Life and Habit
by Samuel Butler · English · Gutenberg #6138 · 507,982 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Life and Habit
Author: Samuel Butler
Contributor: R. A. Streatfeild
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6138]
Most recently updated: August 2, 2014
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6138
Credits: Transcribed from the 1910 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND HABIT ***
Transcribed from the 1910 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.lorg
Life and Habit
_By_
Samuel Butler
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
* * * * *
Jonathan Cape
Eleven Gower Street, London
* * * * *
FIRST PUBLISHED 1878
SECOND EDITION 1878
NEW EDITION WITH ADDENDA AND
PREFACE BY R. A. STREATFEILD 1910
REPRINTED 1924
* * * * *
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BUTLER AND TANNER LTD., FROME AND LONDON
* * * * *
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
TO
CHARLES PAINE PAULI, Esq.
BARRISTER-AT-LAW
IN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF HIS INVALUABLE
CRITICISM OF THE PROOF-SHEETS OF THIS AND
OF MY PREVIOUS BOOKS
AND IN RECOGNITION OF AN OLD AND
WELL-TRIED-FRIENDSHIP
PREFACE.
SINCE Samuel Butler published “Life and Habit” thirty-three {vii} years
have elapsed—years fruitful in change and discovery, during which many of
the mighty have been put down from their seat and many of the humble have
been exalted. I do not know that Butler can truthfully be called humble,
indeed, I think he had very few misgivings as to his ultimate triumph,
but he has certainly been exalted with a rapidity that he himself can
scarcely have foreseen. During his lifetime he was a literary pariah,
the victim of an organized conspiracy of silence. He is now, I think it
may be said without exaggeration, universally accepted as one of the most
remarkable English writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century.
I will not weary my readers by quoting the numerous tributes paid by
distinguished contemporary writers to Butler’s originality and force of
mind, but I cannot refrain from illustrating the changed attitude of the
scientific world to Butler and his theories by a reference to “Darwin and
Modern Science,” the collection of essays published in 1909 by the
University of Cambridge, in commemoration of the Darwin centenary. In
that work Professor Bateson, while referring repeatedly to Butler’s
biological works, speaks of him as “the most brilliant and by far the
most interesting of Darwin’s opponents, whose works are at length
emerging from oblivion.” With the growth of Butler’s reputation “Life
and Habit” has had much to do. It was the first and is undoubtedly the
most important of his writings on evolution. From its loins, as it were,
sprang his three later books, “Evolution Old and New,” “Unconscious
Memory,” and “Luck or Cunning”, which carried its arguments further
afield. It will perhaps interest Butler’s readers if I here quote a
passage from his note-books, lately published in the “New Quarterly
Review” (Vol. III. No. 9), in which he summarizes his work in biology:
“To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have
been mainly these:
“1. The identification of heredity and memory, and the corollaries
relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of
old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids, and the principles
underlying longevity—all of which follow as a matter of course. This was
‘Life and Habit’ [1877].
“2. The re-introduction of teleology into organic life, which to me
seems hardly, if at all, less important than the ‘Life and Habit’ theory.
This was ‘Evolution Old and New’ [1879].
“3. An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory. This
was Unconscious Memory’ [1880]. I was alarmed by the suggestion and
fathered it upon Professor Hering, who never, that I can see, meant to
say anything of the kind, but I forced my view upon him, as it were, by
taking hold of a sentence or two in his lecture, ‘On Memory as a
Universal Function of Organised Matter,’ and thus connected memory with
vibrations.
“What I want to do now (1885) is to connect vibrations not only with
memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the
memory resides, thus adopting Newland’s law (sometimes called
Mendelejeff’s law) that there is only one substance, and that the
characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given time
will determine whether it will appear to us as, we will say, hydrogen, or
sodium, or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other.” [This is
touched upon in the concluding chapter of “Luck or Cunning?” 1887].
The present edition of “Life and Habit” is practically a re-issue of that
of 1878. I find that about the year 1890, although the original edition
was far from being exhausted, Butler began to make corrections of the
text of “Life and Habit,” presumably with the intention of publishing a
revised edition. The copy of the book so corrected is now in my
possession. In the first five chapters there are numerous emendations,
very few of which, however, affect the meaning to any appreciable extent,
being mainly concerned with the excision of redundancies and the
simplification of style. I imagine that by the time he had reached the
end of the fifth chapter Butler realised that the corrections he had made
were not of sufficient importance to warrant a new edition, and
determined to let the book stand as it was. I believe, therefore, that I
am carrying out his wishes in reprinting the present edition from the
original plates. I have found, however, among his papers three entirely
new passages, which he probably wrote during the period of correction and
no doubt intended to incorporate into the revised edition. Mr. Henry
Festing Jones has also given me a copy of a passage which Butler wrote
and gummed into Mr. Jones’s copy of “Life and Habit.” These four
passages I have printed as an appendix at the end of the present volume.
One more point deserves notice. Butler often refers in “Life and Habit”
to Darwin’s “Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication.” When
he does so it is always under the name “Plants and Animals.” More often
still he refers to Darwin’s “Origin of Species by means Natural
Selection,” terming it at one time “Origin of Species” and at another
“Natural Selection,” sometimes, as on p. 278, using both names within a
few lines of each other. Butler was as a rule scrupulously careful about
quotations, and I can offer no explanation of this curious confusion of
titles.
R. A. STREATFEILD.
_November_, 1910.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE.
THE Italics in the passages quoted in this book are generally mine, but I
found it almost impossible to call the reader’s attention to this upon
every occasion. I have done so once or twice, as thinking it necessary
in these cases that there should be no mistake; on the whole, however, I
thought it better to content myself with calling attention in a preface
to the fact that the author quoted is not, as a general rule, responsible
for the Italics.
S. BUTLER.
_November_ 13, 1877.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE BY R. A. STREATFEILD vii
AUTHOR’S ORIGINAL PREFACE x
CHAPTER
I. ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS 1
II. CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS—THE LAW AND 20
GRACE
III. APPLICATION OF FOREGOING CHAPTERS TO CERTAIN 43
HABITS ACQUIRED AFTER BIRTH WHICH ARE COMMONLY
CONSIDERED INSTINCTIVE
IV. APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES TO 59
ACTIONS AND HABITS ACQUIRED BEFORE BIRTH
V. PERSONAL IDENTITY 78
VI. PERSONAL IDENTITY—(_continued_) 91
VII. OUR SUBORDINATE PERSONALITIES 104
VIII. APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS—THE 125
ASSIMILATION OF OUTSIDE MATTER
IX. ON THE ABEYANCE OF MEMORY 150
X. WHAT WE SHOULD EXPECT TO FIND IF 166
DIFFERENTIATIONS OF STRUCTURE AND INSTINCT ARE
MAINLY DUE TO MEMORY
XI. INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY 198
XII. INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS 220
XIII. LAMARCK AND MR. DARWIN 252
XIV. MR. MIVART AND MR. DARWIN 273
XV. CONCLUDING REMARKS 294
APPENDIX AUTHOR’S ADDENDA 308
CHAPTER I.
ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS.
IT will be our business in the following chapters to consider whether the
unconsciousness, or quasi-unconsciousness, with which we perform certain
acquired actions, would seem to throw any light upon Embryology and
inherited instincts, and otherwise to follow the train of thought which
the class of actions above-mentioned would suggest; more especially in so
far as they appear to bear upon the origin of species and the
continuation of life by successive generations, whether in the animal or
vegetable kingdoms.
In the outset, however, I would wish most distinctly to disclaim for
these pages the smallest pretension to scientific value, originality, or
even to accuracy of more than a very rough and ready kind—for unless a
matter be true enough to stand a good deal of misrepresentation, its
truth is not of a very robust order, and the blame will rather lie with
its own delicacy if it be crushed, than with the carelessness of the
crusher. I have no wish to instruct, and not much to be instructed; my
aim is simply to entertain and interest the numerous class of people who,
like myself, know nothing of science, but who enjoy speculating and
reflecting (not too deeply) upon the phenomena around them. I have
therefore allowed myself a loose rein, to run on with whatever came
uppermost, without regard to whether it was new or old; feeling sure that
if true, it must be very old or it never could have occurred to one so
little versed in science as myself; and knowing that it is sometimes
pleasanter to meet the old under slightly changed conditions, than to go
through the formalities and uncertainties of making new acquaintance. At
the same time, I should say that whatever I have knowingly taken from any
one else, I have always acknowledged.
It is plain, therefore, that my book cannot be intended for the perusal
of scientific people; it is intended for the general public only, with
whom I believe myself to be in harmony, as knowing neither much more nor
much less than they do.
Taking then, the art of playing the piano as an example of the kind of
action we are in search of, we observe that a practised player will
perform very difficult pieces apparently without effort, often, indeed,
while thinking and talking of something quite other than his music; yet
he will play accurately and, possibly, with much expression. If he has
been playing a fugue, say in four parts, he will have kept each part well
distinct, in such a manner as to prove that his mind was not prevented,
by its other occupations, from consciously or unconsciously following
four distinct trains of musical thought at the same time, nor from making
his fingers act in exactly the required manner as regards each note of
each part.
It commonly happens that in the course of four or five minutes a player
may have struck four or five thousand notes. If we take into
consideration the rests, dotted notes, accidentals, variations of time,
&c., we shall find his attention must have been exercised on many more
occasions than when he was actually striking notes: so that it may not be
too much to say that the attention of a first-rate player may have been
exercised—to an infinitesimally small extent—but still truly exercised—on
as many as ten thousand occasions within the space of five minutes, for
no note can be struck nor point attended to without a certain amount of
attention, no matter how rapidly or unconsciously given.
Moreover, each act of attention has been followed by an act of volition,
and each act of volition by a muscular action, which is composed of many
minor actions; some so small that we can no more follow them than the
player himself can perceive them; nevertheless, it may have been
perfectly plain that the player was not attending to what he was doing,
but was listening to conversation on some other subject, not to say
joining in it himself. If he has been playing the violin, he may have
done all the above, and may also have been walking about. Herr Joachim
would unquestionably be able to do all that has here been described.
So complete would the player’s unconsciousness of the attention he is
giving, and the brain power he is exerting appear to be, that we shall
find it difficult to awaken his attention to any particular part of his
performance without putting him out. Indeed we cannot do so. We shall
observe that he finds it hardly less difficult to compass a voluntary
consciousness of what he has once learnt so thoroughly that it has
passed, so to speak, into the domain of unconsciousness, than he found it
to learn the note or passage in the first instance. The effort after a
second consciousness of detail baffles him—compels him to turn to his
music or play slowly. In fact it seems as though he knew the piece too
well to be able to know that he knows it, and is only conscious of
knowing those passages which he does not know so thoroughly.
At the end of his performance, his memory would appear to be no less
annihilated than was his consciousness of attention and volition. For of
the thousands of acts requiring the exercise of both the one and the
other, which he has done during the five minutes, we will say, of his
performance, he will remember hardly one when it is over. If he calls to
mind anything beyond the main fact that he has played such and such a
piece, it will probably be some passage which he has found more difficult
than the others, and with the like of which he has not been so long
familiar. All the rest he will forget as completely as the breath which
he has drawn while playing.
He finds it difficult to remember even the difficulties he experienced in
learning to play. A few may have so impressed him that they remain with
him, but the greater part will have escaped him as completely as the
remembrance of what he ate, or how he put on his clothes, this day ten
years ago; nevertheless, it is plain he remembers more than he remembers
remembering, for he avoids mistakes which he made at one time, and his
performance proves that all the notes are in his memory, though if called
upon to play such and such a bar at random from the middle of the piece,
and neither more nor less, he will probably say that he cannot remember
it unless he begins from the beginning of the phrase which leads to it.
Very commonly he will be obliged to begin from the beginning of the
movement itself, and be unable to start at any other point unless he have
the music before him; and if disturbed, as we have seen above, he will
have to start _de novo_ from an accustomed starting-point.
Yet nothing can be more obvious than that there must have been a time
when what is now so easy as to be done without conscious effort of the
brain was only done by means of brain work which was very keenly
perceived, even to fatigue and positive distress. Even now, if the
player is playing something the like of which he has not met before, we
observe he pauses and becomes immediately conscious of attention.
We draw the inference, therefore, as regards pianoforte or violin
playing, that the more the familiarity or knowledge of the art, the less
is there consciousness of such knowledge; even so far as that there
should seem to be almost as much difficulty in awakening consciousness
which has become, so to speak, latent,—a consciousness of that which is
known too well to admit of recognised self-analysis while the knowledge
is being exercised—as in creating a consciousness of that which is not
yet well enough known to be properly designated as known at all. On the
other hand, we observe that the less the familiarly or knowledge, the
greater the consciousness of whatever knowledge there is.
Considering other like instances of the habitual exercise of intelligence
and volition, which, from long familiarity with the method of procedure,
escape the notice of the person exercising them, we naturally think of
writing. The formation of each letter requires attention and volition,
yet in a few minutes a practised writer will form several hundred
letters, and be able to think and talk of something else all the time he
is doing so. It will not probably remember the formation of a single
character in any page that he has written; nor will he be able to give
more than the substance of his writing if asked to do so. He knows how
to form each letter so well, and he knows so well each word that he is
about to write, that he has ceased to be conscious of his knowledge or to
notice his acts of volition, each one of which is, nevertheless, followed
by a corresponding muscular action. Yet the uniformity of our
handwriting, and the manner in which we almost invariably adhere to one
method of forming the same character, would seem to suggest that during
the momentary formation of each letter our memories must revert (with an
intensity too rapid for our perception) to many if not to all the
occasions on which we have ever written the same letter previously—the
memory of these occasions dwelling in our minds as what has been called a
residuum—an unconsciously struck balance or average of them all—a fused
mass of individual reminiscences of which no trace can be found in our
consciousness, and of which the only effect would seem to lie in the
gradual changes of handwriting which are perceptible in most people till
they have reached middle-age, and sometimes even later. So far are we
from consciously remembering any one of the occasions on which we have
written such and such a letter, that we are not even conscious of
exercising our memory at all, any more than we are in health conscious of
the action of our heart. But, if we are writing in some unfamiliar way,
as when printing our letters instead of writing them in our usual running
hand, our memory is so far awakened that we become conscious of every
character we form; sometimes it is even perceptible as memory to
ourselves, as when we try to remember how to print some letter, for
example a g, and cannot call to mind on which side of the upper half of
the letter we ought to put the link which connects it with the lower, and
are successful in remembering; but if we become very conscious of
remembering, it shows that we are on the brink of only trying to
remember,—that is to say, of not remembering at all.
As a general rule, we remember for a time the substance of what we have
written, for the subject is generally new to us; but if we are writing
what we have often written before, we lose consciousness of this too, as
fully as we do of the characters necessary to convey the substance to
another person, and we shall find ourselves writing on as it were
mechanically while thinking and talking of something else. So a paid
copyist, to whom the subject of what he is writing is of no importance,
does not even notice it. He deals only with familiar words and familiar
characters without caring to go behind them, and thereupon writes on in a
quasi-unconscious manner; but if he comes to a word or to characters with
which he is but little acquainted, he becomes immediately awakened to the
consciousness of either remembering or trying to remember. His
consciousness of his own knowledge or memory would seem to belong to a
period, so to speak, of twilight between the thick darkness of ignorance
and the brilliancy of perfect knowledge; as colour which vanishes with
extremes of light or of shade. Perfect ignorance and perfect knowledge
are alike unselfconscious.
The above holds good even more noticeably in respect of reading. How
many thousands of individual letters do our eyes run over every morning
in the “Times” newspaper, how few of them do we notice, or remember
having noticed? Yet there was a time when we had such difficulty in
reading even the simplest words, that we had to take great pains to
impress them upon our memory so as to know them when we came to then
again. Now, not even a single word of all we have seen will remain with
us, unless it is a new one, or an old one used in an unfamiliar sense, in
which case we notice, and may very likely remember it. Our memory
retains the substance only, the substance only being unfamiliar.
Nevertheless, although we do not perceive more than the general result of
our perception, there can be no doubt of our having perceived every
letter in every word that we have read at all, for if we come upon a word
misspelt our attention is at once aroused; unless, indeed, we have
actually corrected the misspelling, as well as noticed it, unconsciously,
through exceeding familiarity with the way in which it ought to be spelt.
Not only do we perceive the letters we have seen without noticing that we
have perceived them, but we find it almost impossible to notice that we
notice them when we have once learnt to read fluently. To try to do so
puts us out, and prevents our being able to read. We may even go so far
as to say that if a man can attend to the individual characters, it is a
sign that he cannot yet read fluently. If we know how to read well, we
are as unconscious of the means and processes whereby we attain the
desired result as we are about the growth of our hair or the circulation
of our blood. So that here again it would seem that we only know what we
know still to some extent imperfectly, and that what we know thoroughly
escapes our conscious perception though none the less actually perceived.
Our perception in fact passes into a latent stage, as also our memory and
volition.
Walking is another example of the rapid exercise of volition with but
little perception of each individual act of exercise. We notice any
obstacle in our path, but it is plain we do not notice that we perceive
much that we have nevertheless been perceiving; for if a man goes down a
lane by night he will stumble over many things which he would have
avoided by day, although he would not have noticed them. Yet time was
when walking was to each one of us a new and arduous task—as arduous as
we should now find it to wheel a wheelbarrow on a tight-rope; whereas, at
present, though we can think of our steps to a certain extent without
checking our power to walk, we certainly cannot consider our muscular
action in detail without having to come to a dead stop.
Talking—especially in one’s mother tongue—may serve as a last example.
We find it impossible to follow the muscular action of the mouth and
tongue in framing every letter or syllable we utter. We have probably
spoken for years and years before we became aware that the letter h is a
labial sound, and until we have to utter a word which is difficult from
its unfamiliarity we speak “trippingly on the tongue” with no attention
except to the substance of what we wish to say. Yet talking was not
always the easy matter to us which it is at present—as we perceive more
readily when we are learning a new language which it may take us months
to master. Nevertheless, when we have once mastered it we speak it
without further consciousness of knowledge or memory, as regards the more
common words, and without even noticing our consciousness. Here, as in
the other instances already given, as long as we did not know perfectly,
we were conscious of our acts of perception, volition, and reflection,
but when our knowledge has become perfect we no longer notice our
consciousness, nor our volition; nor can we awaken a second artificial
consciousness without some effort, and disturbance of the process of
which we are endeavouring to become conscious. We are no longer, so to
speak, under the law, but under grace.
An ascending scale may be perceived in the above instances.
In playing, we have an action acquired long after birth, difficult of
acquisition, and never thoroughly familiarised to the power of absolutely
unconscious performance, except in the case of those who have either an
exceptional genius for music, or who have devoted the greater part of
their time to practising. Except in the case of these persons it is
generally found easy to become more or less conscious of any passage
without disturbing the performance, and our action remains so completely
within our control that we can stop playing at any moment we please.
In writing, we have an action generally acquired earlier, done for the
most part with great unconsciousness of detail, fairly well within our
control to stop at any moment; though not so completely as would be
imagined by those who have not made the experiment of trying to stop in
the middle of a given character when writing at fit speed. Also, we can
notice our formation of any individual character without our writing
being materially hindered.
Reading is usually acquired earlier still. We read with more
unconsciousness of attention than we write. We find it more difficult to
become conscious of any character without discomfiture, and we cannot
arrest ourselves in the middle of a word, for example, and hardly before
the end of a sentence; nevertheless it is on the whole well within our
control.
Walking is so early an acquisition that we cannot remember having
acquired it. In running fast over average ground we find it very
difficult to become conscious of each individual step, and should
possibly find it more difficult still, if the inequalities and roughness
of uncultured land had not perhaps caused the development of a power to
create a second consciousness of our steps without hindrance to our
running or walking. Pursuit and flight, whether in the chase or in war,
must for many generations have played a much more prominent part in the
lives of our ancestors than they do in our own. If the ground over which
they had to travel had been generally as free from obstruction as our
modern cultivated lands, it is possible that we might not find it as easy
to notice our several steps as we do at present. Even as it is, if while
we are running we would consider the action of our muscles, we come to a
dead stop, and should probably fall if we tried to observe too suddenly;
for we must stop to do this, and running, when we have once committed
ourselves to it beyond a certain point, is not controllable to a step or
two without loss of equilibrium.
We learn to talk, much about the same time that we learn to walk, but
talking requires less muscular effort than walking, and makes generally
less demand upon our powers. A man may talk a long while before he has
done the equivalent of a five-mile walk; it is natural, therefore, that
we should have had more practice in talking than in walking, and hence
that we should find it harder to pay attention to our words than to our
steps. Certainly it is very hard to become conscious of every syllable
or indeed of every word we say; the attempt to do so will often bring us
to a check at once; nevertheless we can generally stop talking if we wish
to do so, unless the crying of infants be considered as a kind of
_quasi_-speech: this comes earlier, and is often quite uncontrollable, or
more truly perhaps is done with such complete control over the muscles by
the will, and with such absolute certainty of his own purpose on the part
of the wilier, that there is no longer any more doubt, uncertainty, or
suspense, and hence no power of perceiving any of the processes whereby
the result is attained—as a wheel which may look fast fixed because it is
so fast revolving. {13}
We may observe therefore in this ascending scale, imperfect as it is,
that the older the habit the longer the practice, the longer the
practice, the more knowledge—or, the less uncertainty; the less
uncertainty the less power of conscious self-analysis and control.
It will occur to the reader that in all the instances given above,
different individuals attain the unconscious stage of perfect knowledge
with very different degrees of facility. Some have to attain it with a
great sum; others are free born. Some learn to play, to read, write, and
talk, with hardly an effort—some show such an instinctive aptitude for
arithmetic that, like Zerah Colburn, at eight years old, they achieve
results without instruction, which in the case of most people would
require a long education. The account of Zerah Colburn, as quoted from
Mr. Baily in Dr. Carpenter’s “Mental Physiology,” may perhaps be given
here.
“He raised any number consisting of _one_ figure progressively to the
tenth power, giving the results (by actual multiplication and not by
memory) _faster than they could be set down in figures_ by the person
appointed to record them. He raised the number 8 progressively to the
_sixteenth_ power, and in naming the last result, which consisted of 15
figures, he was right in every one. Some numbers consisting of _two_
figures he raised as high as the eighth power, though he found a
difficulty in proceeding when the products became very large.
“On being asked the _square root_ of 106,929, he answered 327 before the
original number could be written down. He was then required to find the
cube root of 268,336,125, and with equal facility and promptness he
replied 645.
“He was asked how many minutes there are in 48 years, and before the
question could be taken down he replied 25,228,800, and immediately
afterwards he gave the correct number of seconds.
“On being requested to give the factors which would produce the number
247,483, he immediately named 941 and 263, which are the only two numbers
from the multiplication of which it would result. On 171,395 being
proposed, he named 5 × 34,279, 7 × 24,485, 59 × 2905, 83 × 2065, 35 ×
4897, 295 × 581, and 413 × 415.
“He was then asked to give the factors of 36,083, but he immediately
replied that it had none, which was really the case, this being a prime
number. Other numbers being proposed to him indiscriminately, he always
succeeded in giving the correct factors except in the case of prime
numbers, which he generally discovered almost as soon as they were
proposed to him. The number 4,294,967,297, which is 232 + 1, having been
given him, he discovered, as Euler had previously done, that it was not
the prime number which Fermat had supposed it to be, but that it is the
product of the factors 6,700,417 × 641. The solution of this problem was
only given after the lapse of some weeks, but the method he took to
obtain it clearly showed that he had not derived his information from any
extraneous source.
“When he was asked to multiply together numbers both consisting of more
than these figures, he seemed to decompose one or both of them into its
factors, and to work with them separately. Thus, on being asked to give
the square of 4395, he multiplied 293 by itself, and then twice
multiplied the product by 15. And on being asked to tell the square of
999,999 he obtained the correct result, 999,998,000,001, by twice
multiplying the square of 37,037 by 27. He then of his own accord
multiplied that product by 49, and said that the result (viz.,
48,999,902,000,049) was equal to the square of 6,999,993. He afterwards
multiplied this product by 49, and observed that the result (viz.,
2,400,995,198,002,401) was equal to the square of 48,999,951. He was
again asked to multiply the product by 25, and in naming the result
(viz., 60,024,879,950,060,025) he said it was equal to the square of
244,999,755.
“On being interrogated as to the manner in which he obtained these
results, the boy constantly said he did not know _how_ the answers came
into his mind. In the act of multiplying two numbers together, and in
the raising of powers, it was evident (alike from the facts just stated
and from the motion of his lips) that _some_ operation was going forward
in his mind; yet that operation could not (from the readiness with which
his answers were furnished) have been at all allied to the usual modes of
procedure, of which, indeed, he was entirely ignorant, not being able to
perform on paper a simple sum in multiplication or division. But in the
extraction of roots, and in the discovery of the factors of large
numbers, it did not appear that any operation _could_ take place, since
he gave answers _immediately_, or in a very few seconds, which, according
to the ordinary methods, would have required very difficult and laborious
calculations, and prime numbers cannot be recognised as such by any known
rule.”
I should hope that many of the above figures are wrong. I have verified
them carefully with Dr. Carpenter’s quotation, but further than this I
cannot and will not go. Also I am happy to find that in the end the boy
overcame the mathematics, and turned out a useful but by no means
particularly calculating member of society.
The case, however, is typical of others in which persons have been found
able to do without apparent effort what in the great majority of cases
requires a long apprenticeship. It is needless to multiply instances;
the point that concerns us is, that knowledge under such circumstances
being very intense, and the ease with which the result is produced
extreme, it eludes the conscious apprehension of the performer himself,
who only becomes conscious when a difficulty arises which taxes even his
abnormal power. Such a case, therefore, confirms rather than militates
against our opinion that consciousness of knowledge vanishes on the
knowledge becoming perfect—the only difference between those possessed of
any such remarkable special power and the general run of people being,
that the first are born with such an unusual aptitude for their
particular specialty that they are able to dispense with all or nearly
all the preliminary exercise of their faculty, while the latter must
exercise it for a considerable time before they can get it to work
smoothly and easily; but in either case when once the knowledge is
intense it is unconscious.
Nor again would such an instance as that of Zerah Colburn warrant us in
believing that this white heat, as it were, of unconscious knowledge can
be attained by any one without his ever having been originally cold.
Young Colburn, for example, could not extract roots when he was an embryo
of three weeks’ standing. It is true we can seldom follow the process,
but we know there must have been a time in every case when even the
desire for information or action had not been kindled; the forgetfulness
of effort on the part of those with exceptional genius for a special
subject is due to the smallness of the effort necessary, so that it makes
no impression upon the individual himself, rather than to the absence of
any effort at all. {18}
It would, therefore, appear as though perfect knowledge and perfect
ignorance were extremes which meet and become indistinguishable from one
another; so also perfect volition and perfect absence of volition,
perfect memory and utter forgetfulness; for we are unconscious of
knowing, willing, or remembering, either from not yet having known or
willed, or from knowing and willing so well and so intensely as to be no
longer conscious of either. Conscious knowledge and volition are of
attention; attention is of suspense; suspense is of doubt; doubt is of
uncertainty; uncertainty is of ignorance; so that the mere fact of
conscious knowing or willing implies the presence of more or less novelty
and doubt.
It would also appear as a general principle on a superficial view of the
foregoing instances (and the reader may readily supply himself with
others which are perhaps more to the purpose), that unconscious knowledge
and unconscious volition are never acquired otherwise than as the result
of experience, familiarity, or habit; so that whenever we observe a
person able to do any complicated action unconsciously, we may assume
both that he must have done it very often before he could acquire so
great proficiency, and also that there must have been a time when he did
not know how to do it at all.
We may assume that there was a time when he was yet so nearly on the
point of neither knowing nor willing perfectly, that he was quite alive
to whatever knowledge or volition he could exert; going further back, we
shall find him still more keenly alive to a less perfect knowledge;
earlier still, we find him well aware that he does not know nor will
correctly, but trying hard to do both the one and the other; and so on,
back and back, till both difficulty and consciousness become little more
than a sound of going in the brain, a flitting to and fro of something
barely recognisable as the desire to will or know at all—much less as the
desire to know or will definitely this or that. Finally, they retreat
beyond our ken into the repose—the inorganic kingdom—of as yet unawakened
interest.
In either case,—the repose of perfect ignorance or of perfect
knowledge—disturbance is troublesome. When first starting on an Atlantic
steamer, our rest is hindered by the screw; after a short time, it is
hindered if the screw stops. A uniform impression is practically no
impression. One cannot either learn or unlearn without pains or pain.
CHAPTER II.
CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS—THE LAW AND GRACE.
IN this chapter we shall show that the law, which we have observed to
hold as to the vanishing tendency of knowledge upon becoming perfect,
holds good not only concerning acquired actions or habits of body, but
concerning opinions, modes of thought, and mental habits generally, which
are no more recognised as soon as firmly fixed, than are the steps with
which we go about our daily avocations. I am aware that I may appear in
the latter part of the chapter to have wandered somewhat beyond the
limits of my subject, but, on the whole, decide upon leaving what I have
written, inasmuch as it serves to show how far-reaching is the principle
on which I am insisting. Having said so much, I shall during the
remainder of the book keep more closely to the point.
Certain it is that we know best what we are least conscious of knowing,
or at any rate least able to prove, as, for example, our own existence,
or that there is a country England. If any one asks us for proof on
matters of this sort, we have none ready, and are justly annoyed at being
called to consider what we regard as settled questions. Again, there is
hardly anything which so much affects our actions as the centre of the
earth (unless, perhaps, it be that still hotter and more unprofitable
spot the centre of the universe), for we are incessantly trying to get as
near it as circumstances will allow, or to avoid getting nearer than is
for the time being convenient. Walking, running, standing, sitting,
lying, waking, or sleeping, from birth till death it is a paramount
object with us; even after death—if it be not fanciful to say so—it is
one of the few things of which what is left of us can still feel the
influence; yet what can engross less of our attention than this dark and
distant spot so many thousands of miles away?
The air we breathe, so long as it is neither too hot nor cold, nor rough,
nor full of smoke—that is to say, so long as it is in that state within
which we are best acquainted—seldom enters into our thoughts; yet there
is hardly anything with which we are more incessantly occupied night and
day.
Indeed, it is not too much to say that we have no really profound
knowledge upon any subject—no knowledge on the strength of which we are
ready to act at all moments unhesitatingly without either preparation or
after-thought—till we have left off feeling conscious of the possession
of such knowledge, and of the grounds on which it rests. A lesson
thoroughly learned must be like the air which feels so light, though
pressing so heavily against us, because every pore of our skin is
saturated, so to speak, with it on all sides equally. This perfection of
knowledge sometimes extends to positive disbelief in the thing known, so
that the most thorough knower shall believe himself altogether ignorant.
No thief, for example, is such an utter thief—so _good_ a thief—as the
kleptomaniac. Until he has become a kleptomaniac, and can steal a horse
as it were by a reflex action, he is still but half a thief, with many
unthievish notions still clinging to him. Yet the kleptomaniac is
probably unaware that he can steal at all, much less that he can steal so
well. He would be shocked if he were to know the truth. So again, no
man is a great hypocrite until he has left off knowing that he is a
hypocrite. The great hypocrites of the world are almost invariably under
the impression that they are among the very few really honest people to
be found and, as we must all have observed, it is rare to find any one
strongly under this impression without ourselves having good reason to
differ from him.
Our own existence is another case in point. When we have once become
articulately conscious of existing, it is an easy matter to begin
doubting whether we exist at all. As long as man was too unreflecting a
creature to articulate in words his consciousness of his own existence,
he knew very well that he existed, but he did not know that he knew it.
With introspection, and the perception recognised, for better or worse,
that he was a fact, came also the perception that he had no solid ground
for believing that he was a fact at all. That nice, sensible,
unintrospective people who were too busy trying to exist pleasantly to
trouble their heads as to whether they existed or no—that this best part
of mankind should have gratefully caught at such a straw as “_cogito ergo
sum_,” is intelligible enough. They felt the futility of the whole
question, and were thankful to one who seemed to clench the matter with a
cant catchword, especially with a catchword in a foreign language; but
how one, who was so far gone as to recognise that he could not prove his
own existence, should be able to comfort himself with such a begging of
the question, would seem unintelligible except upon the ground of sheer
exhaustion.
At the risk of appearing to wander too far from the matter in hand, a few
further examples may perhaps be given of that irony of nature, by which
it comes about that we so often most know and are, what we least think
ourselves to know and be—and on the other hand hold most strongly what we
are least capable of demonstrating.
Take the existence of a Personal God,—one of the most profoundly-received
and widely-spread ideas that have ever prevailed among mankind. Has
there ever been a _demonstration_ of the existence of such a God as has
satisfied any considerable section of thinkers for long together? Hardly
has what has been conceived to be a demonstration made its appearance and
received a certain acceptance as though it were actual proof, when it has
been impugned with sufficient success to show that, however true the fact
itself, the demonstration is naught. I do not say that this is an
argument against the personality of God; the drift, indeed, of the
present reasoning would be towards an opposite conclusion, inasmuch as it
insists upon the fact that what is most true and best known is often
least susceptible of demonstration owing to the very perfectness with
which it is known; nevertheless, the fact remains that many men in many
ages and countries—the subtlest thinkers over the whole world for some
fifteen hundred years—have hunted for a demonstration of God’s personal
existence; yet though so many have sought,—so many, and so able, and for
so long a time—none have found. There is no demonstration which can be
pointed to with any unanimity as settling the matter beyond power of
reasonable cavil. On the contrary, it may be observed that from the
attempt to prove the existence of a personal God to the denial of that
existence altogether, the path is easy. As in the case of our own
existence, it will be found that they alone are perfect believers in a
personal Deity and in the Christian religion who have not yet begun to
feel that either stands in need of demonstration. We observe that most
people, whether Christians, or Jews, or Mohammedans, are unable to give
their reasons for the faith that is in them with any readiness or
completeness; and this is sure proof that they really hold it so utterly
as to have no further sense that it either can be demonstrated or ought
to be so, but feel towards it as towards the air which they breathe but
do not notice. On the other hand, a living prelate was reported in the
“Times” to have said in one of his latest charges: “My belief is that a
widely extended good practice must be founded upon Christian doctrine.”
The fact of the Archbishop’s recognising this as among the number of his
beliefs is conclusive evidence with those who have devoted attention to
the laws of thought, that his mind is not yet clear as to whether or no
there is any connection at all between Christian doctrine and widely
extended good practice. {25}
Again, it has been often and very truly said that it is not the conscious
and self-styled sceptic, as Shelley for example, who is the true
unbeliever. Such a man as Shelley will, as indeed his life abundantly
proves, have more in common than not with the true unselfconscious
believer. Gallio again, whose indifference to religious animosities has
won him the cheapest immortality which, so far as I can remember, was
ever yet won, was probably if the truth were known, a person of the
sincerest piety. It is the unconscious unbeliever who is the true
infidel, however greatly he would be surprised to know the truth. Mr.
Spurgeon was reported as having recently asked the Almighty to “change
our rulers _as soon as possible_.” There lurks a more profound distrust
of God’s power in these words than in almost any open denial of His
existence.
So it rather shocks us to find Mr. Darwin writing (“Plants and Animals
under Domestication,” vol. ii., p. 275): “No doubt, in every case there
must have been some exciting cause.” And again, six or seven pages
later: “No doubt, each slight variation must have its efficient cause.”
The repetition within so short a space of this expression of confidence
in the impossibility of causeless effects would suggest that Mr. Darwin’s
mind at the time of writing was, unconsciously to himself, in a state of
more or less uneasiness as to whether effects could not occasionally come
about of themselves, and without cause of any sort,—that he may have been
standing, in fact, for a short time upon the brink of a denial of the
indestructibility of force and matter.
In like manner, the most perfect humour and irony is generally quite
unconscious. Examples of both are frequently given by men whom the world
considers as deficient in humour; it is more probably true that these
persons are unconscious of their own delightful power through the very
mastery and perfection with which they hold it. There is a play, for
instance, of genuine fun in some of the more serious scientific and
theological journals which for some time past we have looked for in vain
in “—.”
The following extract, from a journal which I will not advertise, may
serve as an example:
“Lycurgus, when they had abandoned to his revenge him who had put out his
eyes, took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was
sedulous instructions to virtue.” Yet this truly comic paper does not
probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that
he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when he wrote a
hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in composing a
treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe know how exquisitely
humorous he was when he wrote, in his Wilhelm Meister, that a beautiful
tear glistened in Theresa’s right eye, and then went on to explain that
it glistened in her right eye and not in her left, because she had had a
wart on her left which had been removed—and successfully. Goethe
probably wrote this without a chuckle; he believed what a good many
people who have never read Wilhelm Meister believe still, namely, that it
was a work full of pathos, of fine and tender feeling; yet a less
consummate humorist must have felt that there was scarcely a paragraph in
it from first to last the chief merit of which did not lie in its
absurdity.
Another example may be taken from Bacon of the manner in which sayings
which drop from men unconsciously, give the key of their inner thoughts
to another person, though they themselves know not that they have such
thoughts at all; much less that these thoughts are their only true
convictions. In his Essay on Friendship the great philosopher writes:
“Reading good books on morality is a little flat and dead.” Innocent,
not to say pathetic, as this passage may sound it is pregnant with
painful inferences concerning Bacon’s moral character. For if he knew
that he found reading good books of morality a little flat and dead, it
follows he must have tried to read them; nor is he saved by the fact that
he found them a little flat and dead; for though this does indeed show
that he had begun to be so familiar with a few first principles as to
find it more or less exhausting to have his attention directed to them
further—yet his words prove that they were not so incorporate with him
that he should feel the loathing for further discourse upon the matter
which honest people commonly feel now. It will be remembered that he
took bribes when he came to be Lord Chancellor.
It is on the same principle that we find it so distasteful to hear one
praise another for earnestness. For such praise raises a suspicion in
our minds (_pace_ the late Dr. Arnold and his following) that the
praiser’s attention must have been arrested by sincerity, as by something
more or less unfamiliar to himself. So universally is this recognised
that the world has for some time been discarded entirely by all reputable
people. Truly, if there is one who cannot find himself in the same room
with the life and letters of an earnest person without being made
instantly unwell, the same is a just man and perfect in all his ways.
But enough has perhaps been said. As the fish in the sea, or the bird in
the air, so unreasoningly and inarticulately safe must a man feel before
he can be said to know. It is only those who are ignorant and
uncultivated who can know anything at all in a proper sense of the words.
Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty even of
his most assured convictions. It is perhaps fortunate for our comfort
that we can none of us be cultivated upon very many subjects, so that
considerable scope for assurance will still remain to us; but however
this may be, we certainly observe it as a fact that the greatest men are
they who are most uncertain in spite of certainty, and at the same time
most certain in spite of uncertainty, and who are thus best able to feel
that there is nothing in such complete harmony with itself as a flat
contradiction in terms. For nature hates that any principle should
breed, so to speak, hermaphroditically, but will give to each an help
meet for it which shall cross it and be the undoing of it; as in the case
of descent with modification, of which the essence would appear to be
that every offspring should resemble its parents, and yet, at the same
time, that no offspring should resemble its parents. But for the
slightly irritating stimulant of this perpetual crossing, we should pass
our lives unconsciously as though in slumber.
Until we have got to understand that though black is not white, yet it
may be whiter than white itself (and any painter will readily paint that
which shall show obviously as black, yet it shall be whiter than that
which shall show no less obviously as white), we may be good logicians,
but we are still poor reasoners. Knowledge is in an inchoate state as
long as it is capable of logical treatment; it must be transmuted into
that sense or instinct which rises altogether above the sphere in which
words can have being at all, otherwise it is not yet vital. For sense is
to knowledge what conscience is to reasoning about right and wrong; the
reasoning must be so rapid as to defy conscious reference to first
principles, and even at times to be apparently subversive of them
altogether, or the action will halt. It must, in fact, become automatic
before we are safe with it. While we are fumbling for the grounds of our
conviction, our conviction is prone to fall, as Peter for lack of faith
sinking into the waves of Galilee; so that the very power to prove at all
is an _à priori_ argument against the truth—or at any rate the practical
importance to the vast majority of mankind—of all that is supported by
demonstration. For the power to prove implies a sense of the need of
proof, and things which the majority of mankind find practically
important are in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred above proof. The
need of proof becomes as obsolete in the case of assumed knowledge, as
the practice of fortifying towns in the middle of an old and long settled
country. Who builds defences for that which is impregnable or little
likely to be assailed? The answer is ready, that unless the defences had
been built in former times it would be impossible to do without them now;
but this does not touch the argument, which is not that demonstration is
unwise, but that as long as a demonstration is still felt necessary, and
therefore kept ready to hand, the subject of such demonstration is not
yet securely known. _Qui s’excuse_, _s’accuse_; and unless a matter can
hold its own without the brag and self-assertion of continual
demonstration, it is still more or less of a parvenu, which we shall not
lose much by neglecting till it has less occasion to blow its own
trumpet. The only alternative is that it is an error in process of
detection, for if evidence concerning any opinion has long been denied
superfluous, and ever after this comes to be again felt necessary, we
know that the opinion is doomed.
If there is any truth in the above, it should follow that our conception
of the words “science” and “scientific” should undergo some modification.
Not that we should speak slightingly of science, but that we should
recognise more than we do, that there are two distinct classes of
scientific people corresponding not inaptly with the two main parties
unto which the political world is divided. The one class is deeply
versed in those sciences which have already become the common property of
mankind; enjoying, enforcing, perpetuating, and engraving still more
deeply unto the mind of man acquisitions already approved by common
experience, but somewhat careless about extension of empire, or at any
rate disinclined, for the most part, to active effort on their own part
for the sake of such extension—neither progressive, in fact, nor
aggressive—but quiet, peaceable people, who wish to live and let live, as
their fathers before them; while the other class is chiefly intent upon
pushing forward the boundaries of science, and is comparatively
indifferent to what is known already save in so far as necessary for
purposes of extension. These last are called pioneers of science, and to
them alone is the title “scientific” commonly accorded; but pioneers,
unimportant to an army as they are, are still not the army itself; which
can get on better without the pioneers than the pioneers without the
army. Surely the class which knows thoroughly well what it knows, and
which adjudicates upon the value of the discoveries made by the
pioneers—surely this class has as good a right or better to be called
scientific than the pioneers themselves.
These two classes above described blend into one another with every shade
of gradation. Some are admirably proficient in the well-known
sciences—that is to say, they have good health, good looks, good temper,
common sense, and energy, and they hold all these good things in such
perfection as to lie altogether without introspection—to be not under the
law, but so utterly and entirely under grace that every one who sees them
likes them. But such may, and perhaps more commonly will, have very
little inclination to extend the boundaries of human knowledge; their aim
is in another direction altogether. Of the pioneers, on the other hand,
some are agreeable people, well versed in the older sciences, though
still more eminent as pioneers, while others, whose services in this last
capacity have been of inestimable value, are noticeably ignorant of the
sciences which have already become current with the larger part of
mankind—in other words, they are ugly, rude, and disagreeable people,
very progressive, it may be, but very aggressive to boot.
The main difference between these two classes lies in the fact that the
knowledge of the one, so far as it is new, is known consciously, while
that of the other is unconscious, consisting of sense and instinct rather
than of recognised knowledge. So long as a man has these, and of the
same kind as the more powerful body of his fellow-countrymen, he is a
true man of science, though he can hardly read or write. As my great
namesake said so well, “He knows what’s what, and that’s as high as
metaphysic wit can fly.” As usual, these true and thorough knowers do
not know that they are scientific, and can seldom give a reason for the
faith that is in them. They believe themselves to be ignorant,
uncultured men, nor can even the professors whom they sometimes outwit in
their own professorial domain perceive that they have been outwitted by
men of superior scientific attainments to their own. The following
passage from Dr. Carpenter’s “Mesmerism, Spiritualism,” &c., may serve as
an illustration:—
“It is well known that persons who are conversant with the geological
structure of a district are often able to indicate with considerable
certainty in what spot and at what depth water will be found; and men _of
less scientific knowledge_, _but of considerable practical
experience_”—(so that in Dr. Carpenter’s mind there seems to be some sort
of contrast or difference in kind between the knowledge which is derived
from observation of facts and scientific knowledge)—“frequently arrive at
a true conclusion upon this point without being able to assign reasons
for their opinions.
“Exactly the same may be said in regard to the mineral structure of a
mining district; the course of a metallic vein being often correctly
indicated by the shrewd guess of an _observant_ workman, when _the
scientific reasoning_ of the mining engineer altogether fails.”
Precisely. Here we have exactly the kind of thing we are in search of:
the man who has observed and observed till the facts are so thoroughly in
his head that through familiarity he has lost sight both of them and of
the processes whereby he deduced his conclusions from them—is apparently
not considered scientific, though he knows how to solve the problem
before him; the mining engineer, on the other hand, who reasons
scientifically—that is to say, with a knowledge of his own knowledge—is
found not to know, and to fail in discovering the mineral.
“It is an experience we are continually encountering in other walks of
life,” continues Dr. Carpenter, “that particular persons are guided—some
apparently by an original and others by _an acquired intuition_—to
conclusions for which they can give no adequate reason, but which
subsequent events prove to have been correct.” And this, I take it,
implies what I have been above insisting on, namely, that on becoming
intense, knowledge seems also to become unaware of the grounds on which
it rests, or that it has or requires grounds at all, or indeed even
exists. The only issue between myself and Dr. Carpenter would appear to
be, that Dr. Carpenter, himself an acknowledged leader in the scientific
world, restricts the term “scientific” to the people who know that they
know, but are beaten by those who are not so conscious of their own
knowledge; while I say that the term “scientific” should be applied (only
that they would not like it) to the nice sensible people who know what’s
what rather than to the discovering class.
And this is easily understood when we remember that the pioneer cannot
hope to acquire any of the new sciences in a single lifetime so perfectly
as to become unaware of his own knowledge. As a general rule, we observe
him to be still in a state of active consciousness concerning whatever
particular science he is extending, and as long as he is in this state he
cannot know utterly. It is, as I have already so often insisted on,
those who do not know that they know so much who have the firmest grip of
their knowledge: the best class, for example, of our English youth, who
live much in the open air, and, as Lord Beaconsfield finely said, never
read. These are the people who know best those things which are best
worth knowing—that is to say, they are the most truly scientific.
Unfortunately, the apparatus necessary for this kind of science is so
costly as to be within the reach of few, involving, as it does, an
experience in the use of it for some preceding generations. Even those
who are born with the means within their reach must take no less pains,
and exercise no less self-control, before they can attain the perfect
unconscious use of them, than would go to the making of a James Watt or a
Stephenson; it is vain, therefore, to hope that this best kind of science
can ever be put within the reach of the many; nevertheless it may be
safely said that all the other and more generally recognised kinds of
science are valueless except in so far as they tend to minister to this
the highest kind. They have no _raison d’être_ except so far as they
tend to do away with the necessity for work, and to diffuse good health,
and that good sense which is above self-consciousness. They are to be
encouraged because they have rendered the most fortunate kind of modern
European possible, and because they tend to make possible a still more
fortunate kind than any now existing. But the man who devotes himself to
science cannot—with the rarest, if any, exceptions—belong to this most
fortunate class himself. He occupies a lower place, both scientifically
and morally, for it is not possible but that his drudgery should somewhat
soil him both in mind and health of body, or, if this be denied, surely
it must let him and hinder him in running the race for unconsciousness.
We do not feel that it increases the glory of a king or great nobleman
that he should excel in what is commonly called science. Certainly he
should not go further than Prince Rupert’s drops. Nor should he excel in
music, art, literature, or theology—all which things are more or less
parts of science. He should be above them all, save in so far as he can
without effort reap renown from the labours of others. It is a _lâche_
in him that he should write music or books, or paint pictures at all; but
if he must do so, his work should be at best contemptible. Much as we
must condemn Marcus Aurelius, we condemn James I. ever more severely.
It is a pity there should exist so general a confusion of thought upon
this subject, for it may be asserted without fear of contradiction that
there is hardly any form of immorality now rife which produces more
disastrous effects upon those who give themselves up to it, and upon
society in general, than the so-called science of those who know that
they know too well to be able to know truly. With very clever people—the
people who know that they know—it is much as with the members of the
early Corinthian Church, to whom St. Paul wrote, that if they looked
their numbers over, they would not find many wise, nor powerful, nor
well-born people among them. Dog-fanciers tell us that performing dogs
never carry their tails; such dogs have eaten of the tree of knowledge,
and are convinced of sin accordingly—they know that they know things, in
respect of which, therefore, they are no longer under grace, but under
the law, and they have yet so much grace left as to be ashamed. So with
the human clever dog; he may speak with the tongues of men and angels,
but so long as he knows that he knows, his tail will droop. More
especially does this hold in the case of those who are born to wealth and
of old family. We must all feel that a rich young nobleman with a taste
for science and principles is rarely a pleasant object. We do not even
like the rich young man in the Bible who wanted to inherit eternal life,
unless, indeed, he merely wanted to know whether there was not some way
by which he could avoid dying, and even so he is hardly worth
considering. Principles are like logic, which never yet made a good
reasoner of a bad one, but might still be occasionally useful if they did
not invariably contradict each other whenever there is any temptation to
appeal to them. They are like fire, good servants but bad masters. As
many people or more have been wrecked on principle as from want of
principle. They are, as their name implies, of an elementary character,
suitable for beginners only, and he who has so little mastered them as to
have occasion to refer to them consciously, is out of place in the
society of well-educated people. The truly scientific invariably hate
him, and, for the most part, the more profoundly in proportion to the
unconsciousness with which they do so.
If the reader hesitates, let him go down into the streets and look in the
shop-windows at the photographs of eminent men, whether literary,
artistic, or scientific, and note the work which the consciousness of
knowledge has wrought on nine out of every ten of them; then let him go
to the masterpieces of Greek and Italian art, the truest preachers of the
truest gospel of grace; let him look at the Venus of Milo, the
Discobolus, the St. George of Donatello. If it had pleased these people
to wish to study, there was no lack of brains to do it with; but imagine
“what a deal of scorn” would “look beautiful” upon the Venus of Milo’s
face if it were suggested to her that she should learn to read. Which,
think you, knows most, the Theseus, or any modern professor taken at
random? True, the advancement of learning must have had a great share in
the advancement of beauty, inasmuch as beauty is but knowledge perfected
and incarnate—but with the pioneers it is _sic vos non vobis_; the grace
is not for them, but for those who come after. Science is like offences.
It must needs come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes; for
there cannot be much beauty where there is consciousness of knowledge,
and while knowledge is still new it must in the nature of things involve
much consciousness.
It is not knowledge, then, that is incompatible with beauty; there cannot
be too much knowledge, but it must have passed through many people who it
is to be feared must be more or less disagreeable, before beauty or grace
will have anything to say to it; it must be so incarnate in a man’s whole
being that he shall not be aware of it, or it will fit him constrainedly
as one under the law, and not as one under grace.
And grace is best, for where grace is, love is not distant. Grace! the
old Pagan ideal whose charm even unlovely Paul could not understand, but,
as the legend tells us, his soul fainted within him, his heart misgave
him, and, standing alone on the seashore at dusk, he “troubled deaf
heaven with his bootless cries,” his thin voice pleading for grace after
the flesh.
The waves came in one after another, the sea-gulls cried together after
their kind, the wind rustled among the dried canes upon the sandbanks,
and there came a voice from heaven saying, “Let My grace be sufficient
for thee.” Whereon, failing of the thing itself, he stole the word and
strove to crush its meaning to the measure of his own limitations. But
the true grace, with her groves and high places, and troups of young men
and maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and
wine—the true grace he drove out into the wilderness—high up, it may be,
into Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her in
her ill report.
It is common to hear men wonder what new faith will be adopted by mankind
if disbelief in the Christian religion should become general. They seem
to expect that some new theological or quasi-theological system will
arise, which, _mutatis mutandis_, shall be Christianity over again. It
is a frequent reproach against those who maintain that the supernatural
element of Christianity is without foundation, that they bring forward no
such system of their own. They pull down but cannot build. We sometimes
hear even those who have come to the same conclusions as the destroyers
say, that having nothing new to set up, they will not attack the old.
But how can people set up a new superstition, knowing it to be a
superstition? Without faith in their own platform, a faith as intense as
that manifested by the early Christians, how can they preach? A new
superstition will come, but it is in the very essence of things that its
apostles should have no suspicion of its real nature; that they should no
more recognise the common element between the new and the old than the
early Christians recognised it between their faith and Paganism. If they
did, they would be paralysed. Others say that the new fabric may be seen
rising on every side, and that the coming religion is science. Certainly
its apostles preach it without misgiving, but it is not on that account
less possible that it may prove only to be the coming superstition—like
Christianity, true to its true votaries, and, like Christianity, false to
those who follow it introspectively.
It may well be we shall find we have escaped from one set of taskmasters
to fall into the hands of others far more ruthless. The tyranny of the
Church is light in comparison with that which future generations may have
to undergo at the hands of the doctrinaires. The Church did uphold a
grace of some sort as the _summum bonum_, in comparison with which all
so-called earthly knowledge—knowledge, that is to say, which had not
passed through so many people as to have become living and incarnate—was
unimportant. Do what we may, we are still drawn to the unspoken teaching
of her less introspective ages with a force which no falsehood could
command. Her buildings, her music, her architecture, touch us as none
other on the whole can do; when she speaks there are many of us who think
that she denies the deeper truths of her own profounder mind, and
unfortunately her tendency is now towards more rather than less
introspection. The more she gives way to this—the more she becomes
conscious of knowing—the less she will know. But still her ideal is in
grace.
The so-called man of science, on the other hand, seems now generally
inclined to make light of all knowledge, save of the pioneer character.
His ideal is in self-conscious knowledge. Let us have no more Lo, here,
with the professor; he very rarely knows what he says he knows; no sooner
has he misled the world for a sufficient time with a great flourish of
trumpets than he is toppled over by one more plausible than himself. He
is but medicine-man, augur, priest, in its latest development; useful it
may be, but requiring to be well watched by those who value freedom.
Wait till he has become more powerful, and note the vagaries which his
conceit of knowledge will indulge in. The Church did not persecute while
she was still weak. Of course every system has had, and will have, its
heroes, but, as we all very well know, the heroism of the hero is but
remotely due to system; it is due not to arguments, nor reasoning, nor to
any consciously recognised perceptions, but to those deeper sciences
which lie far beyond the reach of self-analysis, and for the sturdy of
which there is but one schooling—to have had good forefathers for many
generations.
Above all things, let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing
in _me_. In that I write at all I am among the dammed. If he must
believe in anything, let him believe in the music of Handel, the painting
of Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s First
Epistle to the Corinthians.
But to return. Whenever we find people knowing that they know this or
that, we have the same story over and over again. They do not yet know
it perfectly.
We come, therefore, to the conclusion that our knowledge and reasoning
thereupon, only become perfect, assured, unhesitating, when they have
become automatic, and are thus exercised without further conscious effort
of the mind, much in the same way as we cannot walk nor read nor write
perfectly till we can do so automatically.
CHAPTER III.
APPLICATION OF FOREGOING CHAPTERS TO CERTAIN HABITS ACQUIRED AFTER BIRTH
WHICH ARE COMMONLY CONSIDERED INSTINCTIVE.
WHAT is true of knowing is also true of willing. The more intensely we
will, the less is our will deliberate and capable of being recognised as
will at all. So that it is common to hear men declare under certain
circumstances that they had no will, but were forced into their own
action under stress of passion or temptation. But in the more ordinary
actions of life, we observe, as in walking or breathing, that we do not
will anything utterly and without remnant of hesitation, till we have
lost sight of the fact that we are exercising our will.
The question, therefore, is forced upon us, how far this principle
extends, and whether there may not be unheeded examples of its operation
which, if we consider them, will land us in rather unexpected
conclusions. If it be granted that consciousness of knowledge and of
volition vanishes when the knowledge and the volition have become intense
and perfect, may it not be possible that many actions which we do without
knowing how we do them, and without any conscious exercise of the
will—actions which we certainly could not do if we tried to do them, nor
refrain from doing if for any reason we wished to do so—are done so
easily and so unconsciously owing to excess of knowledge or experience
rather than deficiency, we having done them too often, knowing how to do
them too well, and having too little hesitation as to the method of
procedure, to be capable of following our own action without the utter
derangement of such action altogether; or, in other cases, because we
have so long settled the question, that we have stowed away the whole
apparatus with which we work in corners of our system which we cannot now
conveniently reach?
It may be interesting to see whether we can find any class or classes of
actions which would seem to link actions which for some time after birth
we could not do at all, and in which our proficiency has reached the
stage of unconscious performance obviously through repeated effort and
failure, and through this only, with actions which we could do as soon as
we were born, and concerning which it would at first sight appear absurd
to say that they can have been acquired by any process in the least
analogous to that which we commonly call experience, inasmuch as the
creature itself which does them has only just begun to exist, and cannot,
therefore, in the very nature of things, have had experience.
Can we see that actions, for the acquisition of which experience is such
an obvious necessity, that whenever we see the acquisition we assume the
experience, gradate away imperceptibly into actions which would seem,
according to all reasonable analogy, to presuppose experience, of which,
however, the time and place seem obscure, if not impossible?
Eating and drinking would appear to be such actions. The new-born child
cannot eat, and cannot drink, but he can swallow as soon as he is born;
and swallowing would appear (as we may remark in passing) to have been an
earlier faculty of animal life than that of eating with teeth. The ease
and unconsciousness with which we eat and drink is clearly attributable
to practice; but a very little practice seems to go a long way—a
suspiciously small amount of practice—as though somewhere or at some
other time there must have been more practice than we can account for.
We can very readily stop eating or drinking, and can follow our own
action without difficulty in either process; but, as regards swallowing,
which is the earlier habit, we have less power of self-analysis and
control: when we have once committed ourselves beyond a certain point to
swallowing, we must finish doing so,—that is to say, our control over the
operation ceases. Also, a still smaller experience seems necessary for
the acquisition of the power to swallow than appeared necessary in the
case of eating; and if we get into a difficulty we choke, and are more at
a loss how to become introspective than we are about eating and drinking.
Why should a baby be able to swallow—which one would have said was the
more complicated process of the two—with so much less practice than it
takes him to learn to eat? How comes it that he exhibits in the case of
the more difficult operation all the phenomena which ordinarily accompany
a more complete mastery and longer practice? Analogy would certainly
seem to point in the direction of thinking that the necessary experience
cannot have been wanting, and that, too, not in such a quibbling sort as
when people talk about inherited habit or the experience of the race,
which, without explanation, is to plain-speaking persons very much the
same, in regard to the individual, as no experience at all, but _bonâ
fide_ in the child’s own person.
Breathing, again, is an action acquired after birth, generally with some
little hesitation and difficulty, but still acquired in a time seldom
longer, as I am informed, than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. For
an ant which has to be acquired at all, there would seem here, as in the
case of eating, to be a disproportion between, on the one hand, the
intricacy of the process performed, and on the other, the shortness of
the time taken to acquire the practice, and the ease and unconsciousness
with which its exercise is continued from the moment of acquisition.
We observe that in later life much less difficult and intricate
operations than breathing acquire much longer practice before they can be
mastered to the extent of unconscious performance. We observe also that
the phenomena attendant on the learning by an infant to breathe are
extremely like those attendant upon the repetition of some performance by
one who has done it very often before, but who requires just a little
prompting to set him off, on getting which, the whole familiar routine
presents itself before him, and he repeats his task by rote. Surely then
we are justified in suspecting that there must have been more _bonâ fide_
personal recollection and experience, with more effort and failure on the
part of the infant itself than meet the eye.
It should be noticed, also, that our control over breathing is very
limited. We can hold our breath a little, or breathe a little faster for
a short time, but we cannot do this for long, and after having gone
without air for a certain time we must breath.
Seeing and hearing require some practice before their free use is
mastered, but not very much. They are so far within our control that we
can see more by looking harder, and hear more by listening
attentively—but they are beyond our control in so far as that we must see
and hear the greater part of what presents itself to us as near, and at
the same time unfamiliar, unless we turn away or shut our eyes, or stop
our ears by a mechanical process; and when we do this it is a sign that
we have already involuntarily seen or heard more than we wished. The
familiar, whether sight or sound, very commonly escapes us.
Take again the processes of digestion, the action of the heart, and the
oxygenisation of the blood—processes of extreme intricacy, done almost
entirely unconsciously, and quite beyond the control of our volition.
Is it possible that our unconsciousness concerning our own performance of
all these processes arises from over-experience?
Is there anything in digestion, or the oxygenisation of the blood,
different in kind to the rapid unconscious action of a man playing a
difficult piece of music on the piano? There may be in degree, but as a
man who sits down to play what he well knows, plays on, when once
started, almost, as we say, mechanically, so, having eaten his dinner, he
digests it as a matter of course, unless it has been in some way
unfamiliar to him, or he to it, owing to some derangement or occurrence
with which he is unfamiliar, and under which therefore he is at a loss
now to comport himself, as a player would be at a loss how to play with
gloves on, or with gout in his fingers, or if set to play music upside
down.
Can we show that all the acquired actions of childhood and after-life,
which we now do unconsciously, or without conscious exercise of the will,
are familiar acts—acts which we have already done a very great number of
times?
Can we also show that there are no acquired actions which we can perform
in this automatic manner, which were not at one time difficult, requiring
attention, and liable to repeated failure, our volition failing to
command obedience from the members which should carry its purposes into
execution?
If so, analogy will point in the direction of thinking that other acts
which we do even more unconsciously may only escape our power of
self-examination and control because they are even more familiar—because
we have done them oftener; and we may imagine that if there were a
microscope which could show us the minutest atoms of consciousness and
volition, we should find that even the apparently most automatic actions
were yet done in due course, upon a balance of considerations, and under
the deliberate exercise of the will.
We should also incline to think that even such an action as the
oxygenisation of its blood by an infant of ten minutes’ old, can only be
done so well and so unconsciously, after repeated failures on the part of
the infant itself.
True, as has been already implied, we do not immediately see when the
baby could have made the necessary mistakes and acquired that infinite
practice without which it could never go through such complex processes
satisfactorily; we have therefore invented the words “hereditary
instinct,” and consider them as accounting for the phenomenon; but a very
little reflection will show that though these words may be a very good
way of stating the difficulty, they do little or nothing towards removing
it.
Why should hereditary instinct enable a creature to dispense with the
experience which we see to be necessary in all other cases before
difficult operations can be performed successfully?
What is this talk that 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 different art, it is _he_ that can do it and
not his neighbour. Yet, practically, we see that the vicarious
experience, which seems so contrary to our common observation, does
nevertheless appear to hold good in the case of creatures and their
descendants. Is there, then, any way of bringing these apparently
conflicting phenomena under the operation of one law? Is there any way
of showing that this experience of the race, of 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, repeating in a great many different ways certain
performances with which he has become exceedingly familiar?
It would seem that we must either suppose the conditions of experience to
differ during the earlier stages of life from those which we observe them
to become during the heyday of any existence—and this would appear very
gratuitous, tolerable only as a suggestion because the beginnings of life
are so obscure, that in such twilight we may do pretty much whatever we
please without danger of confutation—or that we must suppose the
continuity of life and sameness between living beings, whether plants or
animals, and their descendants, to be far closer than we have hitherto
believed; so that the experience of one person is not enjoyed by his
successor, so much as that the successor is _bonâ fide_ but a part of the
life of his progenitor, imbued with all his memories, profiting by all
his experiences—which are, in fact, his own—and only unconscious of the
extent of his own memories and experiences owing to their vastness and
already infinite repetitions.
Certainly it presents itself to us at once as a singular coincidence—
I. That we are _most conscious of_, _and have most control over_, such
habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences, which are
acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and
not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely
human.
II. That we are _less conscious of_, _and have less control over_,
eating and drinking, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing, which
were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided
ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which
are still, geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent.
III. That we are _most unconscious of_, _and have least control over_,
our digestion and circulation, which belonged even to our invertebrate
ancestry, and which are habits, geologically speaking, of extreme
antiquity.
There is something too like method in this for it to be taken as the
result of mere chance—chance again being but another illustration of
Nature’s love of a contradiction in terms; for everything is chance, and
nothing is chance. And you may take it that all is chance or nothing
chance, according as you please, but you must not have half chance and
half not chance.
Does it not seem as though the older and more confirmed the habit, the
more unquestioning the act of volition, till, in the case of the oldest
habits, the practice of succeeding existences has so formulated the
procedure, that, on being once committed to such and such a line beyond a
certain point, the subsequent course is so clear as to be open to no
further doubt, to admit of no alternative, till the very power of
questioning is gone, and even the consciousness of volition? And this
too upon matters which, in earlier stages of a man’s existence, admitted
of passionate argument and anxious deliberation whether to resolve them
thus or thus, with heroic hazard and experiment, which on the losing side
proved to be vice, and on the winning virtue. For there was passionate
argument once what shape a man’s teeth should be, nor can the colour of
his hair be considered as ever yet settled, or likely to be settled for a
very long time.
It is one against legion when a creature tries to differ from his own
past selves. He must yield or die if he wants to differ widely, so as to
lack natural instincts, such as hunger or thirst, or not to gratify them.
It is more righteous in a man that he should “eat strange food,” and that
his cheek should “so much as lank not,” than that he should starve if the
strange food be at his command. His past selves are living in him at
this moment with the accumulated life of centuries. “Do this, this,
this, which we too have done, and found our profit in it,” cry the souls
of his forefathers within him. Faint are the far ones, coming and going
as the sound of bells wafted on to a high mountain; loud and clear are
the near ones, urgent as an alarm of fire. “Withhold,” cry some. “Go on
boldly,” cry others. “Me, me, me, revert hitherward, my descendant,”
shouts one as it were from some high vantage-ground over the heads of the
clamorous multitude. “Nay, but me, me, me,” echoes another; and our
former selves fight within us and wrangle for our possession. Have we
not here what is commonly called an _internal tumult_, when dead
pleasures and pains tug within us hither and thither? Then may the
battle be decided by what people are pleased to call our own experience.
Our own indeed! What is our own save by mere courtesy of speech? A
matter of fashion. Sanction sanctifieth and fashion fashioneth. And so
with death—the most inexorable of all conventions.
However this may be, we may assume it as an axiom with regard to actions
acquired after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the
result of long practice, and after having thus acquired perfect mastery
over the action in question.
But given the practice or experience, and the intricacy of the process to
be performed appears to matter very little. There is hardly anything
conceivable as being done by man, which a certain amount of familiarity
will not enable him to do, as it were mechanically and without conscious
effort. “The most complex and difficult movements,” writes Mr Darwin,
“can in time be performed without the least effort or consciousness.”
All the main business of life is done thus unconsciously or
semi-unconsciously. For what is the main business of life? We work that
we may eat and digest, rather than eat and digest that we may work; this,
at any rate, is the normal state of things: the more important business
then is that which is carried on unconsciously. So again the action of
the brain, which goes on prior to our realising the idea in which it
results, is not perceived by the individual. So also all the deeper
springs of action and conviction. The residuum with which we fret and
worry ourselves is a mere matter of detail, as the higgling and haggling
of the market, which is not over the bulk of the price, but over the last
halfpenny.
Shall we say, then, that a baby of a day old sucks (which involves the
whole principle of the pump, and hence a profound practical knowledge of
the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood
(millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy discovered oxygen), sees and
hears—all most difficult and complicated operations, involving a
knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics, compared with
which the discoveries of Newton sink into utter insignificance? Shall we
say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and
so regularly, without being even able to direct its attention to them,
and without mistake, and at the same time not know how to do them, and
never have done them before?
Such an assertion would be a contradiction to the whole experience of
mankind. Surely the _onus probandi_ must rest with him who makes it.
A man may make a lucky hit now and again by what is called a fluke, but
even this must be only a little in advance of his other performances of
the same kind. He may multiply seven by eight by a fluke after a little
study of the multiplication table, but he will not be able to extract the
cube root of 4913 by a fluke, without long training in arithmetic, any
more than an agricultural labourer would be able to operate successfully
for cataract. If, then, a grown man cannot perform so simple an
operation as that we will say, for cataract, unless he have been long
trained in other similar operations, and until he has done what comes to
the same thing many times over, with what show of reason can we maintain
that one who is so far less capable than a grown man, can perform such
vastly more difficult operations, without knowing how to do them, and
without ever having done them before? There is no sign of “fluke” about
the circulation of a baby’s blood. There may perhaps be some little
hesitation about its earliest breathing, but this, as a general rule,
soon passes over, both breathing and circulation, within an hour after
birth, being as regular and easy as at any time during life. Is it
reasonable, then, to say that the baby does these things without knowing
how to do them, and without ever having done them before, and continues
to do them by a series of lifelong flukes?
It would be well if those who feel inclined to hazard such an assertion
would find some other instances of intricate processes gone through by
people who know nothing about them, and never had any practice therein.
What _is_ to know how to do a thing? Surely to do it. What is proof
that we know how to do a thing? Surely the fact that we can do it. A
man shows that he knows how to throw the boomerang by throwing the
boomerang. No amount of talking or writing can get over this; _ipso
facto_, that a baby breathes and makes its blood circulate, it knows how
to do so and the fact that it does not know its own knowledge is only
proof of the perfection of that knowledge, and of the vast number of past
occasions on which it must have been exercised already. As we have said
already, it is less obvious when the baby could have gained its
experience, so as to be able so readily to remember exactly what to do;
but it is more easy to suppose that the necessary occasions cannot have
been wanting, than that the power which we observe should have been
obtained without practice and memory.
If we saw any self-consciousness on the baby’s part about its breathing
or circulation, we might suspect that it had had less experience, or
profited less by its experience, than its neighbours—exactly in the same
manner as we suspect a deficiency of any quality which we see a man
inclined to parade. We all become introspective when we find that we do
not know our business, and whenever we are introspective we may generally
suspect that we are on the verge of unproficiency. Unfortunately, in the
case of sickly children, we observe that they sometimes do become
conscious of their breathing and circulation, just as in later life we
become conscious that we have a liver or a digestion. In that case there
is always something wrong. The baby that becomes aware of its breathing
does not know how to breathe, and will suffer for his ignorance and
incapacity, exactly in the same way as he will suffer in later life for
ignorance and incapacity in any other respect in which his peers are
commonly knowing and capable. In the case of inability to breath, the
punishment is corporal, breathing being a matter of fashion, so old and
long settled that nature can admit of no departure from the established
custom, and the procedure in case of failure is as much formulated as the
fashion itself in the case of the circulation, the whole performance has
become one so utterly of rote, that the mere discovery that we could do
it at all was considered one of the highest flights of human genius.
It has been said a day will come when the Polar ice shall have
accumulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet above
the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it
is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the
earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a ploughshare. In that
day time icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing
them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten
blotting-paper. There is no respect now of Handel nor of Shakespeare;
the works of Rembrandt and Bellini fossilise at the bottom of the sea.
Grace, beauty, and wit, all that is precious in music, literature, and
art—all gone. In the morning there was Europe. In the evening there are
no more populous cities nor busy hum of men, but a sea of jagged ice, a
lurid sunset, and the doom of many ages. Then shall a scared remnant
escape in places, and settle upon the changed continent when the waters
have subsided—a simple people, busy hunting shellfish on the drying ocean
beds, and with little time for introspection yet they can read and write
and sum, for by that time these accomplishments will have become
universal, and will be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk; but
they do so as a matter of course, and without self-consciousness. Also
they make the simpler kinds of machinery too easily to be able to follow
their own operations—the manner of their own apprenticeship being to them
as a buried city. May we not imagine that, after the lapse of another
ten thousand years or so, some one of them may again become cursed with
lust of introspection, and a second Harvey may astonish the world by
discovering that it can read and write, and that steam-engines do not
grow, but are made? It may be safely prophesied that he will die a
martyr, and be honoured in the fourth generation.
CHAPTER IV.
APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES TO ACTIONS AND HABITS ACQUIRED
BEFORE BIRTH.
BUT if we once admit the principle that consciousness and volition have a
tendency to vanish as soon as practice has rendered any habit exceedingly
familiar, so that the mere presence of an elaborate but unconscious
performance shall carry with it a presumption of infinite practice, we
shall find it impossible to draw the line at those actions which we see
acquired after birth, no matter at how early a period. The whole history
and development of the embryo in all its stages forces itself on our
consideration. Birth has been made too much of. It is a salient feature
in the history of the individual, but not more salient than a hundred
others, and far less so than the commencement of his existence as a
single cell uniting in itself elements derived from both parents, or
perhaps than any point in his whole existence as an embryo. For many
years after we are born we are still very incomplete. We cease to
oxygenise our blood vicariously as soon as we are born, but we still
derive our sustenance from our mothers. Birth is but the beginning of
doubt, the first hankering after scepticism, the dreaming of a dawn of
trouble, the end of certainty and of settled convictions. Not but what
before birth there have been unsettled convictions (more’s the pity) with
not a few, and after birth we have still so made up our minds upon many
points as to have no further need of reflection concerning them;
nevertheless, in the main, birth is the end of that time when we really
knew our business, and the beginning of the days wherein we know not what
we would do, or do. It is therefore the beginning of consciousness, and
infancy is as the dosing of one who turns in his bed on waking, and takes
another short sleep before he rises. When we were yet unborn, our
thoughts kept the roadway decently enough; then were we blessed; we
thought as every man thinks, and held the same opinions as our fathers
and mothers had done upon nearly every subject. Life was not an art—and
a very difficult art—much too difficult to be acquired in a lifetime; it
was a science of which we were consummate masters.
In this sense, then, birth may indeed be looked upon as the most salient
feature in a man’s life; but this is not at all the sense in which it is
commonly so regarded. It is commonly considered as the point at which we
begin to live. More truly it is the point at which we leave off knowing
how to live.
A chicken, for example, is never so full of consciousness, activity,
reasoning faculty, and volition, as when it is an embryo in the eggshell,
making bones, and flesh, and feathers, and eyes, and claws, with nothing
but a little warmth and white of egg to make them from. This is indeed
to make bricks with but a small modicum of straw. There is no man in the
whole world who knows consciously and articulately as much as a
half-hatched hen’s egg knows unconsciously. Surely the egg in its own
way must know quite as much as the chicken does. We say of the chicken
that it knows how to run about as soon as it is hatched. So it does; but
had it no knowledge before it was hatched? What made it lay the
foundations of those limbs which should enable it to run about? What
made it grow a horny tip to its bill before it was hatched, so that it
might peck all round the larger end of the eggshell and make a hole for
itself to get out at? Having once got outside the eggshell, the chicken
throws away this horny tip; but is it reasonable to suppose that it would
have grown it at all unless it had known that it would want something
with which to break the eggshell? And again, is it in the least
agreeable to our experience that such elaborate machinery should be made
without endeavour, failure, perseverance, intelligent contrivance,
experience, and practice?
In the presence of such considerations, it seems impossible to refrain
from thinking that there must be a closer continuity of identity, life,
and memory, between successive generations than we generally imagine. To
shear the thread of life, and hence of memory, between one generation and
its successor, is so to speak, a brutal measure, an act of intellectual
butchery, and like all such strong high-handed measures, a sign of
weakness in him who is capable of it till all other remedies have been
exhausted. It is mere horse science, akin to the theories of the
convulsionists in the geological kingdom, and of the believers in the
supernatural origin of the species of plants and animals. Yet it is to
be feared that we have not a few among us who would feel shocked rather
at the attempt towards a milder treatment of the facts before them, than
at a continuance of the present crass tyranny with which we try to crush
them inside our preconceived opinions. It is quite common to hear men of
education maintain that not even when it was on the point of being
hatched, had the chicken sense enough to know that it wanted to get
outside the eggshell. It did indeed peck all round the end of the shell,
which, if it wanted to get out, would certainly be the easiest way of
effecting its purpose; but it did not, they say, peck because it was
aware of this, but “promiscuously.” Curious, such a uniformity of
promiscuous action among so many eggs for so many generations. If we see
a man knock a hole in a wall on finding that he cannot get out of a place
by any other means, and if we see him knock this hole in a very
workmanlike way, with an implement with which he has been at great pains
to make for a long the past, but which he throws away as soon as he has
no longer use for it, thus showing that he had made it expressly for the
purpose of escape, do we say that this person made the implement and
broke the wall of his prison promiscuously? No jury would acquit a
burglar on these grounds. Then why, without much more evidence to the
contrary than we have, or can hope to have, should we not suppose that
with chickens, as with men, signs of contrivance are indeed signs of
contrivance, however quick, subtle, and untraceable, the contrivance may
be? Again, I have heard people argue that though the chicken, when
nearly hatched, had such a glimmering of sense that it pecked the shell
because it wanted to get out, yet that it is not conceivable that, so
long before it was hatched, it should have had the sense to grow the
horny tip to its bill for use when wanted. This, at any rate, they say,
it must have grown, as the persons previously referred to would maintain,
promiscuously.
Now no one indeed supposes that the chicken does what it does, with the
same self-consciousness with which a tailor makes a suit of clothes. Not
any one who has thought upon the subject is likely to do it so great an
injustice. The probability is that it knows what it is about to an
extent greater than any tailor ever did or will, for, to say the least of
it, many thousands of years to come. It works with such absolute
certainty and so vast an experience, that it is utterly incapable of
following the operations of its own mind—as accountants have been known
to add up long columns of pounds, shillings, and pence, running the three
fingers of one hand, a finger for each column, up the page, and putting
the result down correctly at the bottom, apparently without an effort.
In the case of the accountant, we say that the processes which his mind
goes through are so rapid and subtle as to elude his own power of
observation as well as ours. We do not deny that his mind goes though
processes of some kind; we very readily admit that it must do so, and say
that these processes are so rapid and subtle, owing, as a general rule,
to long experience in addition. Why then should we find it so difficult
to conceive that this principle, which we observe to play so large a part
in mental physiology, wherever we can observe mental physiology at all,
may have a share also in the performance of intricate operations
otherwise inexplicable, though the creature performing them is not man,
or man only in embryo?
Again, after the chicken is hatched, it grows more feathers and bones and
blood, but we still say that it knows nothing about all this. What then
do we say it _does_ know? One is almost ashamed to confess that we only
credit it with knowing what it appears to know by processes which we find
it exceedingly easy to follow, or perhaps rather, which we find it
absolutely impossible to avoid following, as recognising too great a
family likeness between them, and those which are most easily followed in
our own minds, to be able to sit down in comfort under a denial of the
resemblance. Thus, for example, if we see a chicken running away from a
fox, we do admit that the chicken knows the fox would kill it if it
caught it.
On the other hand, if we allow that the half-hatched chicken grew the
horny tip to be ready for use, with an intensity of unconscious
contrivance which can be only attributed to experience, we are driven to
admit that from the first moment the men began to sit upon it—and earlier
too than this—the egg was always full of consciousness and volition, and
that during its embryological condition the unhatched chicken is doing
exactly what it continues doing from the moment it is hatched till it
dies; that is to say, attempting to better itself, doing (as Aristotle
says all creatures do all things upon all occasions) what it considers
most for its advantage under the existing circumstances. What it may
think most advantageous will depend, while it is in the eggshell, upon
exactly the same causes as will influence its opinions in later life—to
wit, upon its habits, its past circumstances and ways of thinking; for
there is nothing, as Shakespeare tells us, good or ill, but thinking
makes it so.
The egg thinks feathers much more to its advantage than hair or fur, and
much more easily made. If it could speak, it would probably tell us that
we could make them ourselves very easily after a few lessons, if we took
the trouble to try, but that hair was another matter, which it really
could not see how any protoplasm could be got to make. Indeed, during
the more intense and active part of our existence, in the earliest
stages, that is to say, of our embryological life, we could probably have
turned our protoplasm into feathers instead of hair if we had cared about
doing so. If the chicken can make feathers, there seems no sufficient
reason for thinking that we cannot do so, beyond the fact that we prefer
hair, and have preferred it for so many ages that we have lost the art
along with the desire of making feathers, if indeed any of our ancestors
ever possessed it. The stuff with which we make hair is practically the
same as that with which chickens make feathers. It is nothing but
protoplasm, and protoplasm is like certain prophecies, out of which
anything can be made by the creature which wants to make it. Everything
depends upon whether a creature knows its own mind sufficiently well, and
has enough faith in its own powers of achievement. When these two
requisites are wanting, the strongest giant cannot lift a two-ounce
weight; when they are given, a bullock can take an eyelash out of its eye
with its hind-foot, or a minute jelly speck can build itself a house out
of various materials which it will select according to its purpose with
the nicest care, though it have neither brain to think with, nor eyes to
see with, nor hands nor feet to work with, nor is it anything but a
minute speck of jelly—faith and protoplasm only.
That this is indeed so, the following passage from Dr. Carpenter’s
“Mental Physiology” may serve to show:—
“The simplest type of an animal consists of a minute mass of
‘protoplasm,’ or living jelly, which is not yet _differentiated_ into
‘organs;’ every part having the same endowments, and taking an equal
share in every action which the creature performs. One of these ‘jelly
specks,’ the amœba, moves itself about by changing the form of its body,
extemporising a foot (or pseudopodium), first in one direction, and then
in another; and then, when it has met with a nutritive particle,
extemporises a stomach for its reception, by wrapping its soft body
around it. Another, instead of going about in search of food, remains in
one place, but projects its protoplasmic substance into long pseudopodia,
which entrap and draw in very minute particles, or absorb nutrient
material from the liquid through which they extend themselves, and are
continually becoming fused (as it were) into the central body, which is
itself continually giving off new pseudopodia. Now we can scarcely
conceive that a creature of such simplicity should possess any distinct
_consciousness_ of its needs” (why not?), “or that its actions should be
directed by any _intention_ of its own; and yet the writer has lately
found results of the most singular elaborateness to be wrought out by the
instrumentality of these minute jelly specks, which build up tests or
casings of the most regular geometrical symmetry of form, and of the most
artificial construction.”
On this Dr. Carpenter remarks:—“Suppose a human mason to be put down by
the side of a pile of stones of various shapes and sizes, and to be told
to build a dome of these, smooth on both surfaces, without using more
than the least possible quantity of a very tenacious, but very costly,
cement, in holding the stones together. If he accomplished this well, he
would receive credit for great intelligence and skill. Yet this is
exactly what these little ‘jelly specks’ do on a most minute scale; the
‘tests’ they construct, when highly magnified, bearing comparison with
the most skilful masonry of man. From _the same sandy bottom_ one
species picks up the _coarser_ quartz grains, cements them together with
_phosphate of iron_ secreted from its own substance” (should not this
rather be, “which it has contrived in some way or other to manufacture”?)
and thus constructs a flask-shaped ‘test,’ having a short neck and a
large single orifice. Another picks up the _finest_ grains, and puts
them together, with the same cement, into perfectly spherical ‘tests’ of
the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores
disposed at pretty regular intervals. Another selects the _minutest_
sand grains and the terminal portions of sponge spicules, and works them
up together—apparently with no cement at all, by the mere laying of the
spicules—into perfect white spheres, like homœopathic globules, each
having a single-fissured orifice. And another, which makes a straight,
many-chambered ‘test,’ that resembles in form the chambered shell of an
orthoceratite—the conical mouth of each chamber projecting into the
cavity of the next—while forming the walls of its chambers of ordinary
sand grains rather loosely held together, shapes the conical mouth of the
successive chambers by firmly cementing together grains of ferruginous
quartz, which it must have picked out from the general mass.”
“To give these actions,” continues Dr. Carpenter, “the vague designation
of ‘instinctive’ does not in the least help us to account for them, since
what we want is to discover the _mechanism_ by which they are worked out;
and it is most difficult to conceive how so artificial a selection can be
made by a creature so simple” (Mental Physiology, 4th ed. pp. 41–43)
This is what protoplasm can do when it has the talisman of faith—of faith
which worketh all wonders, either in the heavens above, or in the earth
beneath, or in the waters under the earth. Truly if a man have faith,
even as a grain of mustard seed, though he may not be able to remove
mountains, he will at any rate be able to do what is no less
difficult—make a mustard plant.
Yet this is but a barren kind of comfort, for we have not, and in the
nature of things cannot have, sufficient faith in the unfamiliar,
inasmuch as the very essence of faith involves the notion of familiarity,
which can grow but slowly, from experience to confidence, and can make no
sudden leap at any time. Such faith cannot be founded upon reason,—that
is to say, upon a recognised perception on the part of the person holding
it that he is holding it, and of the reasons for his doing so—or it will
shift as other reasons come to disturb it. A house built upon reason is
a house built upon the sand. It must be built upon the current cant and
practice of one’s peers, for this is the rock which, though not
immovable, is still most hard to move.
But however this may be, we observe broadly that the intensity of the
will to make this or that, and of the confidence that one can make it,
depends upon the length of time during which the maker’s forefathers have
wanted the same thing before it; the older the custom the more inveterate
the habit, and, with the exception, perhaps, that the reproductive system
is generally the crowning act of development—an exception which I will
hereafter explain—the earlier its manifestation, until, for some reason
or another, we relinquish it and take to another, which we must, as a
general rule, again adhere to for a vast number of generations, before it
will permanently supplant the older habit. In our own case, the habit of
breathing like a fish through gills may serve as an example. We have now
left off this habit, yet we did it formerly for so many generations that
we still do it a little; it still crosses our embryological existence
like a faint memory or dream, for not easily is an inveterate habit
broken. On the other hand—again speaking broadly—the more recent the
habit the later the fashion of its organ, as with the teeth, speech, and
the higher intellectual powers, which are too new for development before
we are actually born.
But to return for a short time to Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Carpenter evidently
feels, what must indeed be felt by every candid mind, that there is no
sufficient reason for supposing that these little specks of jelly,
without brain or eyes, or stomach, or hands, or feet, but the very lowest
known form of animal life, are not imbued with a consciousness of their
needs, and the reasoning faculties which shall enable them to gratify
those needs in a manner, all things considered, equalling the highest
flights of the ingenuity of the highest animal—man. This is no
exaggeration. It is true, that in an earlier part of the passage, Dr.
Carpenter has said that we can scarcely conceive so simple a creature to
“possess any distinct _consciousness_ of its needs, or that its actions
should be directed by any intention of its own;” but, on the other hand,
a little lower down he says, that if a workman did what comes to the same
thing as what the amœba does, he “would receive credit for great
intelligence and skill.” Now if an amœba can do that, for which a
workman would receive credit as for a highly skilful and intelligent
performance, the amœba should receive no less credit than the workman; he
should also be no less credited with skill and intelligence, which words
unquestionably involve a distinct consciousness of needs and an action
directed by an intention of its own. So that Dr. Carpenter seems rather
to blow hot and cold with one breath. Nevertheless there can be no doubt
to which side the minds of the great majority of mankind will incline
upon the evidence before them; they will say that the creature is highly
reasonable and intelligent, though they would readily admit that long
practice and familiarity may have exhausted its powers of attention to
all the stages of its own performance, just as a practised workman in
building a wall certainly does not consciously follow all the processes
which he goes through.
As an example, however, of the extreme dislike which philosophers of a
certain school have for making the admissions which seem somewhat
grudgingly conceded by Dr. Carpenter, we may take the paragraph which
immediately follows the ones which we have just quoted. Dr. Carpenter
there writes:—
“The writer has often amused himself and others, when by the seaside,
with getting a _terebella_ (a marine worm that cases its body in a sandy
tube) out of its house, and then, putting it into a saucer of water with
a supply of sand and comminuted shell, watching its appropriation of
these materials in constructing a new tube. The extended tentacles soon
spread themselves over the bottom of the saucer and lay hold of whatever
comes in their way, ‘all being fish that comes to their net,’ and in half
an hour or thereabouts the new house is finished, though on a very rude
and artificial type. Now here the organisation is far higher; the
instrumentality obviously serves the needs of the animal and suffices for
them; and we characterise the action, on account of its uniformity and
apparent _un_intelligence, as instinctive.”
No comment will, one would think, be necessary to make the reader feel
that the difference between the terebella and the amœba is one of degree
rather than kind, and that if the action of the second is as conscious
and reasonable as that, we will say, of a bird making her nest, the
action of the first should be so also. It is only a question of being a
little less skilful, or more so, but skill and intelligence would seem
present in both cases. Moreover, it is more clever of the terebella to
have made itself the limbs with which it can work, than of the amœba to
be able to work without the limbs; and perhaps it is more sensible also
to want a less elaborate dwelling, provided it is sufficient for
practical purposes. But whether the terebella be less intelligent than
the amœba or not, it does quite enough to establish its claim to
intelligence of a higher order; and one does not see ground for the
satisfaction which Dr. Carpenter appears to find at having, as it were,
taken the taste of the amœba’s performance out of our mouth, by setting
us about the less elaborate performance of the terebella, which he thinks
we can call unintelligent and instinctive.
I may be mistaken in the impression I have derived from the paragraphs I
have quoted. I commonly say they give me the impression that I have
tried to convey to the reader, _i.e._, that the writer’s assent to
anything like intelligence, or consciousness of needs, an animal low down
in the scale of life, is grudging, and that he is more comfortable when
he has got hold of onto to which he can point and say that mere, at any
rate, is an unintelligent and merely instinctive creature. I have only
called attention to the passage as an example of the intellectual bias of
a large number of exceedingly able and thoughtful persons, among whom, so
far as I am able to form an opinion at all, few have greater claims to
our respectful attention than Dr. Carpenter himself.
For the embryo of a chicken, then, we damn exactly the same kind of
reasoning power and contrivance which we damn for the amœba, or for our
own intelligent performances in later life. We do not claim for it much,
if any, perception of its own forethought, for we know very well that it
is among the most prominent features of intellectual activity that, after
a number of repetitions, it ceases to be perceived, and that it does not,
in ordinary cases, cease to be perceived till after a very great number
of repetitions. The fact that the embryo chicken makes itself always as
nearly as may be in the same way, would lead us to suppose that it would
be unconscious of much of its own action, _provided it were always the
same chicken which made itself over and over again_. So far we can see,
it always _is_ unconscious of the greater part of its own wonderful
performance. Surely then we have a presumption that _it is the same
chicken which makes itself over and over again_; for such unconsciousness
is not won, so far as our experience goes, by any other means than by
frequent repetition of the same act on the part of one and the same
individual. How this can be we shall perceive in subsequent chapters.
In the meantime, we may say that all knowledge and volition would seem to
be merely parts of the knowledge and volition of the primordial cell
(whatever this may be), which slumbers but never dies—which has grown,
and multiplied, and differentiated itself into the compound life of the
womb, and which never becomes conscious of knowing what it has once
learnt effectually, till it is for some reason on the point of, or in
danger of, forgetting it.
The action, therefore, of an embryo making its way up in the world from a
simple cell to a baby, developing for itself eyes, ears, hands, and feet
while yet unborn, proves to be exactly of one and the same kind as that
of a man of fifty who goes into the City and tells his broker to buy him
so many Great Northern A shares—that is to say, an effort of the will
exercised in due course on a balance of considerations as to the
immediate expediency, and guided by past experience; while children who
do not reach birth are but prenatal spendthrifts, ne’er-do-weels,
inconsiderate innovators, the unfortunate in business, either through
their own fault or that of others, or through inevitable mischances,
beings who are culled out before birth instead of after; so that even the
lowest idiot, the most contemptible in health or beauty, may yet reflect
with pride that they were _born_. Certainly we observe that those who
have had good fortune (mother and sole cause of virtue, and sole virtue
in itself), and have profited by their experience, and known their
business best before birth, so that they made themselves both to be and
to look well, do commonly on an average prove to know it best in
after-life: they grow their clothes best who have grown their limbs best.
It is rare that those who have not remembered how to finish their own
bodies fairly well should finish anything well in later life. But how
small is the addition to their unconscious attainments which even the
Titans of human intellect have consciously accomplished, in comparison
with the problems solved by the meanest baby living, nay, even by one
whose birth is untimely! In other words, how vast is that back knowledge
over which we have gone fast asleep, through the prosiness of perpetual
repetition; and how little in comparison, is that whose novelty keeps it
still within the scope of our conscious perception! What is the
discovery of the laws of gravitation as compared with the knowledge which
sleeps in every hen’s egg upon a kitchen shelf?
It is all a matter of habit and fashion. Thus we see kings and
councillors of the earth admired for facing death before what they are
pleased to call dishonour. If, on being required to go without anything
they have been accustomed to, or to change their habits, or do what is
unusual in the case of other kings under like circumstances, then, if
they but fold their cloak decently around them, and die upon the spot of
shame at having had it even required of them to do thus or thus, then are
they kings indeed, of old race, that know their business from generation
to generation. Or if, we will say, a prince, on having his dinner
brought to him ill-cooked, were to feel the indignity so keenly as that
he should turn his face to the wall, and breathe out his wounded soul in
one sigh, do we not admire him as a “_real_ prince,” who knows the
business of princes so well that he can conceive of nothing foreign to it
in connection with himself, the bare effort to realise a state of things
other than what princes have been accustomed to being immediately fatal
to him? Yet is there no less than this in the demise of every
half-hatched hen’s egg, shaken rudely by a schoolboy, or neglected by a
truant mother; for surely the prince would not die if he knew how to do
otherwise, and the hen’s egg only dies of being required to do something
to which it is not accustomed.
But the further consideration of this and other like reflections would
too long detain us. Suffice it that we have established the position
that all living creatures which show any signs of intelligence, must
certainly each one have already gone through the embryonic stages an
infinite number of times, or they could no more have achieved the
intricate process of self-development unconsciously, than they could play
the piano unconsciously without any previous knowledge of the instrument.
It remains, therefore, to show the when and where of their having done
so, and this leads us naturally to the subject of the following
chapter—Personal Identity.
CHAPTER V.
PERSONAL IDENTITY.
“STRANGE difficulties have been raised by some,” says Bishop Butler,
“concerning personal identity, or the sameness of living agents as
implied in the notion of our existing now and hereafter, or indeed in any
two consecutive moments.” But in truth it is not easy to see the
strangeness of the difficulty, if the words either “personal” or
“identity” are used in any strictness.
Personality is one of those ideas with which we are so familiar that we
have lost sight of the foundations upon which it rests. We regard our
personality as a simple definite whole; as a plain, palpable, individual
thing, which can be seen going about the streets or sitting indoors at
home, which lasts us our lifetime, and about the confines of which no
doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable people. But in truth this
“we,” which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and indefinable
aggregation of many component parts which war not a little among
themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps due to
this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound and light is due to the
jarring of vibrations. Moreover, as the component parts of our identity
change from moment to moment, our personality becomes a thing dependent
upon the present, which has no logical existence, but lives only upon the
sufferance of times past and future, slipping out of our hands into the
domain of one or other of these two claimants the moment we try to
apprehend it. And not only is our personality as fleeting as the present
moment, but the parts which compose it blend some of them so
imperceptibly into, and are so inextricably linked on to, outside things
which clearly form no part of our personality, that when we try to bring
ourselves to book, and determine wherein we consist, or to draw a line as
to where we begin or end, we find ourselves completely baffled. There is
nothing but fusion and confusion.
Putting theology on one side, and dealing only with the common daily
experience of mankind, our body is certainly part of our personality.
With the destruction of our bodies, our personality, as far as we can
follow it, comes to a full stop; and with every modification of them it
is correspondingly modified. But what are the limits of our bodies?
They are composed of parts, some of them so unessential as to be hardly
included in personality at all, and to be separable from ourselves
without perceptible effect, as the hair, nails, and daily waste of
tissue. Again, other parts are very important, as our hands, feet, arms,
legs, &c., but still are no essential parts of our “self” or “soul,”
which continues to exist in spite of their amputation. Other parts, as
the brain, heart, and blood, are so essential that they cannot be
dispensed with, yet it is impossible to say that personality consists in
any one of them.
Each one of these component members of our personality is continually
dying and being born again, supported in this process by the food we eat,
the water we drink, and the air we breathe; which three things link us
on, and fetter us down, to the organic and inorganic world about us. For
our meat and drink, though no part of our personality before we eat and
drink, cannot, after we have done so, be separated entirely from us
without the destruction of our personality altogether, so far as we can
follow it; and who shall say at what precise moment our food has or has
not become part of ourselves? A famished man eats food; after a short
time his whole personality is so palpably affected that we know the food
to have entered into him and taken, as it were, possession of him; but
who can say at what precise moment it did so? Thus we find that we are
rooted into outside things and melt away into them, nor can any man say
he consists absolutely in this or that, nor define himself so certainly
as to include neither more nor less than himself; many undoubted parts of
his personality being more separable from it, and changing it less when
so separated, both to his own senses and those of other people, than
other parts which are strictly speaking no parts at all.
A man’s clothes, for example, as they lie on a chair at night are no part
of him, but when he wears them they would appear to be so, as being a
kind of food which warms him and hatches him, and the loss of which may
kill him of cold. If this be denied, and a man’s clothes be considered
as no part of his self, nevertheless they, with his money, and it may
perhaps be added his religious opinions, stamp a man’s individuality as
strongly as any natural feature could stamp it. Change in style of
dress, gain or loss of money, make a man feel and appear more changed
than having his chin shaved or his nails cut. In fact, as soon as we
leave common parlance on one side, and try for a scientific definition of
personality, we find that there is none possible, any more than there can
be a demonstration of the fact that we exist at all—a demonstration for
which, as for that of a personal God, many have hunted but none have
found. The only solid foundation is, as in the case of the earth’s
crust, pretty near the surface of things; the deeper we try to go, the
damper and darker and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is
no knowing into what quagmire of superstition we may not find ourselves
drawn, if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of
things, in which alone our nature permits us to be comforted.
Common parlance, however, settles the difficulty readily enough (as
indeed it settles most others if they show signs of awkwardness) by the
simple process of ignoring it: we decline, and very properly, to go into
the question of where personality begins and ends, but assume it to be
known by every one, and throw the onus of not knowing it upon the
over-curious, who had better think as their neighbours do, right or
wrong, or there is no knowing into what villainy they may not presently
fall.
Assuming, then, that every one knows what is meant by the word “person”
(and such superstitious bases as this are the foundations upon which all
action, whether of man, beast, or plant, is constructed and rendered
possible; for even the corn in the fields grows upon a superstitious
basis as to its own existence, and only turns the earth and moisture into
wheat through the conceit of its own ability to do so, without which
faith it were powerless; and the lichen only grows upon the granite rock
by first saying to itself, “I think I can do it;” so that it would not be
able to grow unless it thought it could grow, and would not think it
could grow unless it found itself able to grow, and thus spends its life
arguing in a most vicious circle, basing its action upon a hypothesis,
which hypothesis is in turn based upon its action)—assuming that we know
what is meant by the word “person,” we say that we are one and the same
from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death, so that whatever
is done by or happens to any one between birth and death, is said to
happen to or be done by one individual. This in practice is found to be
sufficient for the law courts and the purposes of daily life, which,
being full of hurry and the pressure of business, can only tolerate
compromise, or conventional rendering of intricate phenomena. When facts
of extreme complexity have to be daily and hourly dealt with by people
whose time is money, they must be simplified, and treated much as a
painter treats them, drawing them in squarely, seizing the more important
features, and neglecting all that does not assert itself as too essential
to be passed over—hence the slang and cant words of every profession, and
indeed all language; for language at best is but a kind of “patter,” the
only way, it is true, in many cases, of expressing our ideas to one
another, but still a very bad way, and not for one moment comparable to
the unspoken speech which we may sometimes have recourse to. The
metaphors and _façons de parler_ to which even in the plainest speech we
are perpetually recurring (as, for example, in this last two lines,
“plain,” “perpetually,” and “recurring,” are all words based on metaphor,
and hence more or less liable to mislead) often deceive us, as though
there were nothing more than what we see and say, and as though words,
instead of being, as they are, the creatures of our convenience, had some
claim to be the actual ideas themselves concerning which we are
conversing.
This is so well expressed in a letter I have recently received from a
friend, now in New Zealand, and certainly not intended by him for
publication, that I shall venture to quote the passage, but should say
that I do so without his knowledge or permission which I should not be
able to receive before this book must be completed.
“Words, words, words,” he writes, “are the stumbling-blocks in the way of
truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that
misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the
appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. Words divide;
thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey, while they are all
only differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing they must
be got rid of: they are the clothes that thoughts wear—only the clothes.
I say this over and over again, for there is nothing of more importance.
Other men’s words will stop you at the beginning of an investigation. A
man may play with words all his life, arranging them and rearranging them
like dominoes. If I could _think_ to you without words you would
understand me better.”
If such remarks as the above hold good at all, they do so with the words
“personal identity.” The least reflection will show that personal
identity in any sort of strictness is an impossibility. The expression
is one of the many ways in which we are obliged to scamp our thoughts
through pressure of other business which pays us better. For surely all
reasonable people will feel that an infant an hour before birth, when in
the eye of the law he has no existence, and could not be called a peer
for another sixty minutes, though his father were a peer, and already
dead,—surely such an embryo is more personally identical with the baby
into which he develops within an hour’s time than the born baby is so
with itself (if the expression may be pardoned), one, twenty, or it may
be eighty years after birth. There is more sameness of matter; there are
fewer differences of any kind perceptible by a third person; there is
more sense of continuity on the part of the person himself; and far more
of all that goes to make up our sense of sameness of personality between
an embryo an hour before birth and the child on being born, than there is
between the child just born and the man of twenty. Yet there is no
hesitation about admitting sameness of personality between these two
last.
On the other hand, if that hazy contradiction in terms, “personal
identity,” be once allowed to retreat behind the threshold of the womb,
it has eluded us once for all. What is true of one hour before birth is
true of two, and so on till we get back to the impregnate ovum, which may
fairly claim to have been personally identical with the man of eighty
into which it ultimately developed, in spite of the fact that there is no
particle of same matter nor sense of continuity between them, nor
recognised community of instinct, nor indeed of anything which goes to
the making up of that which we call identity.
There is far more of all these things common to the impregnate ovum and
the ovum immediately before impregnation, or again between the impregnate
ovum, and both the ovum before impregnation and the spermatozoon which
impregnated it. Nor, if we admit personal identity between the ovum and
the octogenarian, is there any sufficient reason why we should not admit
it between the impregnate ovum and the two factors of which it is
composed, which two factors are but offshoots from two distinct
personalities, of which they are as much part as the apple is of the
apple-tree; so that an impregnate ovum cannot without a violation of
first principles be debarred from claiming personal identity with both
its parents, and hence, by an easy chain of reasoning, _with each of the
impregnate ova from which its parents were developed_.
So that each ovum when impregnate should be considered not as descended
from its ancestors, but as being a continuation of the personality of
every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every ovum _it actually
is_ quite as truly as the octogenarian _is_ the same identity with the
ovum from which he has been developed.
This process cannot stop short of the primordial cell, which again will
probably turn out to be but a brief resting-place. We therefore prove
each one of us to _be actually_ the primordial cell which never died nor
dies, but has differentiated itself into the life of the world, all
living beings whatever, being one with it, and members one of another.
To look at the matter for a moment in another light, it will be admitted
that if the primordial cell had been killed before leaving issue, all its
possible descendants would have been killed at one and the same time. It
is hard to see how this single fact does not establish at the point, as
it were, of a logical bayonet, an identity, between any creature and all
others that are descended from it.
In Bishop Butler’s first dissertation on personality, we find expressed
very much the same opinions as would follow from the above
considerations, though they are mentioned by the Bishop only to be
condemned, namely, “that personality is not a permanent but a transient
thing; that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually; that no man
can any more remain one and the same person two moments together, than
two successive moments can be one and the same moment;” in which case, he
continues, our present self would not be “in reality the same with the
self of yesterday, but another like self or person coming up in its room
and mistaken for it, to which another self will succeed to-morrow.” This
view the Bishop proceeds to reduce to absurdity by saying, “It must be a
fallacy upon ourselves to charge our present selves with anything we did,
or to imagine our present selves interested in anything which befell us
yesterday; or that our present self will be interested in what will
befall us to-morrow. This, I say, must follow, for if the self or person
of to-day and that of to-morrow are not the same, but only like persons,
the person of to-day is really no more interested in what will befall the
person of to-morrow than in what will befall any other person. It may be
thought, perhaps, that this is not a just representation of the opinion
we are speaking of, because those who maintain it allow that a person is
the same as far back as his remembrance reaches. And indeed they do use
the words _identity_ and _same person_. Nor will language permit these
words to be laid aside, since, if they were, there must be I know not
what ridiculous periphrasis substituted in the room of them. But they
cannot consistently with themselves mean that the person is really the
same. For it is self-evident that the personality cannot be really the
same, if, as they expressly assert, that in which it consists is not the
same. And as consistently with themselves they cannot, so I think it
appears they do not mean that the person is really the same, but only
that he is so in a fictitious sense; in such a sense only as they
assert—for this they do assert—that any number of persons whatever may be
the same person. The bare unfolding of this notion, and laying it thus
naked and open, seems the best confutation of it.”
This fencing, for it does not deserve the name of serious disputation, is
rendered possible by the laxness with which the words “identical” and
“identity” are commonly used. Bishop Butler would not seriously deny
that personality undergoes great changes between infancy and old age, and
hence that it must undergo some change from moment to moment. So
universally is this recognised, that it is common to hear it said of such
and such a man that he is not at all the person he was, or of such and
such another that he is twice the man he used to be—expressions than
which none nearer the truth can well be found. On the other hand, those
whom Bishop Butler is intending to confute would be the first to admit
that, though there are many changes between infancy and old age, yet they
come about in any one individual under such circumstances as we are all
agreed in considering as the factors of personal identity rather than as
hindrances thereto—that is to say, there has been no death on the part of
the individual between any two phases of his existence, and any one phase
has had a permanent though perhaps imperceptible effect upon all
succeeding ones. So that no one ever seriously argued in the manner
supposed by Bishop Butler, unless with modifications and saving clauses,
to which it does not suit his purpose to call attention.
Identical strictly means “one and the same;” and if it were tied down to
its strictest usage, it would indeed follow very logically, as we have
said already, that no such thing as personal identity is possible, but
that the case actually is as Bishop Butler has supposed his opponents
without qualification to maintain it. In common use, however, the word
“identical” is taken to mean anything so like another that no vital or
essential differences can be perceived between them; as in the case of
two specimens of the same kind of plant, when we say they are identical
in spite of considerable individual differences. So with two impressions
of a print from the same plate; so with the plate itself, which is
somewhat modified with every impression taken from it. In like manner
“identity” is not held to its strict meaning—absolute sameness—but is
predicated rightly of a past and present which are now very widely
asunder, provided they have been continuously connected by links so small
as not to give too sudden a sense of change at any one point; as, for
instance, in the case of the Thames at Oxford and Windsor or again at
Greenwich, we say the same river flows by all three places, by which we
mean that much of the water at Greenwich has come down from Oxford and
Windsor in a continuous stream. How sudden a change at any one point, or
how great a difference between the two extremes is sufficient to bar
identity, is one of the most uncertain things imaginable, and seems to be
decided on different grounds in different cases, sometimes very
intelligibly, and again at others arbitrarily and capriciously.
Personal identity is barred at one end, in the common opinion, by birth,
and at the other by death. Before birth, a child cannot complain either
by himself or another, in such way as to set the law in motion; after
death he is in like manner powerless to make himself felt by society,
except in so far as he can do so by acts done before the breath has left
his body. At any point between birth and death he is liable, either by
himself or another, to affect his fellow-creatures; hence, no two other
epochs can be found of equal convenience for social purposes, and
therefore they have been seized by society as settling the whole question
of when personal identity begins and ends—society being rightly concerned
with its own practical convenience, rather than with the abstract truth
concerning its individual members. No one who is capable of reflection
will deny that the limitation of personality is certainly arbitrary to a
degree as regards birth, nor yet that it is very possibly arbitrary as
regards death; and as for intermediate points, no doubt it would be more
strictly accurate to say, “you are the now phase of the person I met last
night,” or “you are the being which has been evolved from the being I met
last night,” than “you are the person I met last night.” But life is too
short for the pen-phrases which would crowd upon us from every quarter,
if we did not set our face against all that is under the surface of
things, unless, that is to say, the going beneath the surface is, for
some special chance of profit, excusable or capable of extenuation.
CHAPTER VI.
PERSONAL IDENTITY—(_continued_).
HOW arbitrary current notions concerning identity really are, may perhaps
be perceived by reflecting upon some of the many different phases of
reproduction.
Direct reproduction in which a creation reproduces another, the
_facsimile_, or nearly so, of itself may perhaps occur among the lowest
forms of animal life; but it is certainly not the rule among beings of a
higher order.
A hen lays an egg, which egg becomes a chicken, which chicken, in the
course of time, becomes a hen.
A moth lays an egg, which egg becomes a caterpillar, which caterpillar,
after going through several stages, becomes a chrysalis, which chrysalis
becomes a moth.
A medusa begets a ciliated larva, the larva begets a polyp, the polyp
begets a strobila, and the strobila begets a medusa again; the cycle of
reproduction being completed in the fourth generation.
A frog lays an egg, which egg becomes a tadpole; the tadpole, after more
or fewer intermediate stages, becomes a frog.
The mammals lay eggs, which they hatch inside their own bodies, instead
of outside them; but the difference is one of degree and not of kind. In
all these cases how difficult is it to say where identity begins or ends,
or again where death begins or ends, or where reproduction begins or
ends.
How small and unimportant is the difference between the changes which a
caterpillar undergoes before becoming a moth, and those of a strobila
before becoming a medusa. Yet in the one case we say the caterpillar
does not die, but is changed (though, if the various changes in its
existence be produced metagenetically, as is the case with many insects,
it would appear to make a clean sweep of every organ of its existence,
and start _de novo_, growing a head where its feet were, and so on—at
least twice between its lives as caterpillar and butterfly); in this
case, however, we say the caterpillar does not die, but is changed;
being, nevertheless, one personality with the moth, into which it is
developed. But in the case of the strobila we say that it is not
changed, but dies, and is no part of the personality of the medusa.
We say the egg becomes the caterpillar, not by the death of the egg and
birth of the caterpillar, but by the ordinary process of nutrition and
waste—waste and repair—waste and repair continually. In like manner we
say the caterpillar becomes the chrysalis, and the chrysalis the moth,
not through the death of either one or the other, but by the development
of the same creature, and the ordinary processes of waste and repair.
But the medusa after three or four cycles becomes the medusa again, not,
we say, by these same processes of nutrition and waste, but by a series
of generations, each one involving an actual birth and an actual death.
Why this difference? Surely only because the changes in the offspring of
the medusa are marked by the leaving a little more husk behind them, and
that husk less shrivelled, than is left on the occasion of each change
between the caterpillar and the butterfly. A little more residuum, which
residuum, it may be, can move about; and though shrivelling from hour to
hour, may yet leave a little more offspring before it is reduced to
powder; or again, perhaps, because in the one case, though the actors are
changed, they are changed behind the scenes, and come on in parts and
dresses, more nearly resembling those of the original actors, than in the
other.
When the caterpillar emerges from the egg, almost all that was inside the
egg has become caterpillar; the shell is nearly empty, and cannot move;
therefore we do not count it, and call the caterpillar a continuation of
the egg’s existence, and personally identical with the egg. So with the
chrysalis and the moth; but after the moth has laid her eggs she can
still move her wings about, and she looks nearly as large as she did
before she laid them; besides, she may yet lay a few more, therefore we
do not consider the moth’s life as continued in the life of her eggs, but
rather in their husk, which we still call the moth, and which we say dies
in a day or two, and there is an end of it. Moreover, if we hold the
moth’s life to be continued in that of her eggs, we shall be forced to
admit her to be personally identical with each single egg, and, hence,
each egg to be identical with every other egg, as far as the past, and
community of memories, are concerned; and it is not easy at first to
break the spell which words have cast around us, and to feel that one
person may become many persons, and that many different persons may be
practically one and the same person, as far as their past experience is
concerned; and again, that two or more persons may unite and become one
person, with the memories and experiences of both, though this has been
actually the case with every one of us.
Our present way of looking at these matters is perfectly right and
reasonable, so long as we bear in mind that it is a _façon de parler_, a
sort of hieroglyphic which shall stand for the course of nature, but
nothing more. Repair (as is now universally admitted by physiologists)
is only a phase of reproduction, or rather reproduction and repair are
only phases of the same power; and again, death and the ordinary daily
waste of tissue, are phases of the same thing. As for identity it is
determined in any true sense of the word, not by death alone, but by a
combination of death and failure of issue, whether of mind or body.
To repeat. Wherever there is a separate centre of thought and action, we
see that it is connected with its successive stages of being, by a series
of infinitely small changes from moment to moment, with, perhaps, at
times more startling and rapid changes, but, nevertheless, with no such
sudden, complete, and unrepaired break up of the preceding condition, as
we shall agree in calling death. The branching out from it at different
times of new centres of thought and action, has commonly as little
appreciable effect upon the parent-stock as the fall of an apple full of
ripe seeds has upon an apple-tree; and though the life of the parent,
from the date of the branching off of such personalities, is more truly
continued in these than in the residuum of its own life, we should find
ourselves involved in a good deal of trouble if we were commonly to take
this view of the matter. The residuum has generally the upper hand. He
has more money, and can eat up his new life more easily than his new
life, him. A moral residuum will therefore prefer to see the remainder
of his life in his own person, than in that of his descendants, and will
act accordingly. Hence we, in common with most other living beings,
ignore the offspring as forming part of the personality of the parent,
except in so far as that we make the father liable for its support and
for its extravagances (than which no greater proof need be wished that
the law is at heart a philosopher, and perceives the completeness of the
personal identity between father and son) for twenty-one years from
birth. In other respects we are accustomed, probably rather from
considerations of practical convenience than as the result of pure
reason, to ignore the identity between parent and offspring as completely
as we ignore personality before birth. With these exceptions, however,
the common opinion concerning personal identity is reasonable enough, and
is found to consist neither in consciousness of such identity, nor yet in
the power of recollecting its various phases (for it is plain that
identity survives the distinction or suspension of both these), but in
the fact that the various stages appear to the majority of people to have
been in some way or other linked together.
For a very little reflection will show that identity, as commonly
predicated of living agents, does not consist in identity of matter, of
which there is no same particle in the infant, we will say, and the
octogenarian into whom he has developed. Nor, again, does it depend upon
sameness of form or fashion; for personality is felt to survive frequent
and radical modification of structure, as in the case of caterpillars and
other insects. Mr. Darwin, quoting from Professor Owen, tells us (Plants
and Animals under Domestication, vol. ii. p. 362, ed. 1875), that in the
case of what is called metagenetic development, “the new parts are not
moulded upon the inner surfaces of the old ones. The plastic force has
changed its mode of operation. _The outer case_, _and all that gave form
and character to the precedent individual_, _perish_, _and are cast off_;
_they are not changed_ into the corresponding parts of the same
individual. These are due to a new and distinct developmental process.”
Assuredly, there is more birth and death in the world than is dreamt of
by the greater part of us; but it is so masked, and on the whole, so
little to our purpose, that we fail to see it. Yet radical and sweeping
as the changes of organism above described must be, we do not feel them
to be more a bar to personal identity than the considerable changes which
take place in the structure of our own bodies between youth and old age.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of this is to be found in the case
of some Echinoderms, concerning which Mr. Darwin tells us, that “the
animal in the second stage of development is formed almost like a bud
within the animal of the first stage, the latter being then cast off like
an old vestment, yet sometimes maintaining for a short period an
independent vitality” (“Plants and Animals under Domestication,” vol. ii.
p. 362, ed. 1875).
Nor yet does personality depend upon any consciousness or sense of such
personality on the part of the creature itself—it is not likely that the
moth remembers having been a caterpillar, more than we ourselves remember
having been children of a day old. It depends simply upon the fact that
the various phases of existence have been linked together, by links which
we agree in considering sufficient to cause identity, and that they have
flowed the one out of the other in what we see as a continuous, though it
may be at times, a troubled stream. This is the very essence of
personality, but it involves the probable unity of all animal and
vegetable life, as being, in reality, nothing but one single creature, of
which the component members are but, as it were, blood corpuscles or
individual cells; life being a sort of leaven, which, if once introduced
into the world, will leaven it altogether; or of fire, which will consume
all it can burn; or of air or water, which will turn most things into
themselves. Indeed, no difficulty would probably be felt about admitting
the continued existence of personal identity between parents and their
offspring through all time (there being no _sudden_ break at any time
between the existence of any maternal parent and that of its offspring),
were it not that after a certain time the changes in outward appearance
between descendants and ancestors become very great, the two seeming to
stand so far apart, that it seems absurd in any way to say that they are
one and the same being; much in the same way as after a time—though
exactly when no one can say—the Thames becomes the sea. Moreover, the
separation of the identity is practically of far greater importance to it
than its continuance. We want to be ourselves; we do not want any one
else to claim part and parcel of our identity. This community of
identities is not found to answer in everyday life. When then our love
of independence is backed up by the fact that continuity of life between
parents and offspring is a matter which depends on things which are a
good deal hidden, and that thus birth gives us an opportunity of
pretending that there has been a sudden leap into a separate life; when
also we have regard to the utter ignorance of embryology, which prevailed
till quite recently, it is not surprising that our ordinary language
should be found to have regard to what is important and obvious, rather
than to what is not quite obvious, and is quite unimportant.
Personality is the creature of time and space, changing, as time changes,
imperceptibly; we are therefore driven to deal with it as with all
continuous and blending things; as with time, for example, itself, which
we divide into days, and seasons, and times, and years, into divisions
that are often arbitrary, but coincide, on the whole, as nearly as we can
make them do so, with the more marked changes which we can observe. We
lay hold, in fact, of anything we can catch; the most important feature
in any existence as regards ourselves being that which we can best lay
hold of rather than that which is most essential to the existence itself.
We can lay hold of the continued personality of the egg and the moth into
which the egg develops, but it is less easy to catch sight of the
continued personality between the moth and the eggs which she lays; yet
the one continuation of personality is just as true and free from quibble
as the other. A moth becomes each egg that she lays, and that she does
so, she will in good time show by doing, now that she has got a fresh
start, as near as may be what she did when first she was an egg, and then
a moth, before; and this I take it, so far as I can gather from looking
at life and things generally, she would not be able to do if she had not
travelled the same road often enough already, to be able to know it in
her sleep and blindfold, that is to say, to remember it without any
conscious act of memory.
So also a grain of wheat is linked with an ear, containing, we will say,
a dozen grains, by a series of changes so subtle that we cannot say at
what moment the original grain became the blade, nor when each ear of the
head became possessed of an individual centre of action. To say that
each grain of the head is personally identical with the original grain
would perhaps be an abuse of terms; but it can be no abuse to say that
each grain is a continuation of the personality of the original grain,
and if so, of every grain in the chain of its own ancestry; and that, as
being such a continuation, it must be stored with the memories and
experiences of its past existences, to be recollected under the
circumstances most favourable to recollection, _i.e._, when under similar
conditions to those when the impression was last made and last
remembered. Truly, then, in each case the new egg and the new grain _is_
the egg, and the grain from which its parent sprang, as completely as the
full-grown ox is the calf from which it has grown.
Again, in the case of some weeping trees, whose boughs spring up into
fresh trees when they have reached the ground, who shall say at what time
they cease to be members of the parent tree? In the case of cuttings
from plants it is easy to elude the difficulty by making a parade of the
sharp and sudden act of separation from the parent stock, but this is
only a piece of mental sleight of hand; the cutting remains as much part
of its parent plant as though it had never been severed from it; it goes
on profiting by the experience which it had before it was cut off, as
much as though it had never been cut off at all. This will be more
readily seen in the case of worms which have been cut in half. Let a
worm be cut in half, and the two halves will become fresh worms; which of
them is the original worm? Surely both. Perhaps no simpler case than
this could readily be found of the manner in which personality eludes us,
the moment we try to investigate its real nature. There are few ideas
which on first consideration appear so simple, and none which becomes
more utterly incapable of limitation or definition as soon as it is
examined closely.
Finally, Mr. Darwin (“Plants and Animals under Domestication,” vol. ii.
p. 38, ed. 1875), writes—
“Even with plants multiplied by bulbs, layers, &c., which may _in one
sense_ be said to form part of the same individual,” &c., &c.; and again,
p. 58, “The same rule holds good with plants when propagated by bulbs,
offsets, &c., which _in one sense_ still form parts of the same
individual,” &c. In each of these passages it is plain that the
difficulty of separating the personality of the offspring from that of
the parent plant is present to his mind. Yet, p. 351 of the same volume
as above, he tells us that asexual generation “is effected in many
ways—by the formation of buds of various kinds, and by fissiparous
generation, that is, by spontaneous or artificial division.” The
multiplication of plants by bulbs and layers clearly comes under this
head, nor will any essential difference be felt between one kind of
asexual generation and another; if, then, the offspring formed by bulbs
and layers is in one sense part of the original plant, so also, it would
appear, is all offspring developed by asexual generation in its manifold
phrases.
If we now turn to p. 357, we find the conclusion arrived at, as it would
appear, on the most satisfactory evidence, that “sexual and asexual
reproduction are not seen to differ essentially; and . . . that asexual
reproduction, the power of regrowth, and development are all parts of one
and the same great law.” Does it not then follow, quite reasonably and
necessarily, that all offspring, however generated, is _in one sense_
part of the individuality of its parent or parents. The question,
therefore, turns upon “in what sense” this may be said to be the case?
To which I would venture to reply, “In the same sense as the parent plant
(which is but the representative of the outside matter which it has
assimilated during growth, and of its own powers of development) is the
same individual that it was when it was itself an offset, or a cow the
same individual that it was when it was a calf—but no otherwise.”
Not much difficulty will be felt about supposing the offset of a plant,
to be imbued with the memory of the past history of the plant of which it
is an offset. It is part of the plant itself; and will know whatever the
plant knows. Why, then, should there be more difficulty in supposing the
offspring of the highest mammals, to remember in a profound but
unselfconscious way, the anterior history of the creatures of which they
too have been part and parcel?
Personal identity, then, is much like species itself. It is now, thanks
to Mr. Darwin, generally held that species blend or have blended into one
another; so that any possibility of arrangement and apparent subdivision
into definite groups, is due to the suppression by death both of
individuals and whole genera, which, had they been now existing, would
have linked all living beings by a series of gradations so subtle that
little classification could have been attempted. How it is that the one
great personality of life as a whole, should have split itself up into so
many centres of thought and action, each one of which is wholly, or at
any rate nearly, unconscious of its connection with the other members,
instead of having grown up into a huge polyp, or as it were coral reef or
compound animal over the whole world, which should be conscious but of
its own one single existence; how it is that the daily waste of this
creature should be carried on by the conscious death of its individual
members, instead of by the unconscious waste of tissue which goes on in
the bodies of each individual (if indeed the tissue which we waste daily
in our own bodies is so unconscious of its birth and death as we
suppose); how, again, that the daily repair of this huge creature life
should have become decentralised, and be carried on by conscious
reproduction on the part of its component items, instead of by the
unconscious nutrition of the whole from a single centre, as the nutrition
of our own bodies would appear (though perhaps falsely) to be carried on;
these are matters upon which I dare not speculate here, but on which some
reflections may follow in subsequent chapters.
CHAPTER VII.
OUR SUBORDINATE PERSONALITIES.
WE have seen that we can apprehend neither the beginning nor the end of
our personality, which comes up out of infinity as an island out of the
sea, so gently, that none can say when it is first visible on our mental
horizon, and fades away in the case of those who leave offspring, so
imperceptibly that none can say when it is out of sight. But, like the
island, whether we can see it or no, it is always there. Not only are we
infinite as regards time, but we are so also as regards extension, being
so linked on to the external world that we cannot say where we either
begin or end. If those who so frequently declare that man is a finite
creature would point out his boundaries, it might lead to a better
understanding.
Nevertheless, we are in the habit of considering that our personality, or
soul, no matter where it begins or ends, and no matter what it comprises,
is nevertheless a single thing, uncompounded of other souls. Yet there
is nothing more certain than that this is not at all the case, but that
every individual person is a compound creature, being made up of an
infinite number of distinct centres of sensation and will, each one of
which is personal, and has a soul and individual existence, a
reproductive system, intelligence, and memory of its own, with probably
its hopes and fears, its times of scarcity and repletion, and a strong
conviction that it is itself the centre of the universe.
True, no one is aware of more than one individuality in his own person at
one time. We are, indeed, often greatly influenced by other people, so
much so, that we act on many occasions in accordance with their will
rather than our own, making our actions answer to their sensations, and
register the conclusions of their cerebral action and not our own; for
the time being, we become so completely part of them, that we are ready
to do things most distasteful and dangerous to us, if they think it for
their advantage that we should do so. Thus we sometimes see people
become mere processes of their wives or nearest relations. Yet there is
a something which blinds us, so that we cannot see how completely we are
possessed by the souls which influence us upon these occasions. We still
think we are ourselves, and ourselves only, and are as certain as we can
be of any fact, that we are single sentient beings, uncompounded of other
sentient beings, and that our action is determined by the sole operation
of a single will.
But in reality, over and above this possession of our souls by others of
our own species, the will of the lower animals often enters into our
bodies and possesses them, making us do as they will, and not as we will;
as, for example, when people try to drive pigs, or are run away with by a
restive horse, or are attacked by a savage animal which masters them. It
is absurd to say that a person is a single “ego” when he is in the
clutches of a lion. Even when we are alone, and uninfluenced by other
people except in so far as we remember their wishes, we yet generally
conform to the usages which the current feeling of our peers has taught
us to respect; their will having so mastered our original nature, that,
do what we may, we can never again separate ourselves and dwell in the
isolation of our own single personality. And even though we succeeded in
this, and made a clean sweep of every mental influence which had ever
been brought to bear upon us, and though at the same time we were alone
in some desert where there was neither beast nor bird to attract our
attention or in any way influence our action, yet we could not escape the
parasites which abound within us; whose action, as every medical man well
knows, is often such as to drive men to the commission of grave crimes,
or to throw them into convulsions, make lunatics of them, kill them—when
but for the existence and course of conduct pursued by these parasites
they would have done no wrong to any man.
These parasites—are they part of us or no? Some are plainly not so in
any strict sense of the word, yet their action may, in cases which it is
unnecessary to detail, affect us so powerfully that we are irresistibly
impelled to act in such or such a manner; and yet we are as wholly
unconscious of any impulse outside of our own “ego” as though they were
part of ourselves; others again are essential to our very existence, as
the corpuscles of the blood, which the best authorities concur in
supposing to be composed of an infinite number of living souls, on whose
welfare the healthy condition of our blood, and hence of our whole
bodies, depends. We breathe that they may breathe, not that we may do
so; we only care about oxygen in so far as the infinitely small beings
which course up and down in our veins care about it: the whole
arrangement and mechanism of our lungs may be our doing, but is for their
convenience, and they only serve us because it suits their purpose to do
so, as long as we serve them. Who shall draw the line between the
parasites which are part of us, and the parasites which are not part of
us? Or again, between the influence of those parasites which are within
us, but are yet not _us_, and the external influence of other sentient
beings and our fellow-men? There is no line possible. Everything melts
away into everything else; there are no hard edges; it is only from a
little distance that we see the effect as of individual features and
existences. When we go close up, there is nothing but a blur and
confused mass of apparently meaningless touches, as in a picture by
Turner.
The following passage from Mr. Darwin’s provisional theory of Pangenesis,
will sufficiently show that the above is no strange and paradoxical view
put forward wantonly, but that it follows as a matter of course from the
conclusions arrived at by those who are acknowledged leaders in the
scientific world. Mr. Darwin writes thus:—
“_The functional independence of the elements or units of the
body_.—Physiologists agree that the whole organism consists of a
multitude of elemental parts, which are to a great extent independent of
one another. Each organ, says Claude Bernard, has its proper life, its
autonomy; it can develop and reproduce itself independently of the
adjoining tissues. A great German authority, Virchow, asserts still more
emphatically that each system consists of ‘an enormous mass of minute
centres of action. . . . Every element has its own special action, and
even though it derive its stimulus to activity from other parts, yet
alone effects the actual performance of duties. . . . Every single
epithelial and muscular fibre-cell leads a sort of parasitical existence
in relation to the rest of the body. . . . Every single bone corpuscle
really possesses conditions of nutrition peculiar to itself.’ Each
element, as Sir J. Paget remarks, lives its appointed time, and then
dies, and is replaced after being cast off and absorbed. I presume that
no physiologist doubts that, for instance, each bone corpuscle of the
finger differs from the corresponding corpuscle of the corresponding
joint of the toe,” &c., &c. (“Plants and Animals under Domestication,”
vol. ii. pp. 364, 365, ed. 1875).
In a work on heredity by M. Ribot, I find him saying, “Some recent
authors attribute a memory” (and if so, surely every attribute of
complete individuality) “to every organic element of the body;” among
them Dr. Maudsley, who is quoted by M. Ribot, as saying, “The permanent
effects of a particular virus, such as that of the variola, in the
constitution, shows that the organic element remembers for the remainder
of its life certain modifications it has received. The manner in which a
cicatrix in a child’s finger grows with the growth of the body, proves,
as has been shown by Paget, that the organic element of the part does not
forget the impression it has received. What has been said about the
different nervous centres of the body demonstrates the existence of a
memory in the nerve cells diffused through the heart and intestines; in
those of the spinal cord, in the cells of the motor ganglia, and in the
cells of the cortical substance of the cerebal hemispheres.”
Now, if words have any meaning at all, it must follow from the passages
quoted above, that each cell in the human body is a person with an
intelligent soul, of a low class, perhaps, but still differing from our
own more complex soul in degree, and not in kind; and, like ourselves,
being born, living, and dying. So that each single creature, whether man
or beast, proves to be as a ray of white light, which, though single, is
compounded of the red, blue, and yellow rays. It would appear, then, as
though “we,” “our souls,” or “selves,” or “personalities,” or by whatever
name we may prefer to be called, are but the _consensus_ and full flowing
stream of countless sensations and impulses on the part of our tributary
souls or “selves,” who probably know no more that we exist, and that they
exist as part of us, than a microscopic water-flea knows the results of
spectrum analysis, or than an agricultural labourer knows the working of
the British constitution: and of whom we know no more, until some
misconduct on our part, or some confusion of ideas on theirs, has driven
them into insurrection, than we do of the habits and feelings of some
class widely separated from our own.
These component souls are of many and very different natures, living in
territories which are to them vast continents, and rivers, and seas, but
which are yet only the bodies of our other component souls; coral reefs
and sponge-beds within us; the animal itself being a kind of mean
proportional between its house and its soul, and none being able to say
where house ends and animal begins, more than they can say where animal
ends and soul begins. For our bones within us are but inside walls and
buttresses, that is to say, houses constructed of lime and stone, as it
were, by coral insects; and our houses without us are but outside bones,
a kind of exterior skeleton or shell, so that we perish of cold if
permanently and suddenly deprived of the coverings which warm us and
cherish us, as the wing of a hen cherishes her chickens. If we consider
the shells of many living creatures, we shall find it hard to say whether
they are rather houses, or part of the animal itself, being, as they are,
inseparable from the animal, without the destruction of its personality.
Is it possible, then, to avoid imagining that if we have within us so
many tributary souls, so utterly different from the soul which they unite
to form, that they neither can perceive us, nor we them, though it is in
us that they live and move and have their being, and though we are what
we are, solely as the result of their co-operation—is it possible to
avoid imagining that we may be ourselves atoms, undesignedly combining to
form some vaster being, though we are utterly incapable of perceiving
that any such being exists, or of realising the scheme or scope of our
own combination? And this, too, not a spiritual being, which, without
matter, or what we think matter of some sort, is as complete nonsense to
us as though men bade us love and lean upon an intelligent vacuum, but a
being with what is virtually flesh and blood and bones; with organs,
senses, dimensions, in some way analogous to our own, into some other
part of which being, at the time of our great change we must infallibly
re-enter, starting clean anew, with bygones bygones, and no more ache for
ever from either age or antecedents. Truly, sufficient for the life is
the evil thereof. Any speculations of ours concerning the nature of such
a being, must be as futile and little valuable as those of a blood
corpuscle might be expected to be concerning the nature of man; but if I
were myself a blood corpuscle, I should be amused at making the discovery
that I was not only enjoying life in my own sphere, but was _bonâ fide_
part of an animal which would not die with myself, and in which I might
thus think of myself as continuing to live to all eternity, or to what,
as far as my power of thought would carry me, must seem practically
eternal. But, after all, the amusement would be of a rather dreary
nature.
On the other hand, if I were the being of whom such an introspective
blood corpuscle was a component item, I should conceive he served me
better by attending to my blood and making himself a successful
corpuscle, than by speculating about my nature. He would serve me best
by serving himself best, without being over curious. I should expect
that my blood might suffer if his brain were to become too active. If,
therefore, I could discover the vein in which he was, I should let him
out to begin life anew in some other and, _quâ_ me, more profitable
capacity.
With the units of our bodies it is as with the stars of heaven: there is
neither speech nor language, but their voices are heard among them. Our
will is the _fiat_ of their collective wisdom, as sanctioned in their
parliament, the brain; it is they who make us do whatever we do—it is
they who should be rewarded if they have done well, or hanged if they
have committed murder. When the balance of power is well preserved among
them, when they respect each other’s rights and work harmoniously
together, then we thrive and are well; if we are ill, it is because they
are quarrelling with themselves, or are gone on strike for this or that
addition to their environment, and our doctor must pacify or chastise
them as best he may. They are we and we are they; and when we die it is
but a redistribution of the balance of power among them or a change of
dynasty, the result, it may be, of heroic struggle, with more epics and
love romances than we could read from now to the Millennium, if they were
so written down that we could comprehend them.
It is plain, then, that the more we examine the question of personality
the more it baffles us, the only safeguard against utter confusion and
idleness of thought being to fall back upon the superficial and common
sense view, and refuse to tolerate discussions which seem to hold out
little prospect of commercial value, and which would compel us, if
logically followed, to be at the inconvenience of altering our opinions
upon matters which we have come to consider as settled.
And we observe that this is what is practically done by some of our
ablest philosophers, who seem unwilling, if one may say so without
presumption, to accept the conclusions to which their own experiments and
observations would seem to point.
Dr. Carpenter, for example, quotes the well-known experiments upon
headless frogs. If we cut off a frog’s head and pinch any part of its
skin, the animal at once begins to move away with the same regularity as
though the brain had not been removed. Flourens took guinea-pigs,
deprived them of the cerebral lobes, and then irritated their skin; the
animals immediately walked, leaped, and trotted about, but when the
irritation was discontinued they ceased to move. Headless birds, under
excitation, can still perform with their wings the rhythmic movements of
flying. But here are some facts more curious still, and more difficult
of explanation. If we take a frog or a strong and healthy triton, and
subject it to various experiments; if we touch, pinch, or burn it with
acetic acid, and if then, after decapitating the animal, we subject it to
the same experiments, it will be seen that the reactions are exactly the
same; it will strive to be free of the pain, and to shake off the acetic
acid that is burning it; it will bring its foot up to the part of its
body that is irritated, and this movement of the member will follow the
irritation wherever it may be produced.
The above is mainly taken from M. Ribot’s work on heredity rather than
Dr. Carpenter’s, because M. Ribot tells us that the head of the frog was
actually cut off, a fact which does not appear so plainly in Dr.
Carpenter’s allusion to the same experiments. But Dr. Carpenter tells us
that _after the brain of a frog has been removed_—which would seem to be
much the same thing as though its head were cut off—“if acetic acid be
applied over the upper and under part of the thigh, the foot of the same
side will wipe it away; _but if that foot be cut off_, _after some
ineffectual efforts and a short period of inaction_,” during which it is
hard not to surmise that the headless body is considering what it had
better do under the circumstances, “_the same movement will be made by
the foot of the opposite side_,” which, to ordinary people, would convey
the impression that the headless body was capable of feeling the
impressions it had received, and of reasoning upon them by a
psychological act; and this of course involves the possession of a soul
of some sort.
Here is a frog whose right thigh you burn with acetic acid. Very
naturally it tries to get at the place with its right foot to remove the
acid. You then cut off the frog’s head, and put more acetic acid on the
some place: the headless frog, or rather the body of the late frog, does
just what the frog did before its head was cut off—it tries to get at the
place with its right foot. You now cut off its right foot: the headless
body deliberates, and after a while tries to do with its left foot what
it can no longer do with its right. Plain matter-of-fact people will
draw their own inference. They will not be seduced from the superficial
view of the matter. They will say that the headless body can still, to
some extent, feel, think, and act, and if so, that it must have a living
soul.
Dr. Carpenter writes as follows:—“Now the performance of these, as well
as of many other movements, that show a most remarkable adaptation to a
purpose, might be supposed to indicate that sensations are called up by
the _impressions_, and that the animal can not only _feel_, but can
voluntarily direct its movements so as to get rid of the irritation which
annoys it. But such an inference would be inconsistent with other facts.
In the first place, the motions performed under such circumstances are
never spontaneous, but are always excited by a stimulus of some kind.”
Here we pause to ask ourselves whether any action of any creature under
any circumstances is ever excited without “stimulus of some kind,” and
unless we can answer this question in the affirmative, it is not easy to
see how Dr. Carpenter’s objection is valid.
“Thus,” he continues, “a decapitated frog” (here then we have it that the
frog’s head was actually cut off) “after the first violent convulsive
moments occasioned by the operation have passed away, remains at rest
until it is touched; and then the leg, or its whole body may be thrown
into sudden action, which suddenly subsides again.” (How does this
quiescence when it no longer feels anything show that the “leg or whole
body” had not perceived something which made it feel when it was not
quiescent?)—“Again we find that such movements may be performed not only
when the brain has been removed, the spinal cord remaining entire, but
also when the spinal cord has been itself cut across, so as to be divided
into two or more portions, each of them completely isolated from each
other, and from other parts of the nervous centres. Thus, if the head of
a frog be cut off, and its spinal cord be divided in the middle of the
back, so that its fore legs remain connected with the upper part, and its
hind legs with the lower, each pair of members may be excited to
movements by stimulants applied to itself; but the two pairs will not
exhibit any consentaneous motions, as they will do when the spinal cord
is undivided.”
This may be put perhaps more plainly thus. If you take a frog and cut it
into three pieces—say, the head for one piece, the fore legs and shoulder
for another, and the hind legs for a third—and then irritate any one of
these pieces, you will find it move much as it would have moved under
like irritation if the animal had remained undivided, but you will no
longer find any concert between the movements of the three pieces; that
is to say, if you irritate the head, the other two pieces will remain
quiet, and if you irritate the hind legs, you will excite no action in
the fore legs or head.
Dr. Carpenter continues: “Or if the spinal cord be cut across without the
removal of the brain, the lower limbs may be _excited_ to movement by an
appropriate stimulant, though the animal has clearly no power over them,
whilst the upper part remains under its control as completely as before.”
Why are the head and shoulders “the animal” more than the hind legs under
these circumstances? Neither half can exist long without the other; the
two parts, therefore, being equally important to each other, we have
surely as good a right to claim the title of “the animal” for the hind
legs, and to maintain that they have no power over the head and
shoulders, as any one else has to claim the animalship for these last.
What we say is, that the animal has ceased to exist as a frog on being
cut in half, and that the two halves are no longer, either of them, the
frog, but are simply pieces of still living organism, each of which has a
soul of its own, being capable of sensation, and of intelligent
psychological action as the consequence of sensations, though the one
part has probably a much higher and more intelligent soul than the other,
and neither part has a soul for a moment comparable in power and
durability to that of the original frog.
“Now it is scarcely conceivable,” continues Dr Carpenter, “that in this
last case sensations should be felt and volition exercised through the
instrumentality of that portion of the spinal cord which remains
connected with the nerves of the posterior extremities, but which is cut
off from the brain. For if it were so, there must be two distinct
centres of sensation and will in the same animal, the attributes of the
brain not being affected; and by dividing the spinal cord into two or
more segments we might thus create in the body of one animal two or more
such independent centres in addition to that which holds its proper place
in the head.”
In the face of the facts before us, it does not seen far-fetched to
suppose that there _are_ two, or indeed an infinite number of centres of
sensation and will in an animal, the attributes of whose brain are not
affected but that these centres, while the brain is intact, habitually
act in connection with and in subordination to that central authority; as
in the ordinary state of the fish trade, fish is caught, we will say, at
Yarmouth, sent up to London, and then sent down to Yarmouth again to be
eaten, instead of being eaten at Yarmouth when caught. But from the
phenomena exhibited by three pieces of an animal, it is impossible to
argue that the causes of the phenomena were present in the quondam animal
itself; the memory of an infinite series of generations having so
habituated the local centres of sensation and will, to act in concert
with the central government, that as long as they can get at that
government, they are absolutely incapable of acting independently. When
thrown on their own resources, they are so demoralised by ages of
dependence on the brain, that they die after a few efforts at
self-assertion, from sheer unfamiliarity with the position, and inability
to recognise themselves when disjointed rudely from their habitual
associations.
In conclusion, Dr. Carpenter says, “To say that two or more distinct
centres of sensation and will are present in such a case, would really be
the same as saying that we have the power of constituting two or more
distinct egos in one body, _which is manifestly absurd_.” One sees the
absurdity of maintaining that we can make one frog into two frogs by
cutting a frog into two pieces, but there is no absurdity in believing
that the two pieces have minor centres of sensation and intelligence
within themselves, which, when the animal is entire, act in much concert
with the brain, and with each other, that it is not easy to detect their
originally autonomous character, but which, when deprived of their power
of acting in concert, are thrown back upon earlier habit, now too long
forgotten to be capable of permanent resumption.
Illustrations are apt to mislead, nevertheless they may perhaps be
sometimes tolerated. Suppose, for example, that London to the extent,
say, of a circle with a six-mile radius from Charing Cross, were utterly
annihilated in the space of five minutes during the Session of
Parliament. Suppose, also, that two entirely impassable barriers, say of
five miles in width, half a mile high, and red hot, were thrown across
England; one from Gloucester to Harwich, and another from Liverpool to
Hull, and at the same time the sea were to become a mass of molten lava,
so no water communication should be possible; the political, mercantile,
social, and intellectual life of the country would be convulsed in a
manner which it is hardly possible to realise. Hundreds of thousands
would die through the dislocation of existing arrangements.
Nevertheless, each of the three parts into which England was divided
would show signs of provincial life for which it would find certain
imperfect organisms ready to hand. Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, and
Manchester, accustomed though they are to act in subordination to London,
would probably take up the reins of government in their several sections;
they would make their town councils into local governments, appoint
judges from the ablest of their magistrates, organise relief committees,
and endeavour as well as they could to remove any acetic acid that might
be now poured on Wiltshire, Warwickshire, or Northumberland, but no
concert between the three divisions of the country would be any longer
possible. Should we be justified, under these circumstances, in calling
any of the three parts of England, England? Or, again, when we observed
the provincial action to be as nearly like that of the original undivided
nation as circumstances would allow, should we be justified in saying
that the action, such as it was, was not political? And, lastly, should
we for a moment think that an admission that the provincial action was of
a _bonâ fide_ political character would involve the supposition that
England, undivided, had more than one “ego” as England, no matter how
many subordinate “egos” might go to the making of it, each one of which
proved, on emergency, to be capable of a feeble autonomy?
M. Ribot would seem to take a juster view of the phenomenon when he says
(p. 222 of the English translation)—
“We can hardly say that here the movements are co-ordinated like those of
a machine; the acts of the animal are adapted to a special end; we find
in them the characters of intelligence and will, a knowledge and choice
of means, since they are as variable as the cause which provokes them.
“If these, then, and similar acts, were such that both the impressions
which produced them and the acts themselves were perceived by the animal,
would they not be called psychological? Is there not in them all that
constitutes an intelligent act—adaptation of means to ends; not a general
and vague adaptation, but a determinate adaptation to a determinate end?
In the reflex action we find all that constitutes in some sort the very
groundwork of an intelligent act—that is to say, the same series of
stages, in the same order, with the same relations between them. We have
thus, in the reflex act, all that constitutes the psychological act
except consciousness. The reflex act, which is physiological, differs in
nothing from the psychological act, save only in this—that it is without
consciousness.”
The only remark which suggests itself upon this, is that we have no right
to say that the part of the animal which moves does not also perceive its
own act of motion, as much as it has perceived the impression which has
caused it to move. It is plain “the animal” cannot do so, for the animal
cannot be said to be any longer in existence. Half a frog is not a frog;
nevertheless, if the hind legs are capable, as M. Ribot appears to admit,
of “perceiving the impression” which produces their action, and if in
that action there is (and there would certainly appear to be so) “all
that constitutes an intelligent act, . . . a determinate adaptation to a
determinate end,” one fails to see on what ground they should be supposed
to be incapable of perceiving their own action, in which case the action
of the hind legs becomes distinctly psychological.
Secondly, M. Ribot appears to forget that it is the tendency of all
psychological action to become unconscious on being frequently repeated,
and that no line can be drawn between psychological acts and those reflex
acts which he calls physiological. All we can say is, that there are
acts which we do without knowing that we do them; but the analogy of many
habits which we have been able to watch in their passage from laborious
consciousness to perfect unconsciousness, would suggest that all action
is really psychological, only that the soul’s action becomes invisible to
ourselves after it has been repeated sufficiently often—that there is, in
fact, a law as simple as in the case of optics or gravitation, whereby
conscious perception of any action shall vary inversely as the square,
say, of its being repeated.
It is easy to understand the advantage to the individual of this power of
doing things rightly without thinking about them; for were there no such
power, the attention would be incapable of following the multitude of
matters which would be continually arresting it; those animals which had
developed a power of working automatically, and without a recurrence to
first principles when they had once mastered any particular process,
would, in the common course of events, stand a better chance of
continuing their species, and thus of transmitting their new power to
their descendants.
M. Ribot declines to pursue the subject further, and has only cursorily
alluded to it. He writes, however, that, on the “obscure problem” of the
difference between reflex and psychological actions, some say, “when
there can be no consciousness, because the brain is wanting, there is, in
spite of appearances, only mechanism,” whilst others maintain, that “when
there is selection, reflection, psychical action, there must also be
consciousness in spite of appearances.” A little later (p. 223), he
says, “It is quite possible that if a headless animal could live a
sufficient length of time” (that is to say, if _the hind legs of an
animal_ could live a sufficient length of time without the brain), “there
would be found in it” (_them_) “a consciousness like that of the lower
species, which would consist merely in the faculty of apprehending the
external world.” (Why merely? It is more than apprehending the outside
world to be able to try to do a thing with one’s left foot, when one
finds that one cannot do it with one’s right.) “It would not be correct
to say that the amphioxus, the only one among fishes and vertebrata which
has a spinal cord without a brain, has no consciousness because it has no
brain; and if it be admitted that the little ganglia of the invertebrata
can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for the spinal cord.”
We conclude, therefore, that it is within the common scope and meaning of
the words “personal identity,” not only that one creature can become many
as the moth becomes manifold in her eggs, but that each individual may be
manifold in the sense of being compounded of a vast number of subordinate
individualities which have their separate lives within him, with their
hopes, and fears, and intrigues, being born and dying within us, many
generations, of them during our single lifetime.
“An organic being,” writes Mr. Darwin, “is a microcosm, a little
universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably
minute, and numerous as the stars in heaven.”
As these myriads of smaller organisms are parts and processes of us, so
are we but parts and processes of life at large.
CHAPTER VIII.
APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS—THE ASSIMILATION OF OUTSIDE MATTER.
LET us now return to the position which we left at the end of the fourth
chapter. We had then concluded that the self-development of each new
life in succeeding generations—the various stages through which it passes
(as it would appear, at first sight, without rhyme or reason)—the manner
in whi
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