
so united each generation remembers (within, of course, the limits to
which all memory is subject) what happened to it while still in the
persons of its progenitors—then his order to Professor Hering and myself
should be immediately obeyed; but this was just what was at once most
wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the passages given
above—passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself—this point is altogether
ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made it—put continued
personality and memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead
of leaving them to be discovered “by implications,” and then such
expressions as “accumulated experiences” and “experience of the race”
become luminous; till this had been done they were _Vox et præterea
nihil_.
To sum up briefly. The passages quoted by Mr. Spencer from his
“Principles of Psychology” can hardly be called clear, even now that
Professor Hering and others have thrown light upon them. If, indeed,
they had been clear Mr. Spencer would probably have seen what they
necesitated, and found the way of meeting the difficulties of the case
which occurred to Professor Hering and myself. Till we wrote, very few
writers had even suggested this. The idea that offspring was only “an
elongation or branch proceeding from its parents” had scintillated in the
ingenious brain of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and in that of the designer of
Jesse tree windows, but it had kindled no fire; it now turns out that
Canon Kingsley had once called instinct inherited memory, {40a} but the
idea, if born alive at all, died on the page on which it saw light:
Professor Ray Lankester, again called attention to Professor Hering’s
address (_Nature_, July 13, 1876), but no discussion followed, and the
matter dropped without having produced visible effect. As for offspring
remembering in any legitimate sense of the words what it had done, and
what had happened to it, before it was born, no such notion was
understood to have been gravely mooted till very recently. I doubt
whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes would accept this even now, when it
is put thus undisguisedly; but this is what Professor Hering and I mean,
and it is the only thing that should be meant, by those who speak of
instinct as inherited memory. Mr Spencer cannot maintain that these two
startling novelties went without saying “by implication” from the use of
such expressions as “accumulated experiences” or “experience of the
race.”
Chapter III
Mr. Herbert Spencer (_continued_)
WHETHER they ought to have gone or not, they did not go.
When “Life and Habit” was first published no one considered Mr. Spencer
to be maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be in reality phenomena of
memory. When, for example, Professor Ray Lankester first called
attention to Professor Hering’s address, he did not understand Mr.
Spencer to be intending this. “Professor Hering,” he wrote (_Nature_,
July 13, 1876), “helps us to a comprehensive view of the nature of
heredity and adaptation, by giving us the word ‘memory,’ conscious or
unconscious, for the continuity of Mr. Spencer’s polar forces or
polarities of physiological units.” He evidently found the prominence
given to memory a help to him which he had not derived from reading Mr.
Spencer’s works.
When, again, he attacked me in the _Athenæum_ (March 29, 1884), he spoke
of my “tardy recognition” of the fact that Professor Hering had preceded
me “in treating all manifestations of heredity as a form of memory.”
Professor Lankester’s words could have no force if he held that any other
writer, and much less so well known a writer as Mr. Spencer, had preceded
me in putting forward the theory in question.
When Mr. Romanes reviewed “Unconscious Memory” in _Nature_ (January 27,
1881) the notion of a “race-memory,” to use his own words, was still so
new to him that he declared it “simply absurd” to suppose that it could
“possibly be fraught with any benefit to science,” and with him too it
was Professor Hering who had anticipated me in the matter, not Mr.
Spencer.
In his “Mental Evolution in Animals” (p. 296) he said that Canon
Kingsley, writing in 1867, was the first to advance the theory that
instinct is inherited memory; he could not have said this if Mr. Spencer
had been understood to have been upholding this view for the last thirty
years.
Mr. A. R. Wallace reviewed “Life and Habit” in _Nature_ (March 27, 1879),
but he did not find the line I had taken a familiar one, as he surely
must have done if it had followed easily by implication from Mr.
Spencer’s works. He called it “an ingenious and paradoxical explanation”
which was evidently new to him. He concluded by saying that “it might
yet afford a clue to some of the deepest mysteries of the organic world.”
Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on Evolution in the _American
Catholic Quarterly Review_ (July 1881), said, “Mr Butler is not only
perfectly logical and consistent in the startling consequences he deduces
from his principles, but,” &c. Professor Mivart could not have found my
consequences startling if they had already been insisted upon for many
years by one of the best-known writers of the day.
The reviewer of “Evolution Old and New” in the _Saturday Review_ (March
31, 1879), of whom all I can venture to say is that he or she is a person
whose name carries weight in matters connected with biology, though he
(for brevity) was in the humour for seeing everything objectionable in me
that could be seen, still saw no Mr. Spencer in me. He said—“Mr Butler’s
own particular contribution to the terminology of Evolution is the phrase
two or three times repeated with some emphasis” (I repeated it not two or
three times only, but whenever and wherever I could venture to do so
without wearying the reader beyond endurance) “oneness of personality
between parents and offspring.” The writer proceeded to reprobate this
in language upon which a Huxley could hardly improve, but as he declares
himself unable to discover what it means, it may be presumed that the
idea of continued personality between successive generations was new to
him.
When Dr. Francis Darwin called on me a day or two before “Life and Habit”
went to the press, he said the theory which had pleased him more than any
he had seen for some time was one which referred all life to memory;
{44a} he doubtless intended “which referred all the phenomena of heredity
to memory.” He then mentioned Professor Ray Lankester’s article in
_Nature_, of which I had not heard, but he said nothing about Mr.
Spencer, and spoke of the idea as one which had been quite new to him.
The above names comprise (excluding Mr. Spencer himself) perhaps those of
the best-known writers on evolution that can be mentioned as now before
the public; it is curious that Mr Spencer should be the only one of them
to see any substantial resemblance between the “Principles of Psychology”
and Professor Hering’s address and “Life and Habit.”
I ought, perhaps, to say that Mr. Romanes, writing to the _Athenæum_
(March 8, 1884), took a different view of the value of the theory of
inherited memory to the one he took in 1881.
In 1881 he said it was “simply absurd” to suppose it could “possibly be
fraught with any benefit to science” or “reveal any truth of profound
significance;” in 1884 he said of the same theory, that “it formed the
backbone of all the previous literature upon instinct” by Darwin,
Spencer, Lewes, Fiske, and Spalding, “not to mention their numerous
followers, and is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any
theory can be stated in words.”
Few except Mr. Romanes will say this. I grant it ought to “have formed
the backbone,” &c., and ought “to have been elaborately stated,” &c., but
when I wrote “Life and Habit” neither Mr Romanes nor any one else
understood it to have been even glanced at by more than a very few, and
as for having been “elaborately stated,” it had been stated by Professor
Hering as elaborately as it could be stated within the limits of an
address of only twenty-two pages, but with this exception it had never
been stated at all. It is not too much to say that “Life and Habit,”
when it first came out, was considered so startling a paradox that people
would not believe in my desire to be taken seriously, or at any rate were
able to pretend that they thought I was not writing seriously.
Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who keep an eye on
evolution; he himself, indeed, had said (_Nature_, January 27, 1881) that
so long as I “aimed only at entertaining” my “readers by such works as
‘Erewhon’ and ‘Life and Habit’” (as though these books were of kindred
character) I was in my proper sphere. It would be doing too little
credit to Mr. Romanes’ intelligence to suppose him not to have known when
he said this that “Life and Habit” was written as seriously as my
subsequent books on evolution, but it suited him at the moment to join
those who professed to consider it another book of paradoxes such as, I
suppose, “Erewhon” had been, so he classed the two together. He could
not have done this unless enough people thought, or said they thought,
the books akin, to give colour to his doing so.
One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, brought Mr. Spencer
against me. This was a writer in the _St. James’s Gazette_ (December 2,
1880). I challenged him in a letter which appeared (December 8, 1880),
and said, “I would ask your reviewer to be kind enough to refer your
readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer’s “Principles of Psychology”
which in any direct intelligible way refer the phenomena of instinct and
heredity generally, to memory on the part of offspring of the action it
_bonâ fide_ took in the persons of its forefathers.” The reviewer made
no reply, and I concluded, as I have since found correctly, that he could
not find the passages.
True, in his “Principles of Psychology” (vol. ii. p. 195) Mr. Spencer
says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all intelligence is
acquired through experience “so as to make it include with the experience
of each individual the experiences of all ancestral individuals,” &c.
This is all very good, but it is much the same as saying, “We have only
got to stand on our heads and we shall be able to do so and so.” We did
not see our way to standing on our heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help
us; we had been accustomed, as I am afraid I must have said _usque ad
nauseam_ already, to lose sight of the physical connection existing
between parents and offspring; we understood from the marriage service
that husband and wife were in a sense one flesh, but not that parents and
children were so also; and without this conception of the matter, which
in its way is just as true as the more commonly received one, we could
not extend the experience of parents to offspring. It was not in the
bond or _nexus_ of our ideas to consider experience as appertaining to
more than a single individual in the common acceptance of the term; these
two ideas were so closely bound together that wherever the one went the
other went perforce. Here, indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer’s
just referred to, the race is throughout regarded as “a series of
individuals”—without an attempt to call attention to that other view, in
virtue of which we are able to extend to many an idea we had been
accustomed to confine to one.
In his chapter on Memory, Mr. Spencer certainly approaches the Heringian
view. He says, “On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of
organised memory; on the other, Memory may be regarded as a kind of
incipient instinct” (“Principles of Psychology,” ed. 2, vol. i. p. 445).
Here the ball has fallen into his hands, but if he had got firm hold of
it he could not have written, “Instinct _may be_ regarded as _a kind of_,
&c.;” to us there is neither “may be regarded as” nor “kind of” about it;
we require, “Instinct is inherited memory,” with an explanation making it
intelligible how memory can come to be inherited at all. I do not like,
again, calling memory “a kind of incipient instinct;” as Mr. Spencer puts
them the words have a pleasant antithesis, but “instinct is inherited
memory” covers all the ground, and to say that memory is inherited
instinct is surplusage.
Nor does he stick to it long when he says that “instinct is a kind of
organised memory,” for two pages later he says that memory, to be memory
at all, must be tolerably conscious or deliberate; he, therefore (vol. i.
p. 447), denies that there can be such a thing as unconscious memory; but
without this it is impossible for us to see instinct as the “kind of
organised memory” which he has just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct
is notably undeliberate and unreflecting.
A few pages farther on (vol. i. p. 452) he finds himself driven to
unconscious memory after all, and says that “conscious memory passes into
unconscious or organic memory.” Having admitted unconscious memory, he
declares (vol. i. p. 450) that “as fast as those connections among
psychical states, which we form in memory, grow by constant repetition
automatic—they _cease to be part of memory_,” or, in other words, he
again denies that there can be an unconscious memory.
Mr. Spencer doubtless saw that he was involved in contradiction in terms,
and having always understood that contradictions in terms were very
dreadful things—which, of course, under some circumstances they
are—thought it well so to express himself that his readers should be more
likely to push on than dwell on what was before them at the moment. I
should be the last to complain of him merely on the ground that he could
not escape contradiction in terms: who can? When facts conflict,
contradict one another, melt into one another as the colours of the
spectrum so insensibly that none can say where one begins and the other
ends, contradictions in terms become first fruits of thought and speech.
They are the basis of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that a
physical obstacle is the basis of physical sensation. No opposition, no
sensation, applies as much to the psychical as to the physical kingdom,
as soon as these two have got well above the horizon of our thoughts and
can be seen as two. No contradiction, no consciousness; no cross, no
crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without which there is
no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or
deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small
scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of
pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger,
kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said
in “Life and Habit,” hates that any principle should breed
hermaphroditically, but will give to each an helpmeet for it which shall
cross it and be the undoing of it; and in the undoing, do; and in the
doing, undo, and so _ad infinitum_. Cross-fertilisation is just as
necessary for continued fertility of ideas as for that of organic life,
and the attempt to frown this or that down merely on the ground that it
involves contradiction in terms, without at the same time showing that
the contradiction is on a larger scale than healthy thought can stomach,
argues either small sense or small sincerity on the part of those who
make it. The contradictions employed by Mr. Spencer are objectionable,
not on the ground of their being contradictions at all, but on the ground
of their being blinked, and used unintelligently.
But though it is not possible for any one to get a clear conception of
Mr. Spencer’s meaning, we may say with more confidence what it was that
he did not mean. He did not mean to make memory the keystone of his
system; he has none of that sense of the unifying, binding force of
memory which Professor Hering has so well expressed, nor does he show any
signs of perceiving the far-reaching consequences that ensue if the
phenomena of heredity are considered as phenomena of memory. Thus, when
he is dealing with the phenomena of old age (vol. i. p. 538, ed. 2) he
does not ascribe them to lapse and failure of memory, nor surmise the
principle underlying longevity. He never mentions memory in connection
with heredity without presently saying something which makes us
involuntarily think of a man missing an easy catch at cricket; it is only
rarely, however, that he connects the two at all. I have only been able
to find the word “inherited” or any derivative of the verb “to inherit”
in connection with memory once in all the 1300 long pages of the
“Principles of Psychology.” It occurs in vol ii. p. 200, 2d ed., where
the words stand, “Memory, inherited or acquired.” I submit that this was
unintelligible when Mr. Spencer wrote it, for want of an explanation
which he never gave; I submit, also, that he could not have left it
unexplained, nor yet as an unrepeated expression not introduced till late
in his work, if he had had any idea of its pregnancy.
At any rate, whether he intended to imply what he now implies that he
intended to imply (for Mr. Spencer, like the late Mr. Darwin, is fond of
qualifying phrases), I have shown that those most able and willing to
understand him did not take him to mean what he now appears anxious to
have it supposed that he meant. Surely, moreover, if he had meant it he
would have spoken sooner, when he saw his meaning had been missed. I
can, however, have no hesitation in saying that if I had known the
“Principles of Psychology” earlier, as well as I know the work now, I
should have used it largely.
It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to see whether he
even now assigns to continued personality and memory the place assigned
to it by Professor Hering and myself. I will therefore give the
concluding words of the letter to the _Athenæum_ already referred to, in
which he tells us to stand aside. He writes “I still hold that
inheritance of functionally produced modifications is the chief factor
throughout the higher stages of organic evolution, bodily as well as
mental (see ‘Principles of Biology,’ i. 166), while I recognise the truth
that throughout the lower stages survival of the fittest is the chief
factor, and in the lowest the almost exclusive factor.”
This is the same confused and confusing utterance which Mr. Spencer has
been giving us any time this thirty years. According to him the fact
that variations can be inherited and accumulated has less to do with the
first development of organic life, than the fact that if a square
organism happens to get into a square hole, it will live longer and more
happily than a square organism which happens to get into a round one; he
declares “the survival of the fittest”—and this is nothing but the fact
that those who “fit” best into their surroundings will live longest and
most comfortably—to have more to do with the development of the amœba
into, we will say, a mollusc than heredity itself. True, “inheritance of
functionally produced modifications” is allowed to be the chief factor
throughout the “higher stages of organic evolution,” but it has very
little to do in the lower; in these “the almost exclusive factor” is not
heredity, or inheritance, but “survival of the fittest.”
Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe this; of course,
also, all who are fairly well up in the history of the development theory
will see why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this distinction between
the “factors” of the development of the higher and lower forms of life;
but no matter how or why Mr. Spencer has been led to say what he has, he
has no business to have said it. What can we think of a writer who,
after so many years of writing upon his subject, in a passage in which he
should make his meaning doubly clear, inasmuch as he is claiming ground
taken by other writers, declares that though hereditary use and disuse,
or, to use his own words, “the inheritance of functionally produced
modifications,” is indeed very important in connection with the
development of the higher forms of life, yet heredity itself has little
or nothing to do with that of the lower? Variations, whether produced
functionally or not, can only be perpetuated and accumulated because they
can be inherited;—and this applies just as much to the lower as to the
higher forms of life; the question which Professor Hering and I have
tried to answer is, “How comes it that anything can be inherited at all?
In virtue of what power is it that offspring can repeat and improve upon
the performances of their parents?” Our answer was, “Because in a very
valid sense, though not perhaps in the most usually understood, there is
continued personality and an abiding memory between successive
generations.” How does Mr. Spencer’s confession of faith touch this? If
any meaning can be extracted from his words, he is no more supporting
this view now than he was when he wrote the passages he has adduced to
show that he was supporting it thirty years ago; but after all no
coherent meaning can be got out of Mr. Spencer’s letter—except, of
course, that Professor Hering and myself are to stand aside. I have
abundantly shown that I am very ready to do this in favour of Professor
Hering, but see no reason for admitting Mr. Spencer’s claim to have been
among the forestallers of “Life and Habit.”
Chapter IV {52a}
Mr. Romanes’ “Mental Evolution in Animals”
WITHOUT raising the unprofitable question how Mr. Romanes, in spite of
the indifference with which he treated the theory of Inherited Memory in
1881, came, in 1883, to be sufficiently imbued with a sense of its
importance, I still cannot afford to dispense with the weight of his
authority, and in this chapter will show how closely he not infrequently
approaches the Heringian position.
Thus, he says that the analogies between the memory with which we are
familiar in daily life and hereditary memory “are so numerous and
precise” as to justify us in considering them to be of essentially the
same kind. {52b}
Again, he says that although the memory of milk shown by new-born infants
is “at all events in large part hereditary, it is none the less memory”
of a certain kind. {52c}
Two lines lower down he writes of “hereditary memory or instinct,”
thereby implying that instinct is “hereditary memory.” “It makes no
essential difference,” he says, “whether the past sensation was actually
experienced by the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by
its ancestors. {52d} For it makes no essential difference whether the
nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the life-time of the
individual or during that of the species, and afterwards impressed by
heredity on the individual.”
Lower down on the same page he writes:—
“As showing how close is the connection between hereditary memory and
instinct,” &c.
And on the following page:—
“And this shows how closely the phenomena of hereditary memory are
related to those of individual memory: at this stage . . . it is
practically impossible to disentangle the effects of hereditary memory
from those of the individual.”
Again:—
“Another point which we have here to consider is the part which heredity
has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to
its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an
important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is
that many animals come into the world with their power of perception
already largely developed. The wealth of ready-formed information, and
therefore of ready-made powers of perception, with which many newly-born
or newly-hatched animals are provided, is so great and so precise that it
scarcely requires to be supplemented by the subsequent experience of the
individual.” {53a}
Again:—
“Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or other of
the two principles.
“I. The first mode of origin consists in natural selection or survival
of the fittest, continuously preserving actions, &c. &c.
“II. The second mode of origin is as follows:—By the effects of habit in
successive generations, actions which were originally intelligent become
as it were stereotyped into permanent instincts. Just as in the lifetime
of the individual adjustive actions which were originally intelligent may
by frequent repetition become automatic, so in the lifetime of species
actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity so
write their effects on the nervous system that the latter is prepared,
even before individual experience, to perform adjustive actions
mechanically which in previous generations were performed intelligently.
This mode of origin of instincts has been appropriately called (by
Lewes—see “Problems of Life and Mind” {54a}) the ‘lapsing of
intelligence.’” {54b}
I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid by Mr.
Romanes both in his “Mental Evolution in Animals” and in his letters to
the _Athenæum_ in March 1884, on Natural Selection as an originator and
developer of instinct, he very soon afterwards let the Natural Selection
part of the story go as completely without saying as I do myself, or as
Mr. Darwin did during the later years of his life. Writing to _Nature_,
April 10, 1884, he said: “To deny _that experience in the course of
successive generations is the source of instinct_, is not to meet by way
of argument the enormous mass of evidence which goes to prove _that this
is the case_.” Here, then, instinct is referred, without reservation, to
“experience in successive generations,” and this is nonsense unless
explained as Professor Hering and I explain it. Mr. Romanes’ words, in
fact, amount to an unqualified acceptance of the chapter “Instinct as
Inherited Memory” given in “Life and Habit,” of which Mr. Romanes in
March 1884 wrote in terms which it is not necessary to repeat.
Later on:—
“That ‘practice makes perfect’ is a matter, as I have previously said, of
daily observation. Whether we regard a juggler, a pianist, or a
billiard-player, a child learning his lesson or an actor his part by
frequently repeating it, or a thousand other illustrations of the same
process, we see at once that there is truth in the cynical definition of
a man as a ‘bundle of habits.’ And the same, of course, is true of
animals.” {55a}
From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show “that automatic actions and
conscious habits may be inherited,” {55b} and in the course of doing this
contends that “instincts may be lost by disuse, and conversely that they
may be acquired as instincts by the hereditary transmission of ancestral
experience.”
On another page Mr. Romanes says:—
“Let us now turn to the second of these two assumptions, viz., that some
at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very
precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued. It is
without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should be
prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the year,
and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its own
parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct
which aims at being complete. Now upon our own theory it can only be met
by taking it to be due to inherited memory.”
A little lower Mr. Romanes says: “Of what kind, then, is the inherited
memory on which the young cuckoo (if not also other migratory birds)
depends? We can only answer, of the same kind, whatever this may be, as
that upon which the old bird depends.” {55c}
I have given above most of the more marked passages which I have been
able to find in Mr. Romanes’ book which attribute instinct to memory, and
which admit that there is no fundamental difference between the kind of
memory with which we are all familiar and hereditary memory as
transmitted from one generation to another.
But throughout his work there are passages which suggest, though less
obviously, the same inference.
The passages I have quoted show that Mr. Romanes is upholding the same
opinions as Professor Hering’s and my own, but their effect and tendency
is more plain here than in Mr Romanes’ own book, where they are overlaid
by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always easy of
comprehension.
Moreover, at the same time that I claim the weight of Mr. Romanes’
authority, I am bound to admit that I do not find his support
satisfactory. The late Mr. Darwin himself—whose mantle seems to have
fallen more especially and particularly on Mr. Romanes—could not
contradict himself more hopelessly than Mr. Romanes often does. Indeed
in one of the very passages I have quoted in order to show that Mr.
Romanes accepts the phenomena of heredity as phenomena of memory, he
speaks of “heredity as playing an important part _in forming memory_ of
ancestral experiences;” so that, whereas I want him to say that the
phenomena of heredity are due to memory, he will have it that the memory
is due to the heredity, which seems to me absurd.
Over and over again Mr. Romanes insists that it is heredity which does
this or that. Thus it is “_heredity with natural selection which adapt_
the anatomical plan of the ganglia.” {56a} It is heredity which
impresses nervous changes on the individual. {56b} “In the lifetime of
species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and
heredity,” &c.; {56c} but he nowhere tells us what heredity is any more
than Messrs. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, and Lewes have done. This,
however, is exactly what Professor Hering, whom I have unwittingly
followed, does. He resolves all phenomena of heredity, whether in
respect of body or mind, into phenomena of memory. He says in effect, “A
man grows his body as he does, and a bird makes her nest as she does,
because both man and bird remember having grown body and made nest as
they now do, or very nearly so, on innumerable past occasions.” He thus,
as I have said on an earlier page, reduces life from an equation of say
100 unknown quantities to one of 99 only by showing that heredity and
memory, two of the original 100 unknown quantities, are in reality part
of one and the same thing.
That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very
unsatisfactory way.
What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following?—Mr.
Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation is
that of memory, and that this “is the _conditio sine quâ non_ of all
mental life” (page 35).
I do not understand Mr. Romanes to hold that there is any living being
which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to admit that
development of body and mind are closely interdependent.
If, then, “the most fundamental principle” of mind is memory, it follows
that memory enters also as a fundamental principle into development of
body. For mind and body are so closely connected that nothing can enter
largely into the one without correspondingly affecting the other.
On a later page Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child as
“_embodying_ the results of a great mass of _hereditary experience_” (p.
77), so that what he is driving at can be collected by those who take
trouble, but is not seen until we call up from our own knowledge matter
whose relevancy does not appear on the face of it, and until we connect
passages many pages asunder, the first of which may easily be forgotten
before we reach the second. There can be no doubt, however, that Mr.
Romanes does in reality, like Professor Hering and myself, regard
development, whether of mind or body, as due to memory, for it is now
pretty generally seen to be nonsense to talk about “hereditary
experience” or “hereditary memory” if anything else is intended.
I have said above that on page 113 of his recent work Mr. Romanes
declares the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in
daily life, and hereditary memory, to be “so numerous and precise” as to
justify us in considering them as of one and the same kind.
This is certainly his meaning, but, with the exception of the words
within inverted commas, it is not his language. His own words are
these:—
“Profound, however, as our ignorance unquestionably is concerning the
physical substratum of memory, I think we are at least justified in
regarding this substratum as the same both in ganglionic or organic, and
in the conscious or psychological memory, seeing that the analogies
between them are so numerous and precise. Consciousness is but an
adjunct which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency of
repetition, complexity of operation, or other causes, involve what I have
before called ganglionic friction.”
I submit that I have correctly translated Mr. Romanes’ meaning, and also
that we have a right to complain of his not saying what he has to say in
words which will involve less “ganglionic friction” on the part of the
reader.
Another example may be found on p. 43 of Mr. Romanes’ book. “Lastly,” he
writes, “just as innumerable special mechanisms of muscular
co-ordinations are found to be inherited, innumerable special
associations of ideas are found to be the same, and in one case as in the
other the strength of the organically imposed connection is found to bear
a direct proportion to the frequency with which in the history of the
species it has occurred.”
Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on on p.
51 of “Life and Habit;” but how difficult he has made what could have
been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing but the reader’s
comfort to be considered. Unfortunately that seems to have been by no
means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes was thinking, or why, after
implying and even saying over and over again that instinct is inherited
habit due to inherited memory, should he turn sharply round on p. 297 and
praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out “the well-known doctrine of
inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck”? The answer is not far to seek.
It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about
instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with
the hounds and run with the hare at one and the same time.
I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin “had told us what the
earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed from
them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would have
taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and more
likely to remove misconception from his own mind and from those of his
readers.” {59a} This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made
Mr. Romanes so angry with me. I can find no better words to apply to Mr.
Romanes himself. He knows perfectly well what others have written about
the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well
that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that
they have taken. If he had begun by saying what they had said, and had
then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be
improved upon.
Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned
method of procedure was not good enough for him. One-half the obscurity
which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same
cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin’s work—I
mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with
whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement. He
adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid
appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.
Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes’ definition of instinct:—
“Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of
consciousness. The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all those
faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive action,
antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the
relation between means employed and ends attained, but similarly
performed under similar and frequently recurring circumstances by all the
individuals of the same species.” {60a}
If Mr. Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor
Hering’s foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly
admitted, he might have said—
“Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations—the new
generation remembering what happened to it before it parted company with
the old. More briefly, Instinct is inherited memory.” Then he might
have added a rider—
“If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime, it is
not an instinct. If having been acquired in one lifetime it is
transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring, though it
was not an instinct in the parent. If the habit is transmitted
partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly
acquired.”
This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know
what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such
debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose,
knowledge of purpose, &c.; it both introduces the feature of inheritance
which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from so-called
intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pass into
the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition;
finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked
upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said {61a}) as
“a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.
In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of
time, money and trouble that has been caused, by his not having been
content to appear as descending with modification like other people from
those who went before him. It will take years to get the evolution
theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a
discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr.
Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting
heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got
evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about “_heredity being able
to work up_ the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration,” {61b}
or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of
lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” {61c} is little
likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with
advantage either to himself or any one else. Fortunately Mr. Romanes is
not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s mantle, and
got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’ shoulders hide a good
deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin
wore it.
I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to
have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory.
Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his
life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming
“_instinctive_, _i.e._, _memory transmitted from one generation to
another_.” {62a}
Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of
hereditary memory are as follows:—
1859. “It would be _the most serious error_ to suppose that the greater
number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and
transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” {62b} And this
more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.
1876. “It would be a _serious error_ to suppose,” &c., as before. {62c}
1881. “We should remember _what a mass of inherited knowledge_ is
crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” {62d}
1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes: “It
does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more
than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:” i.e.,
_memory transmitted from one generation to another_. {62e}
And yet in 1839, or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped the
conception from which until the last year or two of his life he so
fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account
of the voyages of the _Adventure_ and _Beagle_, he wrote: “Nature by
making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the
Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country” (p. 237).
What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common-sense
view of the matter which he took when he was a young man? I imagine
simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter, over-anxiety to
appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and
Lamarck.
I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the
connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must
readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed. For
in the preface to Hermann Müller’s “Fertilisation of Flowers,” {63a}
which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin’s death, I
find him saying:—“Design in nature has for a long time deeply interested
many men, and though the subject must now be looked at from a somewhat
different point of view from what was formerly the case, it is not on
that account rendered less interesting.” This is mused forth as a
general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing: the writer of the
letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore’s Almanac could not be more
guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.
I cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I
should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design in
organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr.
Darwin’s. This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and,
moreover, it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin think it
worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It has no fitness in
its connection with Hermann Müller’s book, for what little Hermann Müller
says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why, then, should Mr.
Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest attaching
to design in organism? Neither has the passage any connection with the
rest of the preface. There is not another word about design, and even
here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as
it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which
could be disputed.
The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin wanted to hedge. He
saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in
pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a
burglar’s jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again,
and that though, as I insisted in “Evolution Old and New,” and
“Unconscious Memory,” it must now be placed within the organism instead
of outside it, as “was formerly the case,” it was not on that account any
the less—design, as well as interesting.
I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly. Indeed I
should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the
meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting
himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner.
In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin’s manner when he did
not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he
wrote to Professor Weismann’s “Studies in the Theory of Descent,”
published in 1881.
“Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, “maintain with much
confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale,
independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have
been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such
exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite
unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of
more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and
the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole
subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the
existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility”—or towards _being able
to be perfected_.
I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor
Weismann’s book. There was a little something here and there, but not
much.
It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr. Romanes’
latest contribution to biology—I mean his theory of physiological
selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in _Nature_
just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since the
foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written. I admit to
feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not appear earlier;
as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable of further embryonic
change, and this must be my excuse for saying less about Mr. Romanes’
theory than I might perhaps otherwise do. I cordially, however, agree
with the _Times_, which says that “Mr. George Romanes appears to be the
biological investigator on whom the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most
conspicuously descended” (August 16, 1886). Mr. Romanes is just the
person whom the late Mr. Darwin would select to carry on his work, and
Mr. Darwin was just the kind of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would
find himself instinctively attracted.
The _Times_ continues—“The position which Mr. Romanes takes up is the
result of his perception shared by many evolutionists, that the theory of
natural selection is not really a theory of the origin of species. . . .”
What, then, becomes of Mr. Darwin’s most famous work, which was written
expressly to establish natural selection as the main means of organic
modification? “The new factor which Mr. Romanes suggests,” continues the
_Times_, “is that at a certain stage of development of varieties in a
state of nature a change takes place in their reproductive systems,
rendering those which differ in some particulars mutually infertile, and
thus the formation of new permanent species takes place without the
swamping effect of free intercrossing. . . . How his theory can be
properly termed one of selection he fails to make clear. If correct, it
is a law or principle of operation rather than a process of selection.
It has been objected to Mr. Romanes’ theory that it is the re-statement
of a fact. This objection is less important than the lack of facts in
support of the theory.” The _Times_, however, implies it as its opinion
that the required facts will be forthcoming by and by, and that when they
have been found Mr. Romanes’ suggestion will constitute “the most
important addition to the theory of evolution since the publication of
the ‘Origin of Species.’” Considering that the _Times_ has just implied
the main thesis of the “Origin of Species” to be one which does not stand
examination, this is rather a doubtful compliment.
Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the _Times_ appears to perceive
that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice
depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do not
appear to see that though the expression natural selection must be always
more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for
purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which is
open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical
character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of
error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly
fortuitous is chimerical as well as metaphorical. Both writers speak of
natural selection as though there could not possibly be any selection in
the course of nature, or natural survival, of any but accidental
variations. Thus Mr. Romanes says: {66a} “The swamping effect of free
inter-crossing upon an individual variation constitutes perhaps the most
formidable difficulty with which _the theory of natural selection_ is
beset.” And the writer of the article in the _Times_ above referred to
says: “In truth _the theory of natural selection_ presents many facts and
results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of accounting
for the existence of species.” The assertion made in each case is true
if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous variations is
intended, but it does not hold good if the selection is supposed to be
made from variations under which there lies a general principle of wide
and abiding application. It is not likely that a man of Mr. Romanes’
antecedents should not be perfectly awake to considerations so obvious as
the foregoing, and I am afraid I am inclined to consider his whole
suggestion as only an attempt upon the part of the wearer of Mr. Darwin’s
mantle to carry on Mr. Darwin’s work in Mr. Darwin’s spirit.
I have seen Professor Hering’s theory adopted recently more unreservedly
by Dr. Creighton in his “Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease.”
{67a} Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering’s
address, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen him
lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and organ
has an individual memory. In “Life and Habit” I expressed a hope that
the opinions it upheld would be found useful by medical men, and am
therefore the more glad to see that this has proved to be the case. I
may perhaps be pardoned if I quote the passage in “Life and Habit” to
which I am referring. It runs:—
“_Mutatis mutandis_, the above would seem to hold as truly about medicine
as about politics. We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so
much more” (of course I mean “about their own business”) “than we do,
that they cannot understand us;—but though we cannot reason with them, we
can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what, therefore,
they are most likely to expect; we can see that they get this as far as
it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest
to them, only bearing in mind that they will rebel equally against too
sudden a change of treatment and no change at all” (p. 305).
Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which—though I
did not notice his saying so—he would doubtless see as a mode of
cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same advantages as
this, and requiring the same precautions against abuse; he would not,
however, I am sure, deny that there could be no fertility of good results
if too wide a cross were attempted, so that I may claim the weight of his
authority as supporting both the theory of an unconscious memory in
general, and the particular application of it to medicine which I had
ventured to suggest.
“Has the word ‘memory,’” he asks, “a real application to unconscious
organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only in a
figure of speech?”
“If I had thought,” he continues later, “that unconscious memory was no
more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various
forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not
unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class of maladies in the
light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its
workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in
nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To say that
a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a
diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all
events to make comparisons with things that we all understand.
“For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that
retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty
throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or
unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain class of maladies
according to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description
and not a figurative.” (p. 2.)
As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards “alterative action”
as “habit-breaking action.”
As regards the organism’s being guided throughout its development to
maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that “Professor
Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication.” “I should
prefer to say,” he adds, “the acme of organic implication; for the reason
that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in
their form or structure to show for the marvellous potentialities within
them.
“I now come to the application of these considerations to the doctrine of
unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of organic implicitness,
what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic
explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness. Generation is
implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is
potential memory, consciousness is actual memory.”
I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as I
should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to
turn to Dr. Creighton’s book, I will proceed to the subject indicated in
my title.
Chapter V
Statement of the Question at Issue
OF the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book—I mean
the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of
design into organic modification—the second is both the more important
and the one which stands most in need of support. The substantial
identity between heredity and memory is becoming generally admitted; as
regards my second point, however, I cannot flatter myself that I have
made much way against the formidable array of writers on the
neo-Darwinian side; I shall therefore devote the rest of my book as far
as possible to this subject only. Natural selection (meaning by these
words the preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable
variations that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck and
in no way arising out of function) has been, to use an Americanism than
which I can find nothing apter, the biggest biological boom of the last
quarter of a century; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that
Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should
show some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification
called in question. Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen
{70a} and Professor Ray Lankester {70b} in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause
{70c} in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory
of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by myself; if
they are not to be left in possession of the field the sooner they are
met the better.
Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;—whether luck or cunning is
the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development.
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning.
They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the
situation—within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as
organism retreats farther backwards from ourselves—and persistent effort
to turn it to account. They made this the soul of all development
whether of mind or body.
And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for
better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready wit and
_savoir faire_ than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have
more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone
through waters of misery which they have used as wells.
The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and
thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by
“striking oil,” and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of
the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired. No speculation,
no commerce; “nothing venture, nothing have,” is as true for the
development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither
Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting that highly
picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture do from time
to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest and most
dead-level organisms under the name of “sports;” but they would hold that
even these occur most often and most happily to those that have
persevered in well-doing for some generations. Unto the organism that
hath is given, and from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that
even “sports” prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains
the sheet anchor of the early evolutionists. They believe, in fact, that
more organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way. The
race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to
the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round organism that
is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness.
_Festina_, but _festina lente_—perhaps as involving so completely the
contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—is the motto
they would assign to organism, and _Chi va piano va lontano_, they hold
to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even
after these), at any rate as the amœba.
To repeat in other words. All enduring forms establish a _modus vivendi_
with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the
surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow
limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their
habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding
change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity
depends in great measure upon their failure to perceive that they are
moulding themselves. If a change is so great that they are seriously
incommoded by its novelty, they are not likely to acquiesce in it kindly
enough to grow to it, but they will make no difficulty about the miracle
involved in accommodating themselves to a difference of only two or three
per cent. {72a}
As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as fresh
change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established,
there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be
accumulated in the course of generations—provided, of course, always,
that the modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive
habits and physical development of the organism in their collective
capacity. Where the change is too great, or where an organ has been
modified cumulatively in some one direction, until it has reached a
development too seriously out of harmony with the habits of the organism
taken collectively, then the organism holds itself excused from further
effort, throws up the whole concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation
and reconstruction of death. It is only on the relinquishing of further
effort that this death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on
from change to change, altering and being altered—that is to say, either
killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or killing
the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves. There is a ceaseless
higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle between these
two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both have in no
small part to re-enter into the womb from whence they came and be born
again in some form which shall give greater satisfaction.
All change is _pro tanto_ death or _pro tanto_ birth. Change is the
common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and death are
not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one another; in the
highest life there is still much death, and in the most complete death
there is still not a little life. _La vie_, says Claud Bernard, {73a}
_c’est la mort_: he might have added, and perhaps did, _et la mort ce
n’est que la vie transformée_. Life and death are the extreme modes of
something which is partly both and wholly neither; this something is
common, ordinary change; solve any change and the mystery of life and
death will be revealed; show why and how anything becomes ever anything
other in any respect than what it is at any given moment, and there will
be little secret left in any other change. One is not in its ultimate
essence more miraculous that another; it may be more striking—a greater
_congeries_ of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but
not more miraculous; all change is _quâ_ us absolutely incomprehensible
and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its
essence, as apart from its phenomena, be inquired into.
But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a
dissolution, or a combination of the two. Growth is the coming together
of elements with _quasi_ similar characteristics. I understand it is
believed to be the coming together of matter in certain states of motion
with other matter in states so nearly similar that the rhythms of the one
coalesce with and hence reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the
other—making, rather than marring and undoing them. Life and growth are
an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession
of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is “the
diapason closing full in man”; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in
pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges
through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of
life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to
the comparative simplicity of the amœba. Death, again, like life, ranges
through every degree of complexity. All pleasant changes are recreative;
they are _pro tanto_ births; all unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as
such, _pro tanto_ deaths, but we can no more exhaust either wholly of the
other, than we can exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and
pain lurk within one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as
rest and unrest in one another.
There is no greater mystery in life than in death. We talk as though the
riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death is just as
great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making five, the other is
five splitting into two and two. Solve either, and we have solved the
other; they should be studied not apart, for they are never parted, but
together, and they will tell more tales of one another than either will
tell about itself. If there is one thing which advancing knowledge makes
clearer than another, it is that death is swallowed up in life, and life
in death; so that if the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then
indeed is our salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness
there is neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures
of speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as most
convenient. There is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but a being
ever with the Lord only, in the eternal φορα, or going to and fro and
heat and fray of the universe. When we were young we thought the one
certain thing was that we should one day come to die; now we know the one
certain thing to be that we shall never wholly do so. _Non omnis
moriar_, says Horace, and “I die daily,” says St. Paul, as though a life
beyond the grave, and a death on this side of it, were each some strange
thing which happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely
once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly called that of
death, and who does not die daily and hourly? Does any man in continuing
to live from day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a
changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives
from moment to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment
to moment also? Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and more
complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the most
essential factor of his life, from the day that he became “he” at all?
When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are sounded, and
so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life
that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer. If in the
midst of life we are in death, so also in the midst of death we are in
life, and whether we live or whether we die, whether we like it and know
anything about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—living always, dying
always, and in the Lord always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is
no respecter of persons.
Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as
functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and
substance, are—for the condition of every substance may be considered as
the expression and outcome of its mind. Where there is consciousness
there is change; where there is no change there is no consciousness; may
we not suspect that there is no change without a _pro tanto_
consciousness however simple and unspecialised? Change and motion are
one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or motion), as the
ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, and
all feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited, to be the
interaction of those states which for want of better terms we call mind
and matter. Action may be regarded as a kind of middle term between mind
and matter; it is the throe of thought and thing, the quivering clash and
union of body and soul; commonplace enough in practice; miraculous, as
violating every canon on which thought and reason are founded, if we
theorise about it, put it under the microscope, and vivisect it. It is
here, if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction
in terms of combining with that which is without material substance and
cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with matter,
till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.
All body is more or less ensouled. As it gets farther and farther from
ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say to
ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about it—as
though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power of being
understood rather than of understanding. We are intelligent, and no
intelligence, so different from our own as to baffle our powers of
comprehension deserves to be called intelligence at all. The more a
thing resembles ourselves, the more it thinks as we do—and thus by
implication tells us that we are right, the more intelligent we think it;
and the less it thinks as we do, the greater fool it must be; if a
substance does not succeed in making it clear that it understands our
business, we conclude that it cannot have any business of its own, much
less understand it, or indeed understand anything at all. But letting
this pass, so far as we are concerned, χρημάτων πάντων μέτρον άνθρωπος;
we are body ensouled, and soul embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible
for us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist
either of soul without body, or body without soul. Unmattered condition,
therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned matter; and we must
hold that all body with which we can be conceivably concerned is more or
less ensouled, and all soul, in like manner, more or less embodied.
Strike either body or soul—that is to say, effect either a physical or a
mental change, and the harmonics of the other sound. So long as body is
minded in a certain way—so long, that is to say, as it feels, knows,
remembers, concludes, and forecasts one set of things—it will be in one
form; if it assumes a new one, otherwise than by external violence, no
matter how slight the change may be, it is only through having changed
its mind, through having forgotten and died to some trains of thought,
and having been correspondingly born anew by the adoption of new ones.
What it will adopt depends upon which of the various courses open to it
it considers most to its advantage.
What it will think to its advantage depends mainly on the past habits of
its race. Its past and now invisible lives will influence its desires
more powerfully than anything it may itself be able to add to the sum of
its likes and dislikes; nevertheless, over and above preconceived opinion
and the habits to which all are slaves, there is a small salary, or, as
it were, agency commission, which each may have for himself, and spend
according to his fancy; from this, indeed, income-tax must be deducted;
still there remains a little margin of individual taste, and here, high
up on this narrow, inaccessible ledge of our souls, from year to year a
breed of not unprolific variations build where reason cannot reach them
to despoil them; for _de gustibus non est disputandum_.
Here we are as far as we can go. Fancy, which sometimes sways so much
and is swayed by so little, and which sometimes, again, is so hard to
sway, and moves so little when it is swayed; whose ways have a method of
their own, but are not as our ways—fancy, lies on the extreme borderland
of the realm within which the writs of our thoughts run, and extends into
that unseen world wherein they have no jurisdiction. Fancy is as the
mist upon the horizon which blends earth and sky; where, however, it
approaches nearest to the earth and can be reckoned with, it is seen as
melting into desire, and this as giving birth to design and effort. As
the net result and outcome of these last, living forms grow gradually but
persistently into physical conformity with their own intentions, and
become outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual faiths, or
wants of faith, that have been most within them. They thus very
gradually, but none the less effectually, design themselves.
In effect, therefore, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck introduce uniformity
into the moral and spiritual worlds as it was already beginning to be
introduced into the physical. According to both these writers
development has ever been a matter of the same energy, effort, good
sense, and perseverance, as tend to advancement of life now among
ourselves. In essence it is neither more nor less than this, as the
rain-drop which denuded an ancient formation is of the same kind as that
which is denuding a modern one, though its effect may vary in geometrical
ratio with the effect it has produced already. As we are extending
reason to the lower animals, so we must extend a system of moral
government by rewards and punishments no less surely; and if we admit
that to some considerable extent man is man, and master of his fate, we
should admit also that all organic forms which are saved at all have been
in proportionate degree masters of their fate too, and have worked out,
not only their own salvation, but their salvation according, in no small
measure, to their own goodwill and pleasure, at times with a light heart,
and at times in fear and trembling. I do not say that Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck saw all the foregoing as clearly as it is easy to see it now;
what I have said, however, is only the natural development of their
system.
Chapter VI
Statement of the Question at Issue (_continued_)
SO much for the older view; and now for the more modern opinion.
According to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, and ostensibly, I am afraid I
should add, a great majority of our most prominent biologists, the view
taken by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is not a sound one. Some organisms,
indeed, are so admirably adapted to their surroundings, and some organs
discharge their functions with so much appearance of provision, that we
are apt to think they must owe their development to sense of need and
consequent contrivance, but this opinion is fantastic; the appearance of
design is delusive; what we are tempted to see as an accumulated outcome
of desire and cunning, we should regard as mainly an accumulated outcome
of good luck.
Let us take the eye as a somewhat crucial example. It is a
seeing-machine, or thing to see with. So is a telescope; the telescope
in its highest development is a secular accumulation of cunning,
sometimes small, sometimes great; sometimes applied to this detail of the
instrument, and sometimes to that. It is an admirable example of design;
nevertheless, as I said in “Evolution Old and New,” he who made the first
rude telescope had probably no idea of any more perfect form of the
instrument than the one he had himself invented. Indeed, if he had, he
would have carried his idea out in practice. He would have been unable
to conceive such an instrument as Lord Rosse’s; the design, therefore, at
present evidenced by the telescope was not design all on the part of one
and the same person. Nor yet was it unmixed with chance; many a detail
has been doubtless due to an accident or coincidence which was forthwith
seized and made the best of. Luck there always has been and always will
be, until all brains are opened, and all connections made known, but luck
turned to account becomes design; there is, indeed, if things are driven
home, little other design than this. The telescope, therefore, is an
instrument designed in all its parts for the purpose of seeing, and, take
it all round, designed with singular skill.
Looking at the eye, we are at first tempted to think that it must be the
telescope over again, only more so; we are tempted to see it as something
which has grown up little by little from small beginnings, as the result
of effort well applied and handed down from generation to generation,
till, in the vastly greater time during which the eye has been developing
as compared with the telescope, a vastly more astonishing result has been
arrived at. We may indeed be tempted to think this, but, according to
Mr. Darwin, we should be wrong. Design had a great deal to do with the
telescope, but it had nothing or hardly anything whatever to do with the
eye. The telescope owes its development to cunning, the eye to luck,
which, it would seem, is so far more cunning than cunning that one does
not quite understand why there should be any cunning at all. The main
means of developing the eye was, according to Mr. Darwin, not use as
varying circumstances might direct with consequent slow increase of power
and an occasional happy flight of genius, but natural selection. Natural
selection, according to him, though not the sole, is still the most
important means of its development and modification. {81a} What, then,
is natural selection?
Mr. Darwin has told us this on the title-page of the “Origin of Species.”
He there defines it as “The Preservation of Favoured Races;” “Favoured”
is “Fortunate,” and “Fortunate” “Lucky;” it is plain, therefore, that
with Mr. Darwin natural selection comes to “The Preservation of Lucky
Races,” and that he regarded luck as the most important feature in
connection with the development even of so apparently purposive an organ
as the eye, and as the one, therefore, on which it was most proper to
insist. And what is luck but absence of intention or design? What,
then, can Mr. Darwin’s title-page amount to when written out plainly, but
to an assertion that the main means of modification has been the
preservation of races whose variations have been unintentional, that is
to say, not connected with effort or intention, devoid of mind or
meaning, fortuitous, spontaneous, accidental, or whatever kindred word is
least disagreeable to the reader? It is impossible to conceive any more
complete denial of mind as having had anything to do with organic
development, than is involved in the title-page of the “Origin of
Species” when its doubtless carefully considered words are studied—nor,
let me add, is it possible to conceive a title-page more likely to make
the reader’s attention rest much on the main doctrine of evolution, and
little, to use the words now most in vogue concerning it, on Mr. Darwin’s
own “distinctive feature.”
It should be remembered that the full title of the “Origin of Species”
is, “On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the
preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” The
significance of the expansion of the title escaped the greater number of
Mr. Darwin’s readers. Perhaps it ought not to have done so, but we
certainly failed to catch it. The very words themselves escaped us—and
yet there they were all the time if we had only chosen to look. We
thought the book was called “On the Origin of Species,” and so it was on
the outside; so it was also on the inside fly-leaf; so it was on the
title-page itself as long as the most prominent type was used; the
expanded title was only given once, and then in smaller type; so the
three big “Origins of Species” carried us with them to the exclusion of
the rest.
The short and working title, “On the Origin of Species,” in effect claims
descent with modification generally; the expanded and technically true
title only claims the discovery that luck is the main means of organic
modification, and this is a very different matter. The book ought to
have been entitled, “On Natural Selection, or the preservation of
favoured races in the struggle for life, as the main means of the origin
of species;” this should have been the expanded title, and the short
title should have been “On Natural Selection.” The title would not then
have involved an important difference between its working and its
technical forms, and it would have better fulfilled the object of a
title, which is, of course, to give, as far as may be, the essence of a
book in a nutshell. We learn on the authority of Mr. Darwin himself
{83a} that the “Origin of Species” was originally intended to bear the
title “Natural Selection;” nor is it easy to see why the change should
have been made if an accurate expression of the contents of the book was
the only thing which Mr. Darwin was considering. It is curious that,
writing the later chapters of “Life and Habit” in great haste, I should
have accidentally referred to the “Origin of Species” as “Natural
Selection;” it seems hard to believe that there was no intention in my
thus unconsciously reverting to Mr. Darwin’s own original title, but
there certainly was none, and I did not then know what the original title
had been.
If we had scrutinised Mr. Darwin’s title-page as closely as we should
certainly scrutinise anything written by Mr. Darwin now, we should have
seen that the title did not technically claim the theory of descent;
practically, however, it so turned out that we unhesitatingly gave that
theory to the author, being, as I have said, carried away by the three
large “Origins of Species” (which we understood as much the same thing as
descent with modification), and finding, as I shall show in a later
chapter, that descent was ubiquitously claimed throughout the work,
either expressly or by implication, as Mr. Darwin’s theory. It is not
easy to see how any one with ordinary instincts could hesitate to believe
that Mr. Darwin was entitled to claim what he claimed with so much
insistance. If _ars est celare artem_ Mr. Darwin must be allowed to have
been a consummate artist, for it took us years to understand the ins and
outs of what had been done.
I may say in passing that we never see the “Origin of Species” spoken of
as “On the Origin of Species, &c.,” or as “The Origin of Species, &c.”
(the word “on” being dropped in the latest editions). The distinctive
feature of the book lies, according to its admirers, in the “&c.,” but
they never give it. To avoid pedantry I shall continue to speak of the
“Origin of Species.”
At any rate it will be admitted that Mr. Darwin did not make his
title-page express his meaning so clearly that his readers could readily
catch the point of difference between himself and his grandfather and
Lamarck; nevertheless the point just touched upon involves the only
essential difference between the systems of Mr. Charles Darwin and those
of his three most important predecessors. All four writers agree that
animals and plants descend with modification; all agree that the fittest
alone survive; all agree about the important consequences of the
geometrical ratio of increase; Mr. Charles Darwin has said more about
these last two points than his predecessors did, but all three were alike
cognisant of the facts and attached the same importance to them, and
would have been astonished at its being supposed possible that they
disputed them. The fittest alone survive; yes—but the fittest from among
what? Here comes the point of divergence; the fittest from among
organisms whose variations arise mainly through use and disuse? In other
words, from variations that are mainly functional? Or from among
organisms whose variations are in the main matters of luck? From
variations into which a moral and intellectual system of payment
according to results has largely entered? Or from variations which have
been thrown for with dice? From variations among which, though cards
tell, yet play tells as much or more? Or from those in which cards are
everything and play goes for so little as to be not worth taking into
account? Is “the survival of the fittest” to be taken as meaning “the
survival of the luckiest” or “the survival of those who know best how to
turn fortune to account”? Is luck the only element of fitness, or is not
cunning even more indispensable?
Mr. Darwin has a habit, borrowed, perhaps, _mutatis mutandis_, from the
framers of our collects, of every now and then adding the words “through
natural selection,” as though this squared everything, and descent with
modification thus became his theory at once. This is not the case.
Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck believed in natural selection to the
full as much as any follower of Mr. Charles Darwin can do. They did not
use the actual words, but the idea underlying them is the essence of
their system. Mr. Patrick Matthew epitomised their doctrine more
tersely, perhaps, than was done by any other of the pre-Charles-Darwinian
evolutionists, in the following passage which appeared in 1831, and which
I have already quoted in “Evolution Old and New” (pp. 320, 323). The
passage runs:—
“The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in part,
be traced to the extreme fecundity of nature, who, as before stated, has
in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in
many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies
caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and
preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to
circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity,
these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior
adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other kind; the weaker
and less circumstance-suited being prematurely destroyed. This principle
is in constant action; it regulates the colour, the figure, the
capacities, and instincts; those individuals in each species whose colour
and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies,
or defence from inclemencies or vicissitudes of climate, whose figure is
best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support; whose
capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies to
self-advantage according to circumstances—in such immense waste of
primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from _the
strict ordeal by which nature tests their adaptation to her standard of
perfection_ and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction.” {86a} A
little lower down Mr. Matthew speaks of animals under domestication “_not
having undergone selection by the law of nature_, _of which we have
spoken_, and hence being unable to maintain their ground without culture
and protection.”
The distinction between Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism is generally believed
to lie in the adoption of a theory of natural selection by the younger
Darwin and its non-adoption by the elder. This is true in so far as that
the elder Darwin does not use the words “natural selection,” while the
younger does, but it is not true otherwise. Both writers agree that
offspring tends to inherit modifications that have been effected, from
whatever cause, in parents; both hold that the best adapted to their
surroundings live longest and leave most offspring; both, therefore, hold
that favourable modifications will tend to be preserved and intensified
in the course of many generations, and that this leads to divergence of
type; but these opinions involve a theory of natural selection or
quasi-selection, whether the words “natural selection” are used or not;
indeed it is impossible to include wild species in any theory of descent
with modification without implying a quasi-selective power on the part of
nature; but even with Mr. Charles Darwin the power is only
quasi-selective; there is no conscious choice, and hence there is nothing
that can in strictness be called selection.
It is indeed true that the younger Darwin gave the words “natural
selection” the importance which of late years they have assumed; he
probably adopted them unconsciously from the passage of Mr. Matthew’s
quoted above, but he ultimately said, {87a} “In the literal sense of the
word (_sic_) no doubt natural selection is a false term,” as personifying
a fact, making it exercise the conscious choice without which there can
be no selection, and generally crediting it with the discharge of
functions which can only be ascribed legitimately to living and reasoning
beings. Granted, however, that while Mr. Charles Darwin adopted the
expression natural selection and admitted it to be a bad one, his
grandfather did not use it at all; still Mr. Darwin did not mean the
natural selection which Mr. Matthew and those whose opinions he was
epitomising meant. Mr. Darwin meant the selection to be made from
variations into which purpose enters to only a small extent
comparatively. The difference, therefore, between the older
evolutionists and their successor does not lie in the acceptance by the
more recent writer of a quasi-selective power in nature which his
predecessors denied, but in the background—hidden behind the words
natural selection, which have served to cloak it—in the views which the
old and the new writers severally took of the variations from among which
they are alike agreed that a selection or quasi-selection is made.
It now appears that there is not one natural selection, and one survival
of the fittest only, but two natural selections, and two survivals of the
fittest, the one of which may be objected to as an expression more fit
for religious and general literature than for science, but may still be
admitted as sound in intention, while the other, inasmuch as it supposes
accident to be the main purveyor of variations, has no correspondence
with the actual course of things; for if the variations are matters of
chance or hazard unconnected with any principle of constant application,
they will not occur steadily enough, throughout a sufficient number of
successive generations, nor to a sufficient number of individuals for
many generations together at the same time and place, to admit of the
fixing and permanency of modification at all. The one theory of natural
selection, therefore, may, and indeed will, explain the facts that
surround us, whereas the other will not. Mr. Charles Darwin’s
contribution to the theory of evolution was not, as is commonly supposed,
“natural selection,” but the hypothesis that natural selection from
variations that are in the main fortuitous could accumulate and result in
specific and generic differences.
In the foregoing paragraph I have given the point of difference between
Mr. Charles Darwin and his predecessors. Why, I wonder, have neither he
nor any of his exponents put this difference before us in such plain
words that we should readily apprehend it? Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck
were understood by all who wished to understand them; why is it that the
misunderstanding of Mr. Darwin’s “distinctive feature” should have been
so long and obstinate? Why is it that, no matter how much writers like
Mr. Grant Allen and Professor Ray Lankester may say about “Mr. Darwin’s
master-key,” nor how many more like hyperboles they brandish, they never
put a succinct _résumé_ of Mr. Darwin’s theory side by side with a
similar _résumé_ of his grandfather’s and Lamarck’s? Neither Mr. Darwin
himself, not any of those to whose advocacy his reputation is mainly due,
have done this. Professor Huxley is the man of all others who foisted
Mr. Darwin most upon us, but in his famous lecture on the coming of age
of the “Origin of Species” he did not explain to his hearers wherein the
Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution differed from the old; and why not?
Surely, because no sooner is this made clear than we perceive that the
idea underlying the old evolutionists is more in accord with instinctive
feelings that we have cherished too long to be able now to disregard them
than the central idea which underlies the “Origin of Species.”
What should we think of one who maintained that the steam-engine and
telescope were not developed mainly through design and effort (letting
the indisputably existing element of luck go without saying), but to the
fact that if any telescope or steam-engine “happened to be made ever such
a little more conveniently for man’s purposes than another,” &c., &c.?
Let us suppose a notorious burglar found in possession of a jemmy; it is
admitted on all hands that he will use it as soon as he gets a chance;
there is no doubt about this; how perverted should we not consider the
ingenuity of one who tried to persuade us we were wrong in thinking that
the burglar compassed the possession of the jemmy by means involving
ideas, however vague in the first instance, of applying it to its
subsequent function.
If any one could be found so blind to obvious inferences as to accept
natural selection, “or the preservation of favoured machines,” as the
main means of mechanical modification, we might suppose him to argue much
as follows:—“I can quite understand,” he would exclaim, “how any one who
reflects upon the originally simple form of the earliest jemmies, and
observes the developments they have since attained in the hands of our
most accomplished housebreakers, might at first be tempted to believe
that the present form of the instrument has been arrived at by
long-continued improvement in the hands of an almost infinite succession
of thieves; but may not this inference be somewhat too hastily drawn?
Have we any right to assume that burglars work by means analogous to
those employed by other people? If any thief happened to pick up any
crowbar which happened to be ever such a little better suited to his
purpose than the one he had been in the habit of using hitherto, he would
at once seize and carefully preserve it. If it got worn out or broken he
would begin searching for a crowbar as like as possible to the one that
he had lost; and when, with advancing skill, and in default of being able
to find the exact thing he wanted, he took at length to making a jemmy
for himself, he would imitate the latest and most perfect adaptation,
which would thus be most likely to be preserved in the struggle of
competitive forms. Let this process go on for countless generations,
among countless burglars of all nations, and may we not suppose that a
jemmy would be in time arrived at, as superior to any that could have
been designed as the effect of the Niagara Falls is superior to the puny
efforts of the landscape gardener?”
For the moment I will pass over the obvious retort that there is no
sufficient parallelism between bodily organs and mechanical inventions to
make a denial of design in the one involve in equity a denial of it in
the other also, and that therefore the preceding paragraph has no force.
A man is not bound to deny design in machines wherein it can be clearly
seen because he denies it in living organs where at best it is a matter
of inference. This retort is plausible, but in the course of the two
next following chapters but one it will be shown to be without force; for
the moment, however, beyond thus calling attention to it, I must pass it
by.
I do not mean to say that Mr. Darwin ever wrote anything which made the
utility of his contention as apparent as it is made by what I have above
put into the mouth of his supposed follower. Mr. Darwin was the
Gladstone of biology, and so old a scientific hand was not going to make
things unnecessarily clear unless it suited his convenience. Then,
indeed, he was like the man in “The Hunting of the Snark,” who said, “I
told you once, I told you twice, what I tell you three times is true.”
That what I have supposed said, however, above about the jemmy is no
exaggeration of Mr. Darwin’s attitude as regards design in organism will
appear from the passage about the eye already referred to, which it may
perhaps be as well to quote in full. Mr. Darwin says:—
“It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We
know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued
efforts of the highest human intellects, and we naturally infer that the
eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this
inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator
works by intellectual powers like those of men? If we must compare the
eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick
layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and
then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly
in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and
thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the
surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further, we must suppose
that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental
alteration in the transparent layers, and carefully selecting each
alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any
degree, tend to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new
state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million, and each to be
preserved till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be
destroyed. In living bodies variation will cause the slight alterations,
generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection
will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go
on for millions on millions of years, and during each year on millions of
individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical
instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass as the works
of the Creator are to those of man?” {92a}
Mr. Darwin does not in this passage deny design, or cunning, point blank;
he was not given to denying things point blank, nor is it immediately
apparent that he is denying design at all, for he does not emphasize and
call attention to the fact that the _variations_ on whose accumulation he
relies for his ultimate specific difference are accidental, and, to use
his own words, in the passage last quoted, caused by _variation_. He
does, indeed, in his earlier editions, call the variations “accidental,”
and accidental they remained for ten years, but in 1869 the word
“accidental” was taken out. Mr. Darwin probably felt that the variations
had been accidental as long as was desirable; and though they would, of
course, in reality remain as accidental as ever, still, there could be no
use in crying “accidental variations” further. If the reader wants to
know whether they were accidental or no, he had better find out for
himself. Mr. Darwin was a master of what may be called scientific
chiaroscuro, and owes his reputation in no small measure to the judgment
with which he kept his meaning dark when a less practised hand would have
thrown light upon it. There can, however, be no question that Mr.
Darwin, though not denying purposiveness point blank, was trying to refer
the development of the eye to the accumulation of small accidental
improvements, which were not as a rule due to effort and design in any
way analogous to those attendant on the development of the telescope.
Though Mr. Darwin, if he was to have any point of difference from his
grandfather, was bound to make his variations accidental, yet, to do him
justice, he did not like it. Even in the earlier editions of the “Origin
of Species,” where the “alterations” in the passage last quoted are
called “accidental” in express terms, the word does not fall, so to
speak, on a strong beat of the bar, and is apt to pass unnoticed.
Besides, Mr. Darwin does not say point blank “we may believe,” or “we
ought to believe;” he only says “may we not believe?” The reader should
always be on his guard when Mr. Darwin asks one of these bland and
child-like questions, and he is fond of asking them; but, however this
may be, it is plain, as I pointed out in “Evolution Old and New” {93a}
that the only “skill,” that is to say the only thing that can possibly
involve design, is “the unerring skill” of natural selection.
In the same paragraph Mr. Darwin has already said: “Further, we must
suppose that there is a power represented by natural selection or the
survival of the fittest always intently watching each slight alteration,
&c.” Mr. Darwin probably said “a power represented by natural selection”
instead of “natural selection” only, because he saw that to talk too
frequently about the fact that the most lucky live longest as “intently
watching” something was greater nonsense than it would be prudent even
for him to write, so he fogged it by making the intent watching done by
“a power represented by” a fact, instead of by the fact itself. As the
sentence stands it is just as great nonsense as it would have been if
“the survival of the fittest” had been allowed to do the watching instead
of “the power represented by” the survival of the fittest, but the
nonsense is harder to dig up, and the reader is more likely to pass it
over.
This passage gave Mr. Darwin no less trouble than it must have given to
many of his readers. In the original edition of the “Origin of Species”
it stood, “Further, we must suppose that there is a power always intently
watching each slight accidental variation.” I suppose it was felt that
if this was allowed to stand, it might be fairly asked what natural
selection was doing all this time? If the power was able to do
everything that was necessary now, why not always? and why any natural
selection at all? This clearly would not do, so in 1861 the power was
allowed, by the help of brackets, actually to become natural selection,
and remained so till 1869, when Mr. Darwin could stand it no longer, and,
doubtless for the reason given above, altered the passage to “a power
represented by natural selection,” at the same time cutting out the word
“accidental.”
It may perhaps make the workings of Mr. Darwin’s mind clearer to the
reader if I give the various readings of this passage as taken from the
three most important editions of the “Origin of Species.”
In 1859 it stood, “Further, we must suppose that there is a power always
intently watching each slight accidental alteration,” &c.
In 1861 it stood, “Further, we must suppose that there is a power
(natural selection) always intently watching each slight accidental
alteration,” &c.
And in 1869, “Further, we must suppose that there is a power represented
by natural selection or the survival of the fittest always intently
watching each slight alteration,” &c. {94a}
The hesitating feeble gait of one who fears a pitfall at every step, so
easily recognisable in the “numerous, successive, slight alterations” in
the foregoing passage, may be traced in many another page of the “Origin
of Species” by those who will be at the trouble of comparing the several
editions. It is only when this is done, and the working of Mr. Darwin’s
mind can be seen as though it were the twitchings of a dog’s nose, that
any idea can be formed of the difficulty in which he found himself
involved by his initial blunder of thinking he had got a distinctive
feature which entitled him to claim the theory of evolution as an
original idea of his own. He found his natural selection hang round his
neck like a millstone. There is hardly a page in the “Origin of Species”
in which traces of the struggle going on in Mr. Darwin’s mind are not
discernible, with a result alike exasperating and pitiable. I can only
repeat what I said in “Evolution Old and New,” namely, that I find the
task of extracting a well-defined meaning out of Mr. Darwin’s words
comparable only to that of trying to act on the advice of a lawyer who
has obscured the main issue as much as he can, and whose chief aim has
been to leave as many loopholes as possible for himself to escape by, if
things should go wrong hereafter. Or, again, to that of one who has to
construe an Act of Parliament which was originally drawn with a view to
throwing as much dust as possible in the eyes of those who would oppose
the measure, and which, having been found utterly unworkable in practice,
has had clauses repealed up and down it till it is now in an inextricable
tangle of confusion and contradiction.
The more Mr. Darwin’s work is studied, and more especially the more his
different editions are compared, the more impossible is it to avoid a
suspicion of _arrière pensée_ as pervading it whenever the “distinctive
feature” is on the _tapis_. It is right to say, however, that no such
suspicion attaches to Mr. A. R. Wallace, Mr. Darwin’s fellow discoverer
of natural selection. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Wallace
believed he had made a real and important improvement upon the Lamarckian
system, and, as a natural consequence, unlike Mr. Darwin, he began by
telling us what Lamarck had said. He did not, I admit, say quite all
that I should have been glad to have seen him say, nor use exactly the
words I should myself have chosen, but he said enough to make it
impossible to doubt his good faith, and his desire that we should
understand that with him, as with Mr. Darwin, variations are mainly
accidental, not functional. Thus, in his memorable paper communicated to
the Linnean Society in 1858 he said, in a passage which I have quoted in
“Unconscious Memory”:
“The hypothesis of Lamarck—that progressive changes in species have been
produced by the attempts of the animals to increase the development of
their own organs, and thus modify their structures and habits—has been
repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties
and species; . . . but the view here developed renders such an hypothesis
quite unnecessary. . . . The powerful retractile talons of the falcon
and cat tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of
those animals; . . . neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by
desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly
stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which
occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual _at once
secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their
shorter-necked companions_, _and on the first scarcity of food were thus
enabled to outlive them_” (italics in original). {96a}
“Which occurred” is obviously “which happened to occur, by some chance or
accident entirely unconnected with use and disuse;” and though the word
“accidental” is never used, there can be no doubt about Mr. Wallace’s
desire to make the reader catch the fact that with him accident, and not,
as with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, sustained effort, is the main
purveyor of the variations whose accumulation amounts ultimately to
specific difference. It is a pity, however, that instead of contenting
himself like a theologian with saying that his opponent had been refuted
over and over again, he did not refer to any particular and tolerably
successful attempt to refute the theory that modifications in organic
structure are mainly functional. I am fairly well acquainted with the
literature of evolution, and have never met with any such attempt. But
let this pass; as with Mr. Darwin, so with Mr. Wallace, and so indeed
with all who accept Mr. Charles Darwin’s natural selection as the main
means of modification, the central idea is luck, while the central idea
of the Erasmus-Darwinian system is cunning.
I have given the opinions of these contending parties in their extreme
development; but they both admit abatements which bring them somewhat
nearer to one another. Design, as even its most strenuous upholders will
admit, is a difficult word to deal with; it is, like all our ideas,
substantial enough until we try to grasp it—and then, like all our ideas,
it mockingly eludes us; it is like life or death—a rope of many strands;
there is design within design, and design within undesign; there is
undesign within design (as when a man shuffles cards designing that there
shall be no design in their arrangement), and undesign within undesign;
when we speak of cunning or design in connection with organism we do not
mean cunning, all cunning, and nothing but cunning, so that there shall
be no place for luck; we do not mean that conscious attention and
forethought shall have been bestowed upon the minutest details of action,
and nothing been left to work itself out departmentally according to
precedent, or as it otherwise best may according to the chapter of
accidents.
So, again, when Mr. Darwin and his followers deny design and effort to
have been the main purveyors of the variations whose accumulation results
in specific difference, they do not entirely exclude the action of use
and disuse—and this at once opens the door for cunning; nevertheless,
according to Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, the human eye and the long neck
of the giraffe are alike due to the accumulation of variations that are
mainly functional, and hence practical; according to Charles Darwin they
are alike due to the accumulation of variations that are accidental,
fortuitous, spontaneous, that is to say, mainly cannot be reduced to any
known general principle. According to Charles Darwin “the preservation
of favoured,” or lucky, “races” is by far the most important means of
modification; according to Erasmus Darwin effort _non sibi res sed se
rebus subjungere_ is unquestionably the most potent means; roughly,
therefore, there is no better or fairer way of putting the matter, than
to say that Charles Darwin is the apostle of luck, and his grandfather,
and Lamarck, of cunning.
It should be observed also that the distinction between the organism and
its surroundings—on which both systems are founded—is one that cannot be
so universally drawn as we find it convenient to allege. There is a
debatable ground of considerable extent on which _res_ and _me_, ego and
non ego, luck and cunning, necessity and freewill, meet and pass into one
another as night and day, or life and death. No one can draw a sharp
line between ego and non ego, nor indeed any sharp line between any
classes of phenomena. Every part of the ego is non ego _quâ_ organ or
tool in use, and much of the non ego runs up into the ego and is
inseparably united with it; still there is enough that it is obviously
most convenient to call ego, and enough that it is no less obviously most
convenient to call non ego, as there is enough obvious day and obvious
night, or obvious luck and obvious cunning, to make us think it advisable
to keep separate accounts for each.
I will say more on this head in a following chapter; in this present one
my business should be confined to pointing out as clearly and succinctly
as I can the issue between the two great main contending opinions
concerning organic development that obtain among those who accept the
theory of descent at all; nor do I believe that this can be done more
effectually and accurately than by saying, as above, that Mr. Charles
Darwin (whose name, by the way, was “Charles Robert,” and not, as would
appear from the title-pages of his books, “Charles” only), Mr. A. R.
Wallace, and their supporters are the apostles of luck, while Erasmus
Darwin and Lamarck, followed, more or less timidly, by the Geoffroys and
by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and very timidly indeed by the Duke of Argyll,
preach cunning as the most important means of organic modification.
* * * * *
NOTE.—It appears from “Samuel Butler: A Memoir” (II, 29) that Butler
wrote to his father (Dec. 1885) about a passage in Horace (near the
beginning of the First Epistle of the First Book)—
Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor,
Et mihi res, non me rebus subjungere conor.
On the preceding page he is adapting the second of these two verses to
his own purposes.—H. F. J.
Chapter VII
(_Intercalated_)
Mr. Spencer’s “The Factors of Organic Evolution”
SINCE the foregoing and several of the succeeding chapters were written,
Mr. Herbert Spencer has made his position at once more clear and more
widely understood by his articles “The Factors of Organic Evolution”
which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ for April and May, 1886. The
present appears the fittest place in which to intercalate remarks
concerning them.
Mr. Spencer asks whether those are right who regard Mr. Charles Darwin’s
theory of natural selection as by itself sufficient to account for
organic evolution.
“On critically examining the evidence” (modern writers never examine
evidence, they always “critically,” or “carefully,” or “patiently,”
examine it), he writes, “we shall find reason to think that it by no
means explains all that has to be explained. Omitting for the present
any consideration of a factor which may be considered primordial, it may
be contended that one of the factors alleged by Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck must be recognised as a co-operator. Unless that increase of a
part resulting from extra activity, and that decrease of it resulting
from inactivity, are transmissible to descendants, we are without a key
to many phenomena of organic evolution. _Utterly inadequate to explain
the major part of the facts as is the hypothesis of the inheritance of
functionally produced modifications_, yet there is a minor part of the
facts very extensive though less, which must be ascribed to this cause.”
(Italics mine.)
Mr. Spencer does not here say expressly that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck
considered inheritance of functionally produced modifications to be the
sole explanation of the facts of organic life; modern writers on
evolution for the most part avoid saying anything expressly; this
nevertheless is the conclusion which the reader naturally draws—and was
doubtless intended to draw—from Mr. Spencer’s words. He gathers that
these writers put forward an “utterly inadequate” theory, which cannot
for a moment be entertained in the form in which they left it, but which,
nevertheless, contains contributions to the formation of a just opinion
which of late years have been too much neglected.
This inference would be, as Mr. Spencer ought to know, a mistaken one.
Erasmus Darwin, who was the first to depend mainly on functionally
produced modifications, attributes, if not as much importance to
variations induced either by what we must call chance, or by causes
having no connection with use and disuse, as Mr. Spencer does, still so
nearly as much that there is little to choose between them. Mr.
Spencer’s words show that he attributes, if not half, still not far off
half the modification that has actually been produced, to use and disuse.
Erasmus Darwin does not say whether he considers use and disuse to have
brought about more than half or less than half; he only says that animal
and vegetable modification is “in part produced” by the exertions of the
animals and vegetables themselves; the impression I have derived is, that
just as Mr. Spencer considers rather less than half to be due to use and
disuse, so Erasmus Darwin considers decidedly more than half—so much
more, in fact, than half as to make function unquestionably the factor
most proper to be insisted on if only one can be given. Further than
this he did not go. I will quote enough of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s own
words to put his position beyond doubt. He writes:—
“Thirdly, when we enumerate the great changes produced in the species of
animals before their nativity, as, for example, when the offspring
reproduces the effects produced upon the parent by accident or culture,
or the changes produced by the mixture of species, as in mules; or the
changes produced probably by exuberance of nourishment supplied to the
foetus, as in monstrous births with additional limbs; many of these
enormities are propagated and continued as a variety at least, if not as
a new species of animal. I have seen a breed of cats with an additional
claw on every foot; of poultry also with an additional claw and with
wings to their feet; and of others without rumps. Mr. Buffon” (who, by
the way, surely, was no more “Mr. Buffon” than Lord Salisbury is “Mr.
Salisbury”) “mentions a breed of dogs without tails which are common at
Rome and Naples—which he supposes to have been produced by a custom long
established of cutting their tails close off.” {102a}
Here not one of the causes of variation adduced is connected with use and
disuse, or effort, volition, and purpose; the manner, moreover, in which
they are brought forward is not that of one who shows signs of
recalcitrancy about admitting other causes of modification as well as use
and disuse; indeed, a little lower down he almost appears to assign the
subordinate place to functionally produced modifications, for he
says—“Fifthly, from their first rudiments or primordium to the
termination of their lives, all animals undergo perpetual
transformations; _which are in part produced_ by their own exertions in
consequence of their desires and aversions, of their pleasures and their
pains, or of irritations or of associations; and many of these acquired
forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity.”
I have quoted enough to show that Dr. Erasmus Darwin would have protested
against the supposition that functionally produced modifications were an
adequate explanation of all the phenomena of organic modification. He
declares accident and the chances and changes of this mortal life to be
potent and frequent causes of variations, which, being not infrequently
inherited, result in the formation of varieties and even species, but
considers these causes if taken alone as no less insufficient to account
for observable facts than the theory of functionally produced
modifications would be if not supplemented by inheritance of so-called
fortuitous, or spontaneous variations. The difference between Dr.
Erasmus Darwin and Mr. Spencer does not consist in the denial by the
first, that a variety which happens, no matter how accidentally, to have
varied in a way that enables it to comply more fully and readily with the
conditions of its existence, is likely to live longer and leave more
offspring than one less favoured; nor in the denial by the second of the
inheritance and accumulation of functionally produced modifications; but
in the amount of stress which they respectively lay on the relative
importance of the two great factors of organic evolution, the existence
of which they are alike ready to admit.
With Erasmus Darwin there is indeed luck, and luck has had a great deal
to do with organic modification, but no amount of luck would have done
unless cunning had known how to take advantage of it; whereas if cunning
be given, a very little luck at a time will accumulate in the course of
ages and become a mighty heap. Cunning, therefore, is the factor on
which, having regard to the usage of language and the necessity for
simplifying facts, he thinks it most proper to insist. Surely this is as
near as may be the opinion which common consent ascribes to Mr. Spencer
himself. It is certainly the one which, in supporting Erasmus Darwin’s
system as against his grandson’s, I have always intended to support.
With Charles Darwin, on the other hand, there is indeed cunning, effort,
and consequent use and disuse; nor does he deny that these have produced
some, and sometimes even an important, effect in modifying species, but
he assigns by far the most important _rôle_ in the whole scheme to
natural selection, which, as I have already shown, must, with him, be
regarded as a synonym for luck pure and simple. This, for reasons well
shown by Mr. Spencer in the articles under consideration, is so untenable
that it seems only possible to account for its having been advanced at
all by supposing Mr. Darwin’s judgment to have been perverted by some one
or more of the many causes that might tend to warp them. What the chief
of those causes may have been I shall presently point out.
Buffon erred rather on the side of ignoring functionally produced
modifications than of insisting on them. The main agency with him is the
direct action of the environment upon the organism. This, no doubt, is a
flaw in Buffon’s immortal work, but it is one which Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck easily corrected; nor can we doubt that Buffon would have readily
accepted their amendment if it had been suggested to him. Buffon did
infinitely more in the way of discovering and establishing the theory of
descent with modification than any one has ever done either before or
since. He was too much occupied with proving the fact of evolution at
all, to dwell as fully as might have been wished upon the details of the
process whereby the amœba had become man, but we have already seen that
he regarded inherited mutilation as the cause of establishing a new breed
of dogs, and this is at any rate not laying much stress on functionally
produced modifications. Again, when writing of the dog, he speaks of
variations arising “_by some chance_ common enough with nature,” {104a}
and clearly does not contemplate function as the sole cause of
modification. Practically, though I grant I should be less able to quote
passages in support of my opinion than I quite like, I do not doubt that
his position was much the same as that of his successors, Erasmus Darwin
and Lamarck.
Lamarck is more vulnerable than either Erasmus Darwin or Buffon on the
score of unwillingness to assign its full share to mere chance, but I do
not for a moment believe his comparative reticence to have been caused by
failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a fateful one. He saw
that the cunning or functional side had been too much lost sight of, and
therefore insisted on it, but he did not mean to say that there is no
such thing as luck. “Let us suppose,” he says, “that a grass growing in
a low-lying meadow, gets carried _by some accident_ to the brow of a
neighbouring hill, where the soil is still damp enough for the plant to
be able to exist.” {105a} Or again—“With sufficient time, favourable
conditions of life, successive changes in the condition of the globe, and
the power of new surroundings and habits to modify the organs of living
bodies, all animal and vegetable forms have been imperceptibly rendered
such as we now see them.” {105b} Who can doubt that accident is here
regarded as a potent factor of evolution, as well as the design that is
involved in the supposition that modification is, in the main,
functionally induced? Again he writes, “As regards the circumstances
that give rise to variation, the principal are climatic changes,
different temperatures of any of a creature’s environments, differences
of abode, of habit, of the most frequent actions, and lastly of the means
of obtaining food, self-defence, reproduction,” &c. {105c} I will not
dwell on the small inconsistencies which may be found in the passages
quoted above; the reader will doubtless see them, and will also doubtless
see that in spite of them there can be no doubt that Lamarck, while
believing modification to be effected mainly by the survival in the
struggle for existence of modifications which had been induced
functionally, would not have hesitated to admit the survival of
favourable variations due to mere accident as also a potent factor in
inducing the results we see around us.
For the rest, Mr. Spencer’s articles have relieved me from the necessity
of going into the evidence which proves that such structures as a
giraffe’s neck, for example, cannot possibly have been produced by the
accumulation of variations which had their origin mainly in accident.
There is no occasion to add anything to what Mr. Spencer has said on this
score, and I am satisfied that those who do not find his argument
convince them would not be convinced by anything I might say; I shall,
therefore, omit what I had written on this subject, and confine myself to
giving the substance of Mr. Spencer’s most telling argument against Mr.
Darwin’s theory that accidental variations, if favourable, would
accumulate and result in seemingly adaptive structures. Mr. Spencer well
shows that luck or chance is insufficient as a motive-power, or helm, of
evolution; but luck is only absence of design; if, then, absence of
design is found to fail, it follows that there must have been design
somewhere, nor can the design be more conveniently placed than in
association with function.
Mr. Spencer contends that where life is so simple as to consist
practically in the discharge of only one function, or where circumstances
are such that some one function is supremely important (a state of
things, by the way, more easily found in hypothesis than in nature—at
least as continuing without modification for many successive seasons),
then accidental variations, if favourable, would indeed accumulate and
result in modification, without the aid of the transmission of
functionally produced modification. This is true; it is also true,
however, that only a very small number of species in comparison with
those we see around us could thus arise, and that we should never have
got plants and animals as embodiments of the two great fundamental
principles on which it is alone possible that life can be conducted,
{107a} and species of plants and animals as embodiments of the details
involved in carrying out these two main principles.
If the earliest organism could have only varied favourably in one
direction, the one possible favourable accidental variation would have
accumulated so long as the organism continued to exist at all, inasmuch
as this would be preserved whenever it happened to occur, while every
other would be lost in the struggle of competitive forms; but even in the
lowest forms of life there is more than one condition in respect of which
the organism must be supposed sensitive, and there are as many directions
in which variations may be favourable as there are conditions of the
environment that affect the organism. We cannot conceive of a living
form as having a power of adaptation limited to one direction only; the
elasticity which admits of a not being “extreme to mark that which is
done amiss” in one direction will commonly admit of it in as many
directions as there are possible favourable modes of variation; the
number of these, as has been just said, depends upon the number of the
conditions of the environment that affect the organism, and these last,
though in the long run and over considerable intervals of time tolerably
constant, are over shorter intervals liable to frequent and great
changes; so that there is nothing in Mr. Charles Darwin’s system of
modification through the natural survival of the lucky, to prevent gain
in one direction one year from being lost irretrievably in the next,
through the greater success of some in no way correlated variation, the
fortunate possessors of which alone survive. This, in its turn, is as
likely as not to disappear shortly through the arising of some difficulty
in some entirely new direction, and so on; nor, if function be regarded
as of small effect in determining organism, is there anything to ensure
either that, even if ground be lost for a season or two in any one
direction, it shall be recovered presently on resumption by the organism
of the habits that called it into existence, or that it shall appear
synchronously in a sufficient number of individuals to ensure its not
being soon lost through gamogenesis.
How is progress ever to be made if races keep reversing, Penelope-like,
in one generation all that they have been achieving in the preceding?
And how, on Mr. Darwin’s system, of which the accumulation of strokes of
luck is the greatly preponderating feature, is a hoard ever to be got
together and conserved, no matter how often luck may have thrown good
things in an organism’s way? Luck, or absence of design, may be
sometimes almost said to throw good things in our way, or at any rate we
may occasionally get more through having made no design than any design
we should have been likely to have formed would have given us; but luck
does not hoard these good things for our use and make our wills for us,
nor does it keep providing us with the same good gifts again and again,
and no matter how often we reject them.
I had better, perhaps, give Mr. Spencer’s own words as quoted by himself
in his article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for April, 1886. He there
wrote as follows, quoting from § 166 of his “Principles of Biology,”
which appeared in 1864:—
“Where the life is comparatively simple, or where surrounding
circumstances render some one function supremely important, the survival
of the fittest” (which means here the survival of the luckiest) “may
readily bring about the appropriate structural change, without any aid
from the transmission of functionally-acquired modifications” (into which
effort and design have entered). “But in proportion as the life grows
complex—in proportion as a healthy existence cannot be secured by a large
endowment of some one power, but demands many powers; in the same
proportion do there arise obstacles to the increase of any particular
power, by ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’”
(that is to say, through mere survival of the luckiest). “As fast as the
faculties are multiplied, so fast does it become possible for the several
members of a species to have various kinds of superiority over one
another. While one saves its life by higher speed, another does the like
by clearer vision, another by keener scent, another by quicker hearing,
another by greater strength, another by unusual power of enduring cold or
hunger, another by special sagacity, another by special timidity, another
by special courage; and others by other bodily and mental attributes.
Now it is unquestionably true that, other things equal, each of these
attributes, giving its possessor an equal extra chance of life, is likely
to be transmitted to posterity. But there seems no reason to believe it
will be increased in subsequent generations by natural selection. That
it may be thus increased, the animals not possessing more than average
endowments of it must be more frequently killed off than individuals
highly endowed with it; and this can only happen when the attribute is
one of greater importance, for the time being, than most of the other
attributes. If those members of the species which have but ordinary
shares of it, nevertheless survive by virtue of other superiorities which
they severally possess, then it is not easy to see how this particular
attribute can be developed by natural selection in subsequent
generations.” (For if some other superiority is a greater source of
luck, then natural selection, or survival of the luckiest, will ensure
that this other superiority be preserved at the expense of the one
acquired in the earlier generation.) “The probability seems rather to
be, that by gamogenesis, this extra endowment will, on the average, be
diminished in posterity—just serving in the long run to compensate the
deficient endowments of other individuals, whose special powers lie in
other directions; and so to keep up the normal structure of the species.
The working out of the process is here somewhat difficult to follow”
(there is no difficulty as soon as it is perceived that Mr. Darwin’s
natural selection invariably means, or ought to mean, the survival of the
luckiest, and that seasons and what they bring with them, though fairly
constant on an average, yet individually vary so greatly that what is
luck in one season is disaster in another); “but it appears to me that as
fast as the number of bodily and mental faculties increases, and as fast
as the maintenance of life comes to depend less on the amount of any one,
and more on the combined action of all, so fast does the production of
specialities of character by natural selection alone become difficult.
Particularly does this seem to be so with a species so multitudinous in
powers as mankind; and above all does it seem to be so with such of the
human powers as have but minor shares in aiding the struggle for life—the
æsthetic faculties, for example.
“Dwelling for a moment on this last illustration of the class of
difficulties described, let us ask how we are to interpret the
development of the musical faculty; how came there that endowment of
musical faculty which characterises modern Europeans at large, as
compared with their remote ancestors? The monotonous chants of low
savages cannot be said to show any melodic inspiration; and it is not
evident that an individual savage who had a little more musical
perception than the rest would derive any such advantage in the
maintenance of life as would secure the spread of his superiority by
inheritance of the variation,” &c.
It should be observed that the passage given in the last paragraph but
one appeared in 1864, only five years after the first edition of the
“Origin of Species,” but, crushing as it is, Mr. Darwin never answered
it. He treated it as nonexistent—and this, doubtless from a business
standpoint, was the best thing he could do. How far such a course was
consistent with that single-hearted devotion to the interests of science
for which Mr. Darwin developed such an abnormal reputation, is a point
which I must leave to his many admirers to determine.
Chapter VIII
Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm
ONE would think the issue stated in the three preceding chapters was
decided in the stating. This, as I have already implied, is probably the
reason why those who have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin’s philosophical
reputation have avoided stating it.
It may be said that, seeing the result is a joint one, inasmuch as both
“res” and “me,” or both luck and cunning, enter so largely into
development, neither factor can claim pre-eminence to the exclusion of
the other. But life is short and business long, and if we are to get the
one into the other we must suppress details, and leave our words
pregnant, as painters leave their touches when painting from nature. If
one factor concerns us greatly more than the other, we should emphasize
it, and let the other go without saying, by force of association. There
is no fear of its being lost sight of; association is one of the few
really liberal things in nature; by liberal, I mean precipitate and
inaccurate; the power of words, as of pictures, and indeed the power to
carry on life at all, vests in the fact that association does not stick
to the letter of its bond, but will take the half for the whole without
even looking closely at the coin given to make sure that it is not
counterfeit. Through the haste and high pressure of business, errors
arise continually, and these errors give us the shocks of which our
consciousness is compounded. Our whole conscious life, therefore, grows
out of memory and out of the power of association, in virtue of which not
only does the right half pass for the whole, but the wrong half not
infrequently passes current for it also, without being challenged and
found out till, as it were, the accounts come to be balanced, and it is
found that they will not do so.
Variations are an organism’s way of getting over an unexpected
discrepancy between its resources as shown by the fly-leaves of its own
cheques and the universe’s passbook; the universe is generally right, or
would be upheld as right if the matter were to come before the not too
incorruptible courts of nature, and in nine cases out of ten the organism
has made the error in its own favour, so that it must now pay or die. It
can only pay by altering its mode of life, and how long is it likely to
be before a new departure in its mode of life comes out in its own person
and in those of its family? Granted it will at first come out in their
appearance only, but there can be no change in appearance without some
slight corresponding organic modification. In practice there is usually
compromise in these matters. The universe, if it does not give an
organism short shrift and eat it at once, will commonly abate something
of its claim; it gets tricked out of an additional moiety by the
organism; the organism really does pay something by way of changed
habits; this results in variation, in virtue of which the accounts are
cooked, cobbled, and passed by a series of those miracles of
inconsistency which was call compromises, and after this they cannot be
reopened—not till next time.
Surely of the two factors which go to the making up of development,
cunning is the one more proper to be insisted on as determining the
physical and psychical well or ill being, and hence, ere long, the future
form of the organism. We can hardly open a newspaper without seeing some
sign of this; take, for example, the following extract from a letter in
the _Times_ of the day on which I am writing (February 8, 1886)—“You may
pass along a road which divides a settlement of Irish Celts from one of
Germans. They all came to the country equally without money, and have
had to fight their way in the forest, but the difference in their
condition is very remarkable; on the German side there is comfort,
thrift, peace, but on the other side the spectacle is very different.”
Few will deny that slight organic differences, corresponding to these
differences of habit, are already perceptible; no Darwinian will deny
that these differences are likely to be inherited, and, in the absence of
intermarriage between the two colonies, to result in still more typical
difference than that which exists at present. According to Mr. Darwin,
the improved type of the more successful race would not be due mainly to
transmitted perseverance in well-doing, but to the fact that if any
member of the German colony “happened” to be born “ever so slightly,” &c.
Of course this last is true to a certain extent also; if any member of
the German colony does “happen to be born,” &c., then he will stand a
better chance of surviving, and, if he marries a wife like himself, of
transmitting his good qualities; but how about the happening? How is it
that this is of such frequent occurrence in the one colony, and is so
rare in the other? _Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis_. True, but how
and why? Through the race being favoured? In one sense, doubtless, it
is true that no man can have anything except it be given him from above,
but it must be from an above into the composition of which he himself
largely enters. God gives us all things; but we are a part of God, and
that part of Him, moreover, whose department it more especially is to
look after ourselves. It cannot be through luck, for luck is blind, and
does not pick out the same people year after year and generation after
generation; shall we not rather say, then, that it is because mind, or
cunning, is a great factor in the achievement of physical results, and
because there is an abiding memory between successive generations, in
virtue of which the cunning of an earlier one enures to the benefit of
its successors?
It is one of the commonplaces of biology that the nature of the organism
(which is mainly determined by ancestral antecedents) is greatly more
important in determining its future than the conditions of its
environment, provided, of course, that these are not too cruelly
abnormal, so that good seed will do better on rather poor soil, than bad
seed on rather good soil; this alone should be enough to show that
cunning, or individual effort, is more important in determining organic
results than luck is, and therefore that if either is to be insisted on
to the exclusion of the other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is
more correctly said to be the main means of the development of
capital—Luck? or Cunning? Of course there must be something to be
developed—and luck, that is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable,
enters everywhere; but is it more convenient with our oldest and
best-established ideas to say that luck is the main means of the
development of capital, or that cunning is so? Can there be a moment’s
hesitation in admitting that if capital is found to have been developed
largely, continuously, by many people, in many ways, over a long period
of time, it can only have been by means of continued application, energy,
effort, industry, and good sense? Granted there has been luck too; of
course there has, but we let it go without saying, whereas we cannot let
the skill or cunning go without saying, inasmuch as we feel the cunning
to have been the essence of the whole matter.
Granted, again, that there is no test more fallacious on a small scale
than that of immediate success. As applied to any particular individual,
it breaks down completely. It is unfortunately no rare thing to see the
good man striving against fate, and the fool born with a silver spoon in
his mouth. Still on a large scale no test can be conceivably more
reliable; a blockhead may succeed for a time, but a succession of many
generations of blockheads does not go on steadily gaining ground, adding
field to field and farm to farm, and becoming year by year more capable
and prosperous. Given time—of which there is no scant in the matter of
organic development—and cunning will do more with ill luck than folly
with good. People do not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of
whist running, if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves.
Cunning, if it can keep its head above water at a
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