The Project Gutenberg EBook of Luck or Cunning?, by Samuel Butler (#11 in our series by Samuel Butler) Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: Luck or Cunning? Author: Samuel Butler Release Date: January, 2004 [EBook #4967] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 5, 2002] [Most recently updated: April 5, 2002] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII
Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk, from the
1922 Jonathan Cape edition.
LUCK, OR CUNNING AS THE MAIN MEANS OF ORGANIC MODIFICATION
NOTE
This second edition of Luck, or Cunning? is a reprint of the
first edition, dated 1887, but actually published in November, 1886.
The only alterations of any consequence are in the Index, which has
been enlarged by the incorporation of several entries made by the author
in a copy of the book which came into my possession on the death of
his literary executor, Mr. R. A. Streatfeild. I thank Mr. G. W.
Webb, of the University Library, Cambridge, for the care and skill with
which he has made the necessary alterations; it was a troublesome job
because owing to the re-setting, the pagination was no longer the same.
Luck, or Cunning? is the fourth of Butler’s evolution books;
it was followed in 1890 by three articles in The Universal Review
entitled “The Deadlock in Darwinism” (republished in
The Humour of Homer), after which he published no more upon that
subject.
In this book, as he says in his Introduction, he insists upon two main
points: (1) the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and
(2) the reintroduction of design into organic development; and these
two points he treats as though they have something of that physical
life with which they are so closely associated. He was aware that
what he had to say was likely to prove more interesting to future generations
than to his immediate public, “but any book that desires to see
out a literary three-score years and ten must offer something to future
generations as well as to its own.” By next year one half
of the three-score years and ten will have passed, and the new generation
by their constant enquiries for the work have already begun to show
their appreciation of Butler’s method of treating the subject,
and their readiness to listen to what was addressed to them as well
as to their fathers.
HENRY FESTING JONES.
March, 1920.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
This book, as I have said in my concluding chapter, has turned out very
different from the one I had it in my mind to write when I began it.
It arose out of a conversation with the late Mr. Alfred Tylor soon after
his paper on the growth of trees and protoplasmic continuity was read
before the Linnean Society - that is to say, in December, 1884 - and
I proposed to make the theory concerning the subdivision of organic
life into animal and vegetable, which I have broached in my concluding
chapter, the main feature of the book. One afternoon, on leaving
Mr. Tylor’s bedside, much touched at the deep disappointment he
evidently felt at being unable to complete the work he had begun so
ably, it occurred to me that it might be some pleasure to him if I promised
to dedicate my own book to him, and thus, however unworthy it might
be, connect it with his name. It occurred to me, of course, also
that the honour to my own book would be greater than any it could confer,
but the time was not one for balancing considerations nicely, and when
I made my suggestion to Mr. Tylor on the last occasion that I ever saw
him, the manner in which he received it settled the question.
If he had lived I should no doubt have kept more closely to my
plan, and should probably have been furnished by him with much that
would have enriched the book and made it more worthy of his acceptance;
but this was not to be.
In the course of writing I became more and more convinced that no progress
could be made towards a sounder view of the theory of descent until
people came to understand what the late Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory
of natural selection amounted to, and how it was that it ever came to
be propounded. Until the mindless theory of Charles Darwinian
natural selection was finally discredited, and a mindful theory of evolution
was substituted in its place, neither Mr. Tylor’s experiments
nor my own theories could stand much chance of being attended to.
I therefore devoted myself mainly, as I had done in “Evolution
Old and New,” and in “Unconscious Memory,” to considering
whether the view taken by the late Mr. Darwin, or the one put forward
by his three most illustrious predecessors, should most command our
assent.
The deflection from my original purpose was increased by the appearance,
about a year ago, of Mr. Grant Allen’s “Charles Darwin,”
which I imagine to have had a very large circulation. So important,
indeed, did I think it not to leave Mr. Allen’s statements unchallenged,
that in November last I recast my book completely, cutting out much
that I had written, and practically starting anew. How far Mr.
Tylor would have liked it, or even sanctioned its being dedicated to
him, if he were now living, I cannot, of course, say. I never
heard him speak of the late Mr. Darwin in any but terms of warm respect,
and am by no means sure that he would have been well pleased at an attempt
to connect him with a book so polemical as the present. On the
other hand, a promise made and received as mine was, cannot be set aside
lightly. The understanding was that my next book was to be dedicated
to Mr. Tylor; I have written the best I could, and indeed never took
so much pains with any other; to Mr. Tylor’s memory, therefore,
I have most respectfully, and regretfully, inscribed it.
Desiring that the responsibility for what has been done should rest
with me, I have avoided saying anything about the book while it was
in progress to any of Mr Tylor’s family or representatives.
They know nothing, therefore, of its contents, and if they did, would
probably feel with myself very uncertain how far it is right to use
Mr. Tylor’s name in connection with it. I can only trust
that, on the whole, they may think I have done most rightly in adhering
to the letter of my promise.
October 15, 1886.
CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION
I shall perhaps best promote the acceptance of the two main points on
which I have been insisting for some years past, I mean, the substantial
identity between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design
into organic development, by treating them as if they had something
of that physical life with which they are so closely connected.
Ideas are like plants and animals in this respect also, as in so many
others, that they are more fully understood when their relations to
other ideas of their time, and the history of their development are
known and borne in mind. By development I do not merely mean their
growth in the minds of those who first advanced them, but that larger
development which consists in their subsequent good or evil fortunes
- in their reception, favourable or otherwise, by those to whom they
were presented. This is to an idea what its surroundings are to
an organism, and throws much the same light upon it that knowledge of
the conditions under which an organism lives throws upon the organism
itself. I shall, therefore, begin this new work with a few remarks
about its predecessors.
I am aware that what I may say on this head is likely to prove more
interesting to future students of the literature of descent than to
my immediate public, but any book that desires to see out a literary
three-score years and ten must offer something to future generations
as well as to its own. It is a condition of its survival that
it shall do this, and herein lies one of the author’s chief difficulties.
If books only lived as long as men and women, we should know better
how to grow them; as matters stand, however, the author lives for one
or two generations, whom he comes in the end to understand fairly well,
while the book, if reasonable pains have been taken with it, should
live more or less usefully for a dozen. About the greater number
of these generations the author is in the dark; but come what may, some
of them are sure to have arrived at conclusions diametrically opposed
to our own upon every subject connected with art, science, philosophy,
and religion; it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased,
it can only be at the cost of repelling some present readers.
Unwilling as I am to do this, I still hold it the lesser of two evils;
I will be as brief, however, as the interests of the opinions I am supporting
will allow.
In “Life and Habit” I contended that heredity was a mode
of memory. I endeavoured to show that all hereditary traits, whether
of mind or body, are inherited in virtue of, and as a manifestation
of, the same power whereby we are able to remember intelligently what
we did half an hour, yesterday, or a twelvemonth since, and this in
no figurative but in a perfectly real sense. If life be compared
to an equation of a hundred unknown quantities, I followed Professor
Hering of Prague in reducing it to one of ninety-nine only, by showing
two of the supposed unknown quantities to be so closely allied that
they should count as one. I maintained that instinct was inherited
memory, and this without admitting more exceptions and qualifying clauses
than arise, as it were, by way of harmonics from every proposition,
and must be neglected if thought and language are to be possible.
I showed that if the view for which I was contending was taken, many
facts which, though familiar, were still without explanation or connection
with our other ideas, would remain no longer isolated, but be seen at
once as joined with the mainland of our most assured convictions.
Among the things thus brought more comfortably home to us was the principle
underlying longevity. It became apparent why some living beings
should live longer than others, and how any race must be treated whose
longevity it is desired to increase. Hitherto we had known that
an elephant was a long-lived animal and a fly short-lived, but we could
give no reason why the one should live longer than the other; that is
to say, it did not follow in immediate coherence with, or as intimately
associated with, any familiar principle that an animal which is late
in the full development of its reproductive system will tend to live
longer than one which reproduces early. If the theory of “Life
and Habit” be admitted, the fact of a slow-growing animal being
in general longer lived than a quick developer is seen to be connected
with, and to follow as a matter of course from, the fact of our being
able to remember anything at all, and all the well-known traits of memory,
as observed where we can best take note of them, are perceived to be
reproduced with singular fidelity in the development of an animal from
its embryonic stages to maturity.
Take this view, and the very general sterility of hybrids from being
a crux of the theory of descent becomes a stronghold of defence.
It appears as part of the same story as the benefit derived from judicious,
and the mischief from injudicious, crossing; and this, in its turn,
is seen as part of the same story, as the good we get from change of
air and scene when we are overworked. I will not amplify; but
reversion to long-lost, or feral, characteristics, the phenomena of
old age, the fact of the reproductive system being generally the last
to arrive at maturity - few further developments occurring in any organism
after this has been attained - the sterility of many animals in confinement,
the development in both males and females under certain circumstances
of the characteristics of the opposite sex, the latency of memory, the
unconsciousness with which we grow, and indeed perform all familiar
actions, these points, though hitherto, most of them, so apparently
inexplicable that no one even attempted to explain them, became at once
intelligible, if the contentions of “Life and Habit” were
admitted.
Before I had finished writing this book I fell in with Professor Mivart’s
“Genesis of Species,” and for the first time understood
the distinction between the Lamarckian and Charles-Darwinian systems
of evolution. This had not, so far as I then knew, been as yet
made clear to us by any of our more prominent writers upon the subject
of descent with modification; the distinction was unknown to the general
public, and indeed is only now beginning to be widely understood.
While reading Mr. Mivart’s book, however, I became aware that
I was being faced by two facts, each incontrovertible, but each, if
its leading exponents were to be trusted, incompatible with the other.
On the one hand there was descent; we could not read Mr. Darwin’s
books and doubt that all, both animals and plants, were descended from
a common source. On the other, there was design; we could not
read Paley and refuse to admit that design, intelligence, adaptation
of means to ends, must have had a large share in the development of
the life we saw around us; it seemed indisputable that the minds and
bodies of all living beings must have come to be what they are through
a wise ordering and administering of their estates. We could not,
therefore, dispense either with descent or with design, and yet it seemed
impossible to keep both, for those who offered us descent stuck to it
that we could have no design, and those, again, who spoke so wisely
and so well about design would not for a moment hear of descent with
modification.
Each, moreover, had a strong case. Who could reflect upon rudimentary
organs, and grant Paley the kind of design that alone would content
him? And yet who could examine the foot or the eye, and grant
Mr. Darwin his denial of forethought and plan?
For that Mr. Darwin did deny skill and contrivance in connection with
the greatly preponderating part of organic developments cannot be and
is not now disputed. In the first chapter of “Evolution
Old and New” I brought forward passages to show how completely
he and his followers deny design, but will here quote one of the latest
of the many that have appeared to the same effect since “Evolution
Old and New” was published; it is by Mr. Romanes, and runs as
follows:-
“It is the very essence of the Darwinian hypothesis that
it only seeks to explain the apparently purposive variations,
or variations of an adaptive kind.” {17a}
The words “apparently purposive” show that those organs
in animals and plants which at first sight seem to have been designed
with a view to the work they have to do - that is to say, with a view
to future function - had not, according to Mr. Darwin, in reality any
connection with, or inception in, effort; effort involves purpose and
design; they had therefore no inception in design, however much they
might present the appearance of being designed; the appearance was delusive;
Mr. Romanes correctly declares it to be “the very essence”
of Mr. Darwin’s system to attempt an explanation of these seemingly
purposive variations which shall be compatible with their having arisen
without being in any way connected with intelligence or design.
As it is indisputable that Mr. Darwin denied design, so neither can
it be doubted that Paley denied descent with modification. What,
then, were the wrong entries in these two sets of accounts, on the detection
and removal of which they would be found to balance as they ought?
Paley’s weakest place, as already implied, is in the matter of
rudimentary organs; the almost universal presence in the higher organisms
of useless, and sometimes even troublesome, organs is fatal to the kind
of design he is trying to uphold; granted that there is design, still
it cannot be so final and far-foreseeing as he wishes to make it out.
Mr. Darwin’s weak place, on the other hand, lies, firstly, in
the supposition that because rudimentary organs imply no purpose now,
they could never in time past have done so - that because they had clearly
not been designed with an eye to all circumstances and all time, they
never, therefore, could have been designed with an eye to any time or
any circumstances; and, secondly, in maintaining that “accidental,”
“fortuitous,” “spontaneous” variations could
be accumulated at all except under conditions that have never been fulfilled
yet, and never will be; in other words, his weak place lay in the contention
(for it comes to this) that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily
wealth, more than of wealth of any other kind, unless sustained experience,
watchfulness, and good sense preside over the accumulation. In
“Life and Habit,” following Mr. Mivart, and, as I now find,
Mr. Herbert Spencer, I showed (pp. 279-281) how impossible it was for
variations to accumulate unless they were for the most part underlain
by a sustained general principle; but this subject will be touched upon
more fully later on.
The accumulation of accidental variations which owed nothing to mind
either in their inception, or their accumulation, the pitchforking,
in fact, of mind out of the universe, or at any rate its exclusion from
all share worth talking about in the process of organic development,
this was the pill Mr. Darwin had given us to swallow; but so thickly
had he gilded it with descent with modification, that we did as we were
told, swallowed it without a murmur, were lavish in our expressions
of gratitude, and, for some twenty years or so, through the mouths of
our leading biologists, ordered design peremptorily out of court, if
she so much as dared to show herself. Indeed, we have even given
life pensions to some of the most notable of these biologists, I suppose
in order to reward them for having hoodwinked us so much to our satisfaction.
Happily the old saying, Naturam expellas furcâ, tamen usque
recurret, still holds true, and the reaction that has been gaining
force for some time will doubtless ere long brush aside the cobwebs
with which those who have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin’s reputation
as a philosopher still try to fog our outlook. Professor Mivart
was, as I have said, among the first to awaken us to Mr. Darwin’s
denial of design, and to the absurdity involved therein. He well
showed how incredible Mr Darwin’s system was found to be, as soon
as it was fully realised, but there he rather left us. He seemed
to say that we must have our descent and our design too, but he did
not show how we were to manage this with rudimentary organs still staring
us in the face. His work rather led up to the clearer statement
of the difficulty than either put it before us in so many words, or
tried to remove it. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that the
“Genesis of Species” gave Natural Selection what will prove
sooner or later to be its death-blow, in spite of the persistence with
which many still declare that it has received no hurt, and the sixth
edition of the” Origin of Species,” published in the following
year, bore abundant traces of the fray. Moreover, though Mr. Mivart
gave us no overt aid, he pointed to the source from which help might
come, by expressly saying that his most important objection to Neo-Darwinism
had no force against Lamarck.
To Lamarck, therefore, I naturally turned, and soon saw that the theory
on which I had been insisting in” Life and Habit” was in
reality an easy corollary on his system, though one which he does not
appear to have caught sight of. I saw also that his denial of
design was only, so to speak, skin deep, and that his system was in
reality teleological, inasmuch as, to use Isidore Geoffroy’s words,
it makes the organism design itself. In making variations depend
on changed actions, and these, again, on changed views of life, efforts,
and designs, in consequence of changed conditions of life, he in effect
makes effort, intention, will, all of which involve design (or at any
rate which taken together involve it), underlie progress in organic
development. True, he did not know he was a teleologist, but he
was none the less a teleologist for this. He was an unconscious
teleologist, and as such perhaps more absolutely an upholder of teleology
than Paley himself; but this is neither here nor there; our concern
is not with what people think about themselves, but with what their
reasoning makes it evident that they really hold.
How strange the irony that hides us from ourselves! When Isidore
Geoffroy said that according to Lamarck organisms designed themselves,
{20a} and endorsed
this, as to a great extent he did, he still does not appear to have
seen that either he or Lamarck were in reality reintroducing design
into organism; he does not appear to have seen this more than Lamarck
himself had seen it, but, on the contrary, like Lamarck, remained under
the impression that he was opposing teleology or purposiveness.
Of course in one sense he did oppose it; so do we all, if the word design
be taken to intend a very far-foreseeing of minute details, a riding
out to meet trouble long before it comes, a provision on academic principles
for contingencies that are little likely to arise. We can see
no evidence of any such design as this in nature, and much everywhere
that makes against it. There is no such improvidence as over providence,
and whatever theories we may form about the origin and development of
the universe, we may be sure that it is not the work of one who is unable
to understand how anything can possibly go right unless he sees to it
himself. Nature works departmentally and by way of leaving details
to subordinates. But though those who see nature thus do indeed
deny design of the prescient-from-all-eternity order, they in no way
impugn a method which is far more in accord with all that we commonly
think of as design. A design which is as incredible as that a
ewe should give birth to a lion becomes of a piece with all that we
observe most frequently if it be regarded rather as an aggregation of
many small steps than as a single large one. This principle is
very simple, but it seems rather difficult to understand. It has
taken several generations before people would admit it as regards organism
even after it was pointed out to them, and those who saw it as regards
organism still failed to understand it as regards design; an inexorable
“Thus far shalt thou go and no farther” barred them from
fruition of the harvest they should have been the first to reap.
The very men who most insisted that specific difference was the accumulation
of differences so minute as to be often hardly, if at all, perceptible,
could not see that the striking and baffling phenomena of design in
connection with organism admitted of exactly the same solution as the
riddle of organic development, and should be seen not as a result reached
per saltum, but as an accumulation of small steps or leaps in
a given direction. It was as though those who had insisted on
the derivation of all forms of the steam-engine from the common kettle,
and who saw that this stands in much the same relations to the engines,
we will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amœba to man,
were to declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at
all, on the ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen
so great a future development, and were unable to understand that a
piecemeal solvitur ambulando design is more omnipresent, all-seeing,
and all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design,
than any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and even at times successful.
From Lamarck I went on to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin - better men both
of them than Lamarck, and treated by him much as he has himself been
treated by those who have come after him - and found that the system
of these three writers, if considered rightly, and if the corollary
that heredity is only a mode of memory were added, would get us out
of our dilemma as regards descent and design, and enable us to keep
both. We could do this by making the design manifested in organism
more like the only design of which we know anything, and therefore the
only design of which we ought to speak - I mean our own.
Our own design is tentative, and neither very far-foreseeing nor very
retrospective; it is a little of both, but much of neither; it is like
a comet with a little light in front of the nucleus and a good deal
more behind it, which ere long, however, fades away into the darkness;
it is of a kind that, though a little wise before the event, is apt
to be much wiser after it, and to profit even by mischance so long as
the disaster is not an overwhelming one; nevertheless, though it is
so interwoven with luck, there is no doubt about its being design; why,
then, should the design which must have attended organic development
be other than this? If the thing that has been is the thing that
also shall be, must not the thing which is be that which also has been?
Was there anything in the phenomena of organic life to militate against
such a view of design as this? Not only was there nothing, but
this view made things plain, as the connecting of heredity and memory
had already done, which till now had been without explanation.
Rudimentary organs were no longer a hindrance to our acceptance of design,
they became weighty arguments in its favour.
I therefore wrote “Evolution Old and New,” with the object
partly of backing up “Life and Habit,” and showing the easy
rider it admitted, partly to show how superior the old view of descent
had been to Mr. Darwin’s, and partly to reintroduce design into
organism. I wrote “Life and Habit” to show that our
mental and bodily acquisitions were mainly stores of memory: I wrote
“Evolution Old and New” to add that the memory must be a
mindful and designing memory.
I followed up these two books with “Unconscious Memory,”
the main object of which was to show how Professor Hering of Prague
had treated the connection between memory and heredity; to show, again,
how substantial was the difference between Von Hartmann and myself in
spite of some little superficial resemblance; to put forward a suggestion
as regards the physics of memory, and to meet the most plausible objection
which I have yet seen brought against “Life and Habit.”
Since writing these three books I have published nothing on the connection
between heredity and memory, except a few pages of remarks on Mr. Romanes’
“Mental Evolution in Animals” in my book, {23a}
from which I will draw whatever seems to be more properly placed here.
I have collected many facts that make my case stronger, but am precluded
from publishing them by the reflection that it is strong enough already.
I have said enough in “Life and Habit” to satisfy any who
wish to be satisfied, and those who wish to be dissatisfied would probably
fail to see the force of what I said, no matter how long and seriously
I held forth to them; I believe, therefore, that I shall do well to
keep my facts for my own private reading and for that of my executors.
I once saw a copy of “Life and Habit” on Mr. Bogue’s
counter, and was told by the very obliging shopman that a customer had
just written something in it which I might like to see. I said
of course I should like to see, and immediately taking the book read
the following - which it occurs to me that I am not justified in publishing.
What was written ran thus:-
“As a reminder of our pleasant hours on the broad Atlantic, will
Mr. -- please accept this book (which I think contains more truth, and
less evidence of it, than any other I have met with) from his friend
-- ?”
I presume the gentleman had met with the Bible - a work which lays itself
open to a somewhat similar comment. I was gratified, however,
at what I had read, and take this opportunity of thanking the writer,
an American, for having liked my book. It was so plain he had
been relieved at not finding the case smothered to death in the weight
of its own evidences, that I resolved not to forget the lesson his words
had taught me.
The only writer in connection with “Life and Habit” to whom
I am anxious to reply is Mr. Herbert Spencer, but before doing this
I will conclude the present chapter with a consideration of some general
complaints that have been so often brought against me that it may be
worth while to notice them.
These general criticisms have resolved themselves mainly into two.
Firstly, it is said that I ought not to write about biology on the ground
of my past career, which my critics declare to have been purely literary.
I wish I might indulge a reasonable hope of one day becoming a literary
man; the expression is not a good one, but there is no other in such
common use, and this must excuse it; if a man can be properly called
literary, he must have acquired the habit of reading accurately, thinking
attentively, and expressing himself clearly. He must have endeavoured
in all sorts of ways to enlarge the range of his sympathies so as to
be able to put himself easily en rapport with those whom he is
studying, and those whom he is addressing. If he cannot speak
with tongues himself, he is the interpreter of those who can - without
whom they might as well be silent. I wish I could see more signs
of literary culture among my scientific opponents; I should find their
books much more easy and agreeable reading if I could; and then they
tell me to satirise the follies and abuses of the age, just as if it
was not this that I was doing in writing about themselves.
What, I wonder, would they say if I were to declare that they ought
not to write books at all, on the ground that their past career has
been too purely scientific to entitle them to a hearing? They
would reply with justice that I should not bring vague general condemnations,
but should quote examples of their bad writing. I imagine that
I have done this more than once as regards a good many of them, and
I dare say I may do it again in the course of this book; but though
I must own to thinking that the greater number of our scientific men
write abominably, I should not bring this against them if I believed
them to be doing their best to help us; many such men we happily have,
and doubtless always shall have, but they are not those who push to
the fore, and it is these last who are most angry with me for writing
on the subjects I have chosen. They constantly tell me that I
am not a man of science; no one knows this better than I do, and I am
quite used to being told it, but I am not used to being confronted with
the mistakes that I have made in matters of fact, and trust that this
experience is one which I may continue to spare no pains in trying to
avoid.
Nevertheless I again freely grant that I am not a man of science.
I have never said I was. I was educated for the Church.
I was once inside the Linnean Society’s rooms, but have no present
wish to go there again; though not a man of science, however, I have
never affected indifference to the facts and arguments which men of
science have made it their business to lay before us; on the contrary,
I have given the greater part of my time to their consideration for
several years past. I should not, however, say this unless led
to do so by regard to the interests of theories which I believe to be
as nearly important as any theories can be which do not directly involve
money or bodily convenience.
The second complaint against me is to the effect that I have made no
original experiments, but have taken all my facts at second hand.
This is true, but I do not see what it has to do with the question.
If the facts are sound, how can it matter whether A or B collected them?
If Professor Huxley, for example, has made a series of valuable original
observations (not that I know of his having done so), why am I to make
them over again? What are fact-collectors worth if the fact co-ordinators
may not rely upon them? It seems to me that no one need do more
than go to the best sources for his facts, and tell his readers where
he got them. If I had had occasion for more facts I daresay I
should have taken the necessary steps to get hold of them, but there
was no difficulty on this score; every text-book supplied me with all,
and more than all, I wanted; my complaint was that the facts which Mr.
Darwin supplied would not bear the construction he tried to put upon
them; I tried, therefore, to make them bear another which seemed at
once more sound and more commodious; rightly or wrongly I set up as
a builder, not as a burner of bricks, and the complaint so often brought
against me of not having made experiments is about as reasonable as
complaint against an architect on the score of his not having quarried
with his own hands a single one of the stones which he has used in building.
Let my opponents show that the facts which they and I use in common
are unsound, or that I have misapplied them, and I will gladly learn
my mistake, but this has hardly, to my knowledge, been attempted.
To me it seems that the chief difference between myself and some of
my opponents lies in this, that I take my facts from them with acknowledgment,
and they take their theories from me - without.
One word more and I have done. I should like to say that I do
not return to the connection between memory and heredity under the impression
that I shall do myself much good by doing so. My own share in
the matter was very small. The theory that heredity is only a
mode of memory is not mine, but Professor Hering’s. He wrote
in 1870, and I not till 1877. I should be only too glad if he
would take his theory and follow it up himself; assuredly he could do
so much better than I can; but with the exception of his one not lengthy
address published some fifteen or sixteen years ago he has said nothing
upon the subject, so far at least as I have been able to ascertain;
I tried hard to draw him in 1880, but could get nothing out of him.
If, again, any of our more influential writers, not a few of whom evidently
think on this matter much as I do, would eschew ambiguities and tell
us what they mean in plain language, I would let the matter rest in
their abler hands, but of this there does not seem much chance at present.
I wish there was, for in spite of the interest I have felt in working
the theory out and the information I have been able to collect while
doing so, I must confess that I have found it somewhat of a white elephant.
It has got me into the hottest of hot water, made a literary Ishmael
of me, lost me friends whom I have been sorry to lose, cost me a good
deal of money, done everything to me, in fact, which a good theory ought
not to do. Still, as it seems to have taken up with me, and no
one else is inclined to treat it fairly, I shall continue to report
its developments from time to time as long as life and health are spared
me. Moreover, Ishmaels are not without their uses, and they are
not a drug in the market just now.
I may now go on to Mr. Spencer.
CHAPTER II - MR. HERBERT SPENCER
Mr. Herbert Spencer wrote to the Athenæum (April 5, 1884),
and quoted certain passages from the 1855 edition of his “Principles
of Psychology,” “the meanings and implications” from
which he contended were sufficiently clear. The passages he quoted
were as follows:-
Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive sequences are not
determined by the experiences of the individual organism manifesting
them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are determined
by the experiences of the race of organisms forming its ancestry,
which by infinite repetition in countless successive generations have
established these sequences as organic relations (p. 526).
The modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life
are also bequeathed (p. 526).
That is to say, the tendencies to certain combinations of psychical
changes have become organic (p. 527).
The doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by
experience must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the connections
established by the accumulated experiences of every individual, but
to all those established by the accumulated experiences of every race
(p. 529).
Here, then, we have one of the simpler forms of instinct which, under
the requisite conditions, must necessarily be established by accumulated
experiences (p. 547).
And manifestly, if the organisation of inner relations, in correspondence
with outer relations, results from a continual registration of experiences,
&c. (p. 551).
On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised memory;
on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of incipient instinct
(pp. 555-6).
Memory, then, pertains to all that class of psychical states which are
in process of being organised. It continues so long as the organising
of them continues; and disappears when the organisation of them is complete.
In the advance of the correspondence, each more complex class of phenomena
which the organism acquires the power of recognising is responded to
at first irregularly and uncertainly; and there is then a weak remembrance
of the relations. By multiplication of experiences this remembrance
becomes stronger, and the response more certain. By further multiplication
of experiences the internal relations are at last automatically organised
in correspondence with the external ones; and so conscious memory passes
into unconscious or organic memory. At the same time, a new and
still more complex order of experiences is thus rendered appreciable;
the relations they present occupy the memory in place of the simpler
one; they become gradually organised; and, like the previous ones, are
succeeded by others more complex still (p. 563).
Just as we saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions
which we call instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner
relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into correspondence
with outer relations; so the establishment of those consolidated, those
indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas
of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the same principle (p. 579).
In a book published a few weeks before Mr. Spencer’s letter appeared
{29a} I had said
that though Mr. Spencer at times closely approached Professor Hering
and “Life and Habit,” he had nevertheless nowhere shown
that he considered memory and heredity to be parts of the same story
and parcel of one another. In his letter to the Athenæum,
indeed, he does not profess to have upheld this view, except “by
implications;” nor yet, though in the course of the six or seven
years that had elapsed since “Life and Habit” was published
I had brought out more than one book to support my earlier one, had
he said anything during those years to lead me to suppose that I was
trespassing upon ground already taken by himself. Nor, again,
had he said anything which enabled me to appeal to his authority - which
I should have been only too glad to do; at last, however, he wrote,
as I have said, to the Athenæum a letter which, indeed,
made no express claim, and nowhere mentioned myself, but “the
meanings and implications” from which were this time as clear
as could be desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering and
myself to stand aside.
The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. Spencer, or any
others that can be found in his works, show that he regarded heredity
in all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit that this
conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer’s writings, and that
even the passages in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible
till read by the light of Professor Hering’s address and of “Life
and Habit.”
True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as “the
experience of the race,” “accumulated experiences,”
and others like them, but he did not explain - and it was here the difficulty
lay - how a race could have any experience at all. We know what
we mean when we say that an individual has had experience; we mean that
he is the same person now (in the common use of the words), on the occasion
of some present action, as the one who performed a like action at some
past time or times, and that he remembers how he acted before, so as
to be able to turn his past action to account, gaining in proficiency
through practice. Continued personality and memory are the elements
that constitute experience; where these are present there may, and commonly
will, be experience; where they are absent the word “experience”
cannot properly be used.
Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many.
We now see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no means
the whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is the race
that is one, and the individual many. We all admit and understand
this readily enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer
wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the Athenæum
above referred to. In the then state of our ideas a race was
only a succession of individuals, each one of them new persons, and
as such incapable of profiting by the experience of its predecessors
except in the very limited number of cases where oral teaching, or,
as in recent times, writing, was possible. The thread of life
was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between each successive
generation, and the importance of the physical and psychical connection
between parents and offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost
sight of. It seems strange how this could ever have been allowed
to come about, but it should be remembered that the Church in the Middle
Ages would strongly discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that
would raise troublesome questions as to who in a future state was to
be responsible for what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out
of ten the generally received opinion that each person is himself and
nobody else is on many grounds the most convenient. Every now
and then, however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued
personality side of the connection between successive generations is
as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine,
and these tenth purposes - some of which are not unimportant - are obscured
and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which the more commonly
needed conception has overgrown the other.
Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted every
hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to speak, in
stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our mental storehouse,
while the other was so seldom asked for that it became not worth while
to keep it. By-and-by it was found so troublesome to send out
for it, and so hard to come by even then, that people left off selling
it at all, and if any one wanted it he must think it out at home as
best he could; this was troublesome, so by common consent the world
decided no longer to busy itself with the continued personality of successive
generations - which was all very well until it also decided to busy
itself with the theory of descent with modification. On the introduction
of a foe so inimical to many of our pre-existing ideas the balance of
power among them was upset, and a readjustment became necessary, which
is still far from having attained the next settlement that seems likely
to be reasonably permanent.
To change the illustration, the ordinary view is true for seven places
of decimals, and this commonly is enough; occasions, however, have now
arisen when the error caused by neglect of the omitted places is appreciably
disturbing, and we must have three or four more. Mr. Spencer showed
no more signs of seeing that he must supply these, and make personal
identity continue between successive generations before talking about
inherited (as opposed to post-natal and educational) experience, than
others had done before him; the race with him, as with every one else
till recently, was not one long individual living indeed in pulsations,
so to speak, but no more losing continued personality by living in successive
generations, than an individual loses it by living in consecutive days;
a race was simply a succession of individuals, each one of which was
held to be an entirely new person, and was regarded exclusively, or
very nearly so, from this point of view.
When I wrote “Life and Habit” I knew that the words “experience
of the race” sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines
and newspapers, but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I
should have given their source. To me they conveyed no meaning,
and vexed me as an attempt to make me take stones instead of bread,
and to palm off an illustration upon me as though it were an explanation.
When I had worked the matter out in my own way, I saw that the illustration,
with certain additions, would become an explanation, but I saw also
that neither he who had adduced it nor any one else could have seen
how right he was, till much had been said which had not, so far as 1
knew, been said yet, and which undoubtedly would have been said if people
had seen their way to saying it.
“What is this talk,” I wrote, “which is made about
the experience of the race, as though the experience of one man could
profit another who knows nothing about him? If a man eats his
dinner it nourishes him and not his neighbour; if he learns a difficult
art it is he that can do it and not his neighbour” (“Life
and Habit,” p. 49).
When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the
father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the son
was fed when the father ate before he begot him.
“Is there any way,” I continued, “of showing that
this experience of the race about which so much is said without the
least attempt to show in what way it may, or does, become the experience
of the individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single
being only, who repeats on a great many different occasions, and in
slightly different ways, certain performances with which he has already
become exceedingly familiar?”
I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the expression
in question, that it was fallacious till this was done. When I
first began to write “Life and Habit” I did not believe
it could be done, but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were,
of my cu de sac, I saw the path which led straight to the point
I had despaired of reaching - I mean I saw that personality could not
be broken as between generations, without also breaking it between the
years, days, and moments of a man’s life. What differentiates
“Life and Habit” from the “Principles of Psychology”
is the prominence given to continued personal identity, and hence to
bonâ fide memory, as between successive generations; but
surely this makes the two books differ widely.
Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost any direction, if
the change is brought about gradually and in accordance with the rules
of all development. As in music we may take almost any possible
discord with pleasing effect if we have prepared and resolved it rightly,
so our ideas will outlive and outgrow almost any modification which
is approached and quitted in such a way as to fuse the old and new harmoniously.
Words are to ideas what the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince
who wore it - only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak,
whereas ideas are unseen until they don the robe of words which reveals
them to us; the words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit
each other and stick to one another in our minds as soon as they are
brought together, or the ideas will fly off, and leave the words void
of that spirit by the aid of which alone they can become transmuted
into physical action and shape material things with their own impress.
Whether a discord is too violent or no, depends on what we have been
accustomed to, and on how widely the new differs from the old, but in
no case can we fuse and assimilate more than a very little new at a
time without exhausting our tempering power - and hence presently our
temper.
Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de minimis non
curat lex, - though all the laws fail when applied to trifles, -
yet too sudden a change in the manner in which our ideas are associated
is as cataclysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are material
convulsions, or too violent revolutions in politics. This must
always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, and the only
lawful home of the miracle is in the microscopically small. Here,
indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and ever shall be,
but we are deadened if they are required of us on a scale which is visible
to the naked eye. If we are told to work them our hands fall nerveless
down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we are more likely to die
than to succeed in doing. If we are required to believe them -
which only means to fuse them with our other ideas - we either take
the law into our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse something
easier of assimilation, and say we have fused the miracle; or if we
play more fairly and insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating
it, we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls.
If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at
the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a small scale these
same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to cease to work them
is to die. And by miracle I do not merely mean something new,
strange, and not very easy of comprehension - I mean something which
violates every canon of thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed
to respect; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction
in terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of
something out of nothing. This, which when writ large maddens
and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest
and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in
which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as
growth and decay, or as life and death.
Claude Bernard says, Rien ne nait, rien ne se crée, tout se
continue. La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune
création, elle est d’une éternelle continuation;
{35a} but surely
he is insisting upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another
which is just as real, and just as important; he might have said, Rien
ne se continue, tout nait, tout se crée. La nature ne nous
offre le spectacle d’aucune continuation. Elle est d’une
éternelle création; for change is no less patent a
fact than continuity, and, indeed, the two stand or fall together.
True, discontinuity, where development is normal, is on a very small
scale, but this is only the difference between looking at distances
on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have even the smallest
change without a small partial corresponding discontinuity; on a small
scale - too small, indeed, for us to cognise - these breaks in continuity,
each one of which must, so far as our understanding goes, rank as a
creation, are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us,
as is the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale
for us to find it out. Creations, then, there must be, but they
must be so small that practically they are no creations. We must
have a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity;
that is to say, we can only conceive the help of change at all by the
help of flat contradiction in terms. It comes, therefore, to this,
that if we are to think fluently and harmoniously upon any subject into
which change enters (and there is no conceivable subject into which
it does not), we must begin by flying in the face of every rule that
professors of the art of thinking have drawn up for our instruction.
These rules may be good enough as servants, but we have let them become
the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy is made for man, not
man for philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which
we have thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens,
and have no more miracle, but see God and live - nor has confusion of
tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul said
well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what
faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths
as species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its
own way both living and saving.
All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things,
is miraculous. It is the two in one, and at the same time one
in two, which is only two and two making five put before us in another
shape; yet this fusion - so easy to think so long as it is not thought
about, and so unthinkable if we try to think it - is, as it were, the
matrix from which our more thinkable thought is taken; it is the cloud
gathering in the unseen world from which the waters of life descend
in an impalpable dew. Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion,
whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously,
an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables
us to brook; granted that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous
element which should vitiate the whole process ab initio, still,
if we have faith we can so work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm
denizens of the unseen world into the seen again - provided we do not
look back, and provided also we do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices
at a time. To think is to fuse and diffuse ideas, and to fuse
and diffuse ideas is to feed. We can all feed, and by consequence
within reasonable limits we can fuse ideas; or we can fuse ideas, and
by consequence within reasonable limits we can feed; we know not which
comes first, the food or the ideas, but we must not overtax our strength;
the moment we do this we taste of death.
It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food
fine before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large
lumps will choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again,
that that which is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas.
Food is very thoughtful: through thought it comes, and back through
thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and comprehension
within our own system is mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere
else with mind and evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide
a cross - that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large
scale. Granted that no one can draw a clear line and define the
limits within which a miracle is healthy working and beyond which it
is unwholesome, any more than he can prescribe the exact degree of fineness
to which we must comminute our food; granted, again, that some can do
more than others, and that at all times all men sport, so to speak,
and surpass themselves, still we know as a general rule near enough,
and find that the strongest can do but very little at a time, and, to
return to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two such hitherto unassociated
ideas as race and experience was a miracle beyond our strength.
Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter
to the Athenæum above referred to, we were not in the habit
of thinking of any one as able to remember things that had happened
before he had been born or thought of. This notion will still
strike many of my non-readers as harsh and strained; no such discord,
therefore, should have been taken unprepared, and when taken it should
have been resolved with pomp and circumstance. Mr Spencer, however,
though he took it continually, never either prepared it or resolved
it at all, but by using the words “experience of the race”
sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the result that his words
were barren. They were barren because they were incoherent; they
were incoherent because they were approached and quitted too suddenly.
While we were realising “experience” our minds excluded
“race,” inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed
hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea
“race,” for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded
experience. We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien
to one another, without having had those other ideas presented to us
which would alone flux them. The absence of these - which indeed
were not immediately ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless
grasped them - made nonsense of the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped
up as two cards one against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer’s
pages, only to find that they had fallen asunder before we had turned
over to the next, so we put down his book resentfully, as written by
one who did not know what to do with his meaning even if he had one,
or bore it meekly while he chastised us with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin
had done with whips, according to our temperaments.
I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and
the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants,
are one in principle - the sterility of hybrids being just as much due
to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent
whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself ultimately
into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas - that is to say,
into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as their neighbours
do.
If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race are
bonâ fide united by a common personality, and that in virtue
of being so united each generation remembers (within, of course, the
limits to which all memory is subject) what happened to it while still
in the persons of its progenitors - then his order to Professor Hering
and myself should be immediately obeyed; but this was just what was
at once most wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the
passages given above - passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself - this
point is altogether ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made
it - put continued personality and memory in the foreground as Professor
Hering did, instead of leaving them to be discovered “by implications,”
and then such expressions as “accumulated experiences” and
“experience of the race” become luminous; till this had
been done they were Vox et præterea nihil.
To sum up briefly. The passages quoted by Mr. Spencer from
his “Principles of Psychology” can hardly be called clear,
even now that Professor Hering and others have thrown light upon them.
If, indeed, they had been clear Mr. Spencer would probably have seen
what they necesitated, and found the way of meeting the difficulties
of the case which occurred to Professor Hering and myself. Till
we wrote, very few writers had even suggested this. The idea that
offspring was only “an elongation or branch proceeding from its
parents” had scintillated in the ingenious brain of Dr. Erasmus
Darwin, and in that of the designer of Jesse tree windows, but it had
kindled no fire; it now turns out that Canon Kingsley had once called
instinct inherited memory, {40a}
but the idea, if born alive at all, died on the page on which it saw
light: Professor Ray Lankester, again called attention to Professor
Hering’s address (Nature, July 13, 1876), but no discussion
followed, and the matter dropped without having produced visible effect.
As for offspring remembering in any legitimate sense of the words what
it had done, and what had happened to it, before it was born, no such
notion was understood to have been gravely mooted till very recently.
I doubt whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes would accept this even now,
when it is put thus undisguisedly; but this is what Professor Hering
and I mean, and it is the only thing that should be meant, by those
who speak of instinct as inherited memory. Mr Spencer cannot maintain
that these two startling novelties went without saying “by implication”
from the use of such expressions as “accumulated experiences”
or “experience of the race.”
CHAPTER III - MR. HERBERT SPENCER (continued)
Whether they ought to have gone or not, they did not go.
When “Life and Habit” was first published no one considered
Mr. Spencer to be maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be in reality
phenomena of memory. When, for example, Professor Ray Lankester
first called attention to Professor Hering’s address, he did not
understand Mr. Spencer to be intending this. “Professor
Hering,” he wrote (Nature, July 13, 1876), “helps
us to a comprehensive view of the nature of heredity and adaptation,
by giving us the word ‘memory,’ conscious or unconscious,
for the continuity of Mr. Spencer’s polar forces or polarities
of physiological units.” He evidently found the prominence
given to memory a help to him which he had not derived from reading
Mr. Spencer’s works.
When, again, he attacked me in the Athenæum (March 29,
1884), he spoke of my “tardy recognition” of the fact that
Professor Hering had preceded me “in treating all manifestations
of heredity as a form of memory.” Professor Lankester’s
words could have no force if he held that any other writer, and much
less so well known a writer as Mr. Spencer, had preceded me in putting
forward the theory in question.
When Mr. Romanes reviewed “Unconscious Memory” in Nature
(January 27, 1881) the notion of a “race-memory,” to
use his own words, was still so new to him that he declared it “simply
absurd” to suppose that it could “possibly be fraught with
any benefit to science,” and with him too it was Professor Hering
who had anticipated me in the matter, not Mr. Spencer.
In his “Mental Evolution in Animals” (p. 296) he said that
Canon Kingsley, writing in 1867, was the first to advance the theory
that instinct is inherited memory; he could not have said this if Mr.
Spencer had been understood to have been upholding this view for the
last thirty years.
Mr. A. R. Wallace reviewed “Life and Habit” in Nature
(March 27, 1879), but he did not find the line I had taken a familiar
one, as he surely must have done if it had followed easily by implication
from Mr. Spencer’s works. He called it “an ingenious
and paradoxical explanation” which was evidently new to him.
He concluded by saying that “it might yet afford a clue to some
of the deepest mysteries of the organic world.”
Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on Evolution in the American
Catholic Quarterly Review (July 1881), said, “Mr Butler is
not only perfectly logical and consistent in the startling consequences
he deduces from his principles, but,” &c. Professor
Mivart could not have found my consequences startling if they had already
been insisted upon for many years by one of the best-known writers of
the day.
The reviewer of “Evolution Old and New” in the Saturday
Review (March 31, 1879), of whom all I can venture to say is that
he or she is a person whose name carries weight in matters connected
with biology, though he (for brevity) was in the humour for seeing everything
objectionable in me that could be seen, still saw no Mr. Spencer in
me. He said - “Mr Butler’s own particular contribution
to the terminology of Evolution is the phrase two or three times repeated
with some emphasis” (I repeated it not two or three times only,
but whenever and wherever I could venture to do so without wearying
the reader beyond endurance) “oneness of personality between parents
and offspring.” The writer proceeded to reprobate this in
language upon which a Huxley could hardly improve, but as he declares
himself unable to discover what it means, it may be presumed that the
idea of continued personality between successive generations was new
to him.
When Dr. Francis Darwin called on me a day or two before “Life
and Habit” went to the press, he said the theory which had pleased
him more than any he had seen for some time was one which referred all
life to memory; {44a}
he doubtless intended “which referred all the phenomena of heredity
to memory.” He then mentioned Professor Ray Lankester’s
article in Nature, of which I had not heard, but he said nothing
about Mr. Spencer, and spoke of the idea as one which had been quite
new to him.
The above names comprise (excluding Mr. Spencer himself) perhaps those
of the best-known writers on evolution that can be mentioned as now
before the public; it is curious that Mr Spencer should be the only
one of them to see any substantial resemblance between the “Principles
of Psychology” and Professor Hering’s address and “Life
and Habit.”
I ought, perhaps, to say that Mr. Romanes, writing to the Athenæum
(March 8, 1884), took a different view of the value of the theory
of inherited memory to the one he took in 1881.
In 1881 he said it was “simply absurd” to suppose it could
“possibly be fraught with any benefit to science” or “reveal
any truth of profound significance;” in 1884 he said of the same
theory, that “it formed the backbone of all the previous literature
upon instinct” by Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Fiske, and Spalding,
“not to mention their numerous followers, and is by all of them
elaborately stated as clearly as any theory can be stated in words.”
Few except Mr. Romanes will say this. I grant it ought to “have
formed the backbone,” &c., and ought “to have been elaborately
stated,” &c., but when I wrote “Life and Habit”
neither Mr Romanes nor any one else understood it to have been even
glanced at by more than a very few, and as for having been “elaborately
stated,” it had been stated by Professor Hering as elaborately
as it could be stated within the limits of an address of only twenty-two
pages, but with this exception it had never been stated at all.
It is not too much to say that “Life and Habit,” when it
first came out, was considered so startling a paradox that people would
not believe in my desire to be taken seriously, or at any rate were
able to pretend that they thought I was not writing seriously.
Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who keep an eye on
evolution; he himself, indeed, had said (Nature, January 27,
1881) that so long as I “aimed only at entertaining” my
“readers by such works as ‘Erewhon’ and ‘Life
and Habit’” (as though these books were of kindred character)
I was in my proper sphere. It would be doing too little credit
to Mr. Romanes’ intelligence to suppose him not to have known
when he said this that “Life and Habit” was written as seriously
as my subsequent books on evolution, but it suited him at the moment
to join those who professed to consider it another book of paradoxes
such as, I suppose, “Erewhon” had been, so he classed the
two together. He could not have done this unless enough people
thought, or said they thought, the books akin, to give colour to his
doing so.
One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, brought Mr. Spencer
against me. This was a writer in the St. James’s Gazette
(December 2, 1880). I challenged him in a letter which appeared
(December 8, 1880), and said, “I would ask your reviewer to be
kind enough to refer your readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer’s
“Principles of Psychology” which in any direct intelligible
way refer the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, to memory
on the part of offspring of the action it bonâ fide took
in the persons of its forefathers.” The reviewer made no
reply, and I concluded, as I have since found correctly, that he could
not find the passages.
True, in his “Principles of Psychology” (vol. ii. p. 195)
Mr. Spencer says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all intelligence
is acquired through experience “so as to make it include with
the experience of each individual the experiences of all ancestral individuals,”
&c. This is all very good, but it is much the same as saying,
“We have only got to stand on our heads and we shall be able to
do so and so.” We did not see our way to standing on our
heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help us; we had been accustomed, as I
am afraid I must have said usque ad nauseam already, to lose
sight of the physical connection existing between parents and offspring;
we understood from the marriage service that husband and wife were in
a sense one flesh, but not that parents and children were so also; and
without this conception of the matter, which in its way is just as true
as the more commonly received one, we could not extend the experience
of parents to offspring. It was not in the bond or nexus of
our ideas to consider experience as appertaining to more than a single
individual in the common acceptance of the term; these two ideas were
so closely bound together that wherever the one went the other went
perforce. Here, indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer’s
just referred to, the race is throughout regarded as “a series
of individuals” - without an attempt to call attention to that
other view, in virtue of which we are able to extend to many an idea
we had been accustomed to confine to one.
In his chapter on Memory, Mr. Spencer certainly approaches the Heringian
view. He says, “On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded
as a kind of organised memory; on the other, Memory may be regarded
as a kind of incipient instinct” (“Principles of Psychology,”
ed. 2, vol. i. p. 445). Here the ball has fallen into his hands,
but if he had got firm hold of it he could not have written, “Instinct
may be regarded as a kind of, &c.;” to
us there is neither “may be regarded as” nor “kind
of” about it; we require, “Instinct is inherited memory,”
with an explanation making it intelligible how memory can come to be
inherited at all. I do not like, again, calling memory “a
kind of incipient instinct;” as Mr. Spencer puts them the words
have a pleasant antithesis, but “instinct is inherited memory”
covers all the ground, and to say that memory is inherited instinct
is surplusage.
Nor does he stick to it long when he says that “instinct is a
kind of organised memory,” for two pages later he says that memory,
to be memory at all, must be tolerably conscious or deliberate; he,
therefore (vol. i. p. 447), denies that there can be such a thing as
unconscious memory; but without this it is impossible for us to see
instinct as the “kind of organised memory” which he has
just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct is notably undeliberate and
unreflecting.
A few pages farther on (vol. i. p. 452) he finds himself driven to unconscious
memory after all, and says that “conscious memory passes into
unconscious or organic memory.” Having admitted unconscious
memory, he declares (vol. i. p. 450) that “as fast as those connections
among psychical states, which we form in memory, grow by constant repetition
automatic - they cease to be part of memory,” or, in other
words, he again denies that there can be an unconscious memory.
Mr. Spencer doubtless saw that he was involved in contradiction in terms,
and having always understood that contradictions in terms were very
dreadful things - which, of course, under some circumstances they are
- thought it well so to express himself that his readers should be more
likely to push on than dwell on what was before them at the moment.
I should be the last to complain of him merely on the ground that he
could not escape contradiction in terms: who can? When facts conflict,
contradict one another, melt into one another as the colours of the
spectrum so insensibly that none can say where one begins and the other
ends, contradictions in terms become first fruits of thought and speech.
They are the basis of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that
a physical obstacle is the basis of physical sensation. No opposition,
no sensation, applies as much to the psychical as to the physical kingdom,
as soon as these two have got well above the horizon of our thoughts
and can be seen as two. No contradiction, no consciousness; no
cross, no crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without
which there is no going; going is our sense of a succession of small
impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots,
which on a small scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger,
give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and
on a still larger, kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong.
Nature, as I said in “Life and Habit,” hates that any principle
should breed hermaphroditically, but will give to each an helpmeet for
it which shall cross it and be the undoing of it; and in the undoing,
do; and in the doing, undo, and so ad infinitum. Cross-fertilisation
is just as necessary for continued fertility of ideas as for that of
organic life, and the attempt to frown this or that down merely on the
ground that it involves contradiction in terms, without at the same
time showing that the contradiction is on a larger scale than healthy
thought can stomach, argues either small sense or small sincerity on
the part of those who make it. The contradictions employed by
Mr. Spencer are objectionable, not on the ground of their being contradictions
at all, but on the ground of their being blinked, and used unintelligently.
But though it is not possible for any one to get a clear conception
of Mr. Spencer’s meaning, we may say with more confidence what
it was that he did not mean. He did not mean to make memory the
keystone of his system; he has none of that sense of the unifying, binding
force of memory which Professor Hering has so well expressed, nor does
he show any signs of perceiving the far-reaching consequences that ensue
if the phenomena of heredity are considered as phenomena of memory.
Thus, when he is dealing with the phenomena of old age (vol. i. p. 538,
ed. 2) he does not ascribe them to lapse and failure of memory, nor
surmise the principle underlying longevity. He never mentions
memory in connection with heredity without presently saying something
which makes us involuntarily think of a man missing an easy catch at
cricket; it is only rarely, however, that he connects the two at all.
I have only been able to find the word “inherited” or any
derivative of the verb “to inherit” in connection with memory
once in all the 1300 long pages of the “Principles of Psychology.”
It occurs in vol ii. p. 200, 2d ed., where the words stand, “Memory,
inherited or acquired.” I submit that this was unintelligible
when Mr. Spencer wrote it, for want of an explanation which he never
gave; I submit, also, that he could not have left it unexplained, nor
yet as an unrepeated expression not introduced till late in his work,
if he had had any idea of its pregnancy.
At any rate, whether he intended to imply what he now implies that he
intended to imply (for Mr. Spencer, like the late Mr. Darwin, is fond
of qualifying phrases), I have shown that those most able and willing
to understand him did not take him to mean what he now appears anxious
to have it supposed that he meant. Surely, moreover, if he had
meant it he would have spoken sooner, when he saw his meaning had been
missed. I can, however, have no hesitation in saying that if I
had known the “Principles of Psychology” earlier, as well
as I know the work now, I should have used it largely.
It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to see whether he
even now assigns to continued personality and memory the place assigned
to it by Professor Hering and myself. I will therefore give the
concluding words of the letter to the Athenæum already
referred to, in which he tells us to stand aside. He writes “I
still hold that inheritance of functionally produced modifications is
the chief factor throughout the higher stages of organic evolution,
bodily as well as mental (see ‘Principles of Biology,’ i.
166), while I recognise the truth that throughout the lower stages survival
of the fittest is the chief factor, and in the lowest the almost exclusive
factor.”
This is the same confused and confusing utterance which Mr. Spencer
has been giving us any time this thirty years. According to him
the fact that variations can be inherited and accumulated has less to
do with the first development of organic life, than the fact that if
a square organism happens to get into a square hole, it will live longer
and more happily than a square organism which happens to get into a
round one; he declares “the survival of the fittest” - and
this is nothing but the fact that those who “fit” best into
their surroundings will live longest and most comfortably - to have
more to do with the development of the amœba into, we will say,
a mollusc than heredity itself. True, “inheritance of functionally
produced modifications” is allowed to be the chief factor throughout
the “higher stages of organic evolution,” but it has very
little to do in the lower; in these “the almost exclusive factor”
is not heredity, or inheritance, but “survival of the fittest.”
Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe this; of course,
also, all who are fairly well up in the history of the development theory
will see why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this distinction between
the “factors” of the development of the higher and lower
forms of life; but no matter how or why Mr. Spencer has been led to
say what he has, he has no business to have said it. What can
we think of a writer who, after so many years of writing upon his subject,
in a passage in which he should make his meaning doubly clear, inasmuch
as he is claiming ground taken by other writers, declares that though
hereditary use and disuse, or, to use his own words, “the inheritance
of functionally produced modifications,” is indeed very important
in connection with the development of the higher forms of life, yet
heredity itself has little or nothing to do with that of the lower?
Variations, whether produced functionally or not, can only be perpetuated
and accumulated because they can be inherited; - and this applies just
as much to the lower as to the higher forms of life; the question which
Professor Hering and I have tried to answer is, “How comes it
that anything can be inherited at all? In virtue of what power
is it that offspring can repeat and improve upon the performances of
their parents?” Our answer was, “Because in a very
valid sense, though not perhaps in the most usually understood, there
is continued personality and an abiding memory between successive generations.”
How does Mr. Spencer’s confession of faith touch this? If
any meaning can be extracted from his words, he is no more supporting
this view now than he was when he wrote the passages he has adduced
to show that he was supporting it thirty years ago; but after all no
coherent meaning can be got out of Mr. Spencer’s letter - except,
of course, that Professor Hering and myself are to stand aside.
I have abundantly shown that I am very ready to do this in favour of
Professor Hering, but see no reason for admitting Mr. Spencer’s
claim to have been among the forestallers of “Life and Habit.”
CHAPTER IV {52a}
- Mr. Romanes’ “Mental Evolution in Animals”
Without raising the unprofitable question how Mr. Romanes, in spite
of the indifference with which he treated the theory of Inherited Memory
in 1881, came, in 1883, to be sufficiently imbued with a sense of its
importance, I still cannot afford to dispense with the weight of his
authority, and in this chapter will show how closely he not infrequently
approaches the Heringian position.
Thus, he says that the analogies between the memory with which we are
familiar in daily life and hereditary memory “are so numerous
and precise” as to justify us in considering them to be of essentially
the same kind. {52b}
Again, he says that although the memory of milk shown by new-born infants
is “at all events in large part hereditary, it is none the less
memory” of a certain kind. {52c}
Two lines lower down he writes of “hereditary memory or instinct,”
thereby implying that instinct is “hereditary memory.”
“It makes no essential difference,” he says, “whether
the past sensation was actually experienced by the individual itself,
or bequeathed it, so to speak, by its ancestors. {52d}
For it makes no essential difference whether the nervous changes . .
. were occasioned during the life-time of the individual or during that
of the species, and afterwards impressed by heredity on the individual.”
Lower down on the same page he writes:-
“As showing how close is the connection between hereditary memory
and instinct,” &c.
And on the following page:-
“And this shows how closely the phenomena of hereditary memory
are related to those of individual memory: at this stage . . . it is
practically impossible to disentangle the effects of hereditary memory
from those of the individual.”
Again:-
“Another point which we have here to consider is the part which
heredity has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual
prior to its own experience. We have already seen that heredity
plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences,
and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their power
of perception already largely developed. The wealth of ready-formed
information, and therefore of ready-made powers of perception, with
which many newly-born or newly-hatched animals are provided, is so great
and so precise that it scarcely requires to be supplemented by the subsequent
experience of the individual.” {53a}
Again:-
“Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or
other of the two principles.
“I. The first mode of origin consists in natural selection
or survival of the fittest, continuously preserving actions, &c.
&c.
“II. The second mode of origin is as follows:- By the effects
of habit in successive generations, actions which were originally intelligent
become as it were stereotyped into permanent instincts. Just as
in the lifetime of the individual adjustive actions which were originally
intelligent may by frequent repetition become automatic, so in the lifetime
of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition
and heredity so write their effects on the nervous system that the latter
is prepared, even before individual experience, to perform adjustive
actions mechanically which in previous generations were performed intelligently.
This mode of origin of instincts has been appropriately called (by Lewes
- see “Problems of Life and Mind” {54a})
the ‘lapsing of intelligence.’” {54b}
I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid by Mr. Romanes
both in his “Mental Evolution in Animals” and in his letters
to the Athenæum in March 1884, on Natural Selection as
an originator and developer of instinct, he very soon afterwards let
the Natural Selection part of the story go as completely without saying
as I do myself, or as Mr. Darwin did during the later years of his life.
Writing to Nature, April 10, 1884, he said: “To deny that
experience in the course of successive generations is the source of
instinct, is not to meet by way of argument the enormous mass of
evidence which goes to prove that this is the case.”
Here, then, instinct is referred, without reservation, to “experience
in successive generations,” and this is nonsense unless explained
as Professor Hering and I explain it. Mr. Romanes’ words,
in fact, amount to an unqualified acceptance of the chapter “Instinct
as Inherited Memory” given in “Life and Habit,” of
which Mr. Romanes in March 1884 wrote in terms which it is not necessary
to repeat.
Later on:-
“That ‘practice makes perfect’ is a matter, as I have
previously said, of daily observation. Whether we regard a juggler,
a pianist, or a billiard-player, a child learning his lesson or an actor
his part by frequently repeating it, or a thousand other illustrations
of the same process, we see at once that there is truth in the cynical
definition of a man as a ‘bundle of habits.’ And the
same, of course, is true of animals.” {55a}
From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show “that automatic actions
and conscious habits may be inherited,” {55b}
and in the course of doing this contends that “instincts may be
lost by disuse, and conversely that they may be acquired as instincts
by the hereditary transmission of ancestral experience.”
On another page Mr. Romanes says:-
“Let us now turn to the second of these two assumptions, viz.,
that some at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance
alone, a very precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued.
It is without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should
be prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the
year, and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its
own parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct
which aims at being complete. Now upon our own theory it can only
be met by taking it to be due to inherited memory.”
A little lower Mr. Romanes says: “Of what kind, then, is the inherited
memory on which the young cuckoo (if not also other migratory birds)
depends? We can only answer, of the same kind, whatever this may
be, as that upon which the old bird depends.” {55c}
I have given above most of the more marked passages which I have been
able to find in Mr. Romanes’ book which attribute instinct to
memory, and which admit that there is no fundamental difference between
the kind of memory with which we are all familiar and hereditary memory
as transmitted from one generation to another.
But throughout his work there are passages which suggest, though less
obviously, the same inference.
The passages I have quoted show that Mr. Romanes is upholding the same
opinions as Professor Hering’s and my own, but their effect and
tendency is more plain here than in Mr Romanes’ own book, where
they are overlaid by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always
easy of comprehension.
Moreover, at the same time that I claim the weight of Mr. Romanes’
authority, I am bound to admit that I do not find his support satisfactory.
The late Mr. Darwin himself - whose mantle seems to have fallen more
especially and particularly on Mr. Romanes - could not contradict himself
more hopelessly than Mr. Romanes often does. Indeed in one of
the very passages I have quoted in order to show that Mr. Romanes accepts
the phenomena of heredity as phenomena of memory, he speaks of “heredity
as playing an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences;”
so that, whereas I want him to say that the phenomena of heredity are
due to memory, he will have it that the memory is due to the heredity,
which seems to me absurd.
Over and over again Mr. Romanes insists that it is heredity which does
this or that. Thus it is “heredity with natural selection
which adapt the anatomical plan of the ganglia.” {56a}
It is heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual. {56b}
“In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may
by frequent repetition and heredity,” &c.; {56c}
but he nowhere tells us what heredity is any more than Messrs. Herbert
Spencer, Darwin, and Lewes have done. This, however, is exactly
what Professor Hering, whom I have unwittingly followed, does.
He resolves all phenomena of heredity, whether in respect of body or
mind, into phenomena of memory. He says in effect, “A man
grows his body as he does, and a bird makes her nest as she does, because
both man and bird remember having grown body and made nest as they now
do, or very nearly so, on innumerable past occasions.” He
thus, as I have said on an earlier page, reduces life from an equation
of say 100 unknown quantities to one of 99 only by showing that heredity
and memory, two of the original 100 unknown quantities, are in reality
part of one and the same thing.
That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very
unsatisfactory way.
What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following? -
Mr. Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation
is that of memory, and that this “is the conditio sine quâ
non of all mental life” (page 35).
I do not understand Mr. Romanes to hold that there is any living being
which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to admit that development
of body and mind are closely interdependent.
If, then, “the most fundamental principle” of mind is memory,
it follows that memory enters also as a fundamental principle into development
of body. For mind and body are so closely connected that nothing
can enter largely into the one without correspondingly affecting the
other.
On a later page Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child
as “embodying the results of a great mass of hereditary
experience” (p. 77), so that what he is driving at can be
collected by those who take trouble, but is not seen until we call up
from our own knowledge matter whose relevancy does not appear on the
face of it, and until we connect passages many pages asunder, the first
of which may easily be forgotten before we reach the second. There
can be no doubt, however, that Mr. Romanes does in reality, like Professor
Hering and myself, regard development, whether of mind or body, as due
to memory, for it is now pretty generally seen to be nonsense to talk
about “hereditary experience” or “hereditary memory”
if anything else is intended.
I have said above that on page 113 of his recent work Mr. Romanes declares
the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily
life, and hereditary memory, to be “so numerous and precise”
as to justify us in considering them as of one and the same kind.
This is certainly his meaning, but, with the exception of the words
within inverted commas, it is not his language. His own words
are these:-
“Profound, however, as our ignorance unquestionably is concerning
the physical substratum of memory, I think we are at least justified
in regarding this substratum as the same both in ganglionic or organic,
and in the conscious or psychological memory, seeing that the analogies
between them are so numerous and precise. Consciousness is but
an adjunct which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency
of repetition, complexity of operation, or other causes, involve what
I have before called ganglionic friction.”
I submit that I have correctly translated Mr. Romanes’ meaning,
and also that we have a right to complain of his not saying what he
has to say in words which will involve less “ganglionic friction”
on the part of the reader.
Another example may be found on p. 43 of Mr. Romanes’ book.
“Lastly,” he writes, “just as innumerable special
mechanisms of muscular co-ordinations are found to be inherited, innumerable
special associations of ideas are found to be the same, and in one case
as in the other the strength of the organically imposed connection is
found to bear a direct proportion to the frequency with which in the
history of the species it has occurred.”
Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on
on p. 51 of “Life and Habit;” but how difficult he has made
what could have been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing
but the reader’s comfort to be considered. Unfortunately
that seems to have been by no means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes
was thinking, or why, after implying and even saying over and over again
that instinct is inherited habit due to inherited memory, should he
turn sharply round on p. 297 and praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff
out “the well-known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by
Lamarck”? The answer is not far to seek. It is because
Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted
also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run
with the hare at one and the same time.
I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin “had told us what
the earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed
from them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would
have taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and
more likely to remove misconception from his own mind and from those
of his readers.” {59a}
This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made Mr. Romanes
so angry with me. I can find no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes
himself. He knows perfectly well what others have written about
the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well
that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view
that they have taken. If he had begun by saying what they had
said, and had then improved on it, I for one should have been only too
glad to be improved upon.
Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned
method of procedure was not good enough for him. One-half the
obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly
the same cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin’s
work - I mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from
others with whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement.
He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid
appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.
Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes’ definition of instinct:-
“Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element
of consciousness. The term is therefore a generic one, comprising
all those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive
action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge
of the relation between means employed and ends attained, but similarly
performed under similar and frequently recurring circumstances by all
the individuals of the same species.” {60a}
If Mr. Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor
Hering’s foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly
admitted, he might have said -
“Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations -
the new generation remembering what happened to it before it parted
company with the old. More briefly, Instinct is inherited memory.”
Then he might have added a rider -
“If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime,
it is not an instinct. If having been acquired in one lifetime
it is transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring,
though it was not an instinct in the parent. If the habit is transmitted
partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly acquired.”
This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to
know what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all
such debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence,
purpose, knowledge of purpose. &c.; it both introduces the feature
of inheritance which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from
so-called intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last
pass into the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition;
finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked
upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said {61a})
as “a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding
it.
In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste
of time, money and trouble that has been caused, by his not having been
content to appear as descending with modification like other people
from those who went before him. It will take years to get the
evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it.
He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited
fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the
theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle
as Mr. Darwin has got evolution, for surely the writer who can talk
about “heredity being able to work up the faculty of homing
into the instinct of migration,” {61b}
or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that
of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” {61c}
is little likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure
with advantage either to himself or any one else. Fortunately
Mr. Romanes is not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s
mantle, and got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’
shoulders hide a good deal that people were not going to observe too
closely while Mr. Darwin wore it.
I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to
have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory.
Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of
his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming
“instinctive, i.e., memory transmitted from one generation
to another.” {62a}
Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of
hereditary memory are as follows:-
1859. “It would be the most serious error to suppose
that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in
one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.”
{62b} And
this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.
1876. “It would be a serious error to suppose,”
&c., as before. {62c}
1881. “We should remember what a mass of inherited knowledge
is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” {62d}
1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes:
“It does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and
why this more than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:”
i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another. {62e}
And yet in 1839, or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped
the conception from which until the last year or two of his life he
so fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an
account of the voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, he
wrote: “Nature by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary,
has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country”
(p. 237).
What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common-sense
view of the matter which he took when he was a young man? I imagine
simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter, over-anxiety
to appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin,
and Lamarck.
I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted
the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that
he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed.
For in the preface to Hermann Muller’s “Fertilisation of
Flowers,” {63a}
which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin’s
death, I find him saying:- “Design in nature has for a long time
deeply interested many men, and though the subject must now be looked
at from a somewhat different point of view from what was formerly the
case, it is not on that account rendered less interesting.”
This is mused forth as a general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing:
the writer of the letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore’s
Almanac could not be more guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.
I cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that
I should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design
in organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr.
Darwin’s. This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation;
and, moreover, it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin
think it worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It
has no fitness in its connection with Hermann Muller’s book, for
what little Hermann Müller says about teleology at all is to condemn
it; why, then, should Mr. Darwin muse here of all places in the world
about the interest attaching to design in organism? Neither has
the passage any connection with the rest of the preface. There
is not another word about design, and even here Mr. Darwin seems mainly
anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it were on the head while
not committing himself to any proposition which could be disputed.
The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin wanted to hedge.
He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental
in pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a
burglar’s jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back
again, and that though, as I insisted in “Evolution Old and New,”
and “Unconscious Memory,” it must now be placed within the
organism instead of outside it, as “was formerly the case,”
it was not on that account any the less - design, as well as interesting.
I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly.
Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all
about the meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting
himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner.
In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin’s manner when
he did not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the
preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann’s “Studies
in the Theory of Descent,” published in 1881.
“Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, “maintain
with much confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in
the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors
have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due
to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is
as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any
question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes
of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able
discussion on the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause
before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility”
- or towards being able to be perfected.
I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor
Weismann’s book. There was a little something here and there,
but not much.
It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr. Romanes’
latest contribution to biology - I mean his theory of physiological
selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in Nature
just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since
the foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written.
I admit to feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not
appear earlier; as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable
of further embryonic change, and this must be my excuse for saying less
about Mr. Romanes’ theory than I might perhaps otherwise do.
I cordially, however, agree with the Times, which says that “Mr.
George Romanes appears to be the biological investigator on whom the
mantle of Mr. Darwin has most conspicuously descended” (August
16, 1886). Mr. Romanes is just the person whom the late Mr. Darwin
would select to carry on his work, and Mr. Darwin was just the kind
of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would find himself instinctively
attracted.
The Times continues - “The position which Mr. Romanes takes
up is the result of his perception shared by many evolutionists, that
the theory of natural selection is not really a theory of the origin
of species. . . .” What, then, becomes of Mr. Darwin’s
most famous work, which was written expressly to establish natural selection
as the main means of organic modification? “The new factor
which Mr. Romanes suggests,” continues the Times, “is
that at a certain stage of development of varieties in a state of nature
a change takes place in their reproductive systems, rendering those
which differ in some particulars mutually infertile, and thus the formation
of new permanent species takes place without the swamping effect of
free intercrossing. . . . How his theory can be properly termed
one of selection he fails to make clear. If correct, it is a law
or principle of operation rather than a process of selection.
It has been objected to Mr. Romanes’ theory that it is the re-statement
of a fact. This objection is less important than the lack of facts
in support of the theory.” The Times, however, implies
it as its opinion that the required facts will be forthcoming by and
by, and that when they have been found Mr. Romanes’ suggestion
will constitute “the most important addition to the theory of
evolution since the publication of the ‘Origin of Species.’”
Considering that the Times has just implied the main thesis of
the “Origin of Species” to be one which does not stand examination,
this is rather a doubtful compliment.
Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the Times appears to perceive
that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice
depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do not
appear to see that though the expression natural selection must be always
more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for
purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which
is open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical
character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of
error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly fortuitous
is chimerical as well as metaphorical. Both writers speak of natural
selection as though there could not possibly be any selection in the
course of nature, or natural survival, of any but accidental variations.
Thus Mr. Romanes says: {66a}
“The swamping effect of free inter-crossing upon an individual
variation constitutes perhaps the most formidable difficulty with which
the theory of natural selection is beset.” And the
writer of the article in the Times above referred to says: “In
truth the theory of natural selection presents many facts and
results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of accounting
for the existence of species.” The assertion made in each
case is true if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous variations
is intended, but it does not hold good if the selection is supposed
to be made from variations under which there lies a general principle
of wide and abiding application. It is not likely that a man of
Mr. Romanes’ antecedents should not be perfectly awake to considerations
so obvious as the foregoing, and I am afraid I am inclined to consider
his whole suggestion as only an attempt upon the part of the wearer
of Mr. Darwin’s mantle to carry on Mr. Darwin’s work in
Mr. Darwin’s spirit.
I have seen Professor Hering’s theory adopted recently more unreservedly
by Dr. Creighton in his “Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in
Disease.” {67a}
Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering’s
address, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen
him lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and
organ has an individual memory. In “Life and Habit”
I expressed a hope that the opinions it upheld would be found useful
by medical men, and am therefore the more glad to see that this has
proved to be the case. I may perhaps be pardoned if I quote the
passage in” Life and Habit” to which I am referring.
It runs:-
“Mutatis mutandis, the above would seem to hold as truly
about medicine as about politics. We cannot reason with our cells,
for they know so much more” (of course I mean “about their
own business”) “than we do, that they cannot understand
us; - but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they
have been most accustomed to, and what, therefore, they are most likely
to expect; we can see that they get this as far as it is in our power
to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them, only
bearing in mind that they will rebel equally against too sudden a change
of treatment and no change at all” (p. 305).
Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which - though
I did not notice his saying so - he would doubtless see as a mode of
cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same advantages
as this, and requiring the same precautions against abuse; he would
not, however, I am sure, deny that there could be no fertility of good
results if too wide a cross were attempted, so that I may claim the
weight of his authority as supporting both the theory of an unconscious
memory in general, and the particular application of it to medicine
which I had ventured to suggest.
“Has the word ‘memory,’” he asks, “a real
application to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it outside
its ancient limits only in a figure of speech?”
“If I had thought,” he continues later, “that unconscious
memory was no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of
it to these various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still
have judged it not unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class
of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is
more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly
any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force
of habit. To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with
a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an
over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things
that we all understand.
“For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that
retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty throughout
the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious;
and I claim the description of a certain class of maladies according
to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description and not
a figurative.” (p. 2.)
As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards “alterative
action” as “habit-breaking action.”
As regards the organism’s being guided throughout its development
to maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that “Professor
Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication.”
“I should prefer to say,” he adds, “the acme of organic
implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly
simple, having nothing in their form or structure to show for the marvellous
potentialities within them.
“I now come to the application of these considerations to the
doctrine of unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of organic
implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of
organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness.
Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation
is potential memory, consciousness is actual memory.”
I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as
I should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader
to turn to Dr. Creighton’s book, I will proceed to the subject
indicated in my title.
CHAPTER V - Statement of the Question at Issue
Of the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book -
I mean the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction
of design into organic modification - the second is both the more important
and the one which stands most in need of support. The substantial
identity between heredity and memory is becoming generally admitted;
as regards my second point, however, I cannot flatter myself that I
have made much way against the formidable array of writers on the neo-Darwinian
side; I shall therefore devote the rest of my book as far as possible
to this subject only. Natural selection (meaning by these words
the preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable variations
that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck and in no way
arising out of function) has been, to use an Americanism than which
I can find nothing apter, the biggest biological boom of the last quarter
of a century; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Professor
Ray Lankester, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should show
some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification called
in question. Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen
{70a} and Professor
Ray Lankester {70b}
in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause {70c}
in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory
of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by myself;
if they are not to be left in possession of the field the sooner they
are met the better.
Stripped of detail the point at issue is this; - whether luck or cunning
is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development.
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning.
They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the situation
- within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as organism retreats
farther backwards from ourselves - and persistent effort to turn it
to account. They made this the soul of all development whether
of mind or body.
And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for
better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready
wit and savoir faire than others; that some give more proofs
of genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that
some have even gone through waters of misery which they have used as
wells.
The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense
and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made
by “striking oil,” and ere now been transmitted to descendants
in spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired.
No speculation, no commerce; “nothing venture, nothing have,”
is as true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any
other kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting
that highly picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture
do from time to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest
and most dead-level organisms under the name of “sports;”
but they would hold that even these occur most often and most happily
to those that have persevered in well-doing for some generations.
Unto the organism that hath is given, and from the organism that hath
not is taken away; so that even “sports” prove to be only
a little off thrift, which still remains the sheet anchor of the early
evolutionists. They believe, in fact, that more organic wealth
has been made by saving than in any other way. The race is not
in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to the phenomenally
strong, but to the good average all-round organism that is alike shy
of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness. Festina,
but festina lente - perhaps as involving so completely the
contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification - is the
motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va piano va lontano,
they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have
a hankering even after these), at any rate as the amœba.
To repeat in other words. All enduring forms establish a modus
vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because
both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined
but somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can
to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted
in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed;
but their plasticity depends in great measure upon their failure to
perceive that they are moulding themselves. If a change is so
great that they are seriously incommoded by its novelty, they are not
likely to acquiesce in it kindly enough to grow to it, but they will
make no difficulty about the miracle involved in accommodating themselves
to a difference of only two or three per cent. {72a}
As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as
fresh change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established,
there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be accumulated
in the course of generations - provided, of course, always, that the
modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive habits
and physical development of the organism in their collective capacity.
Where the change is too great, or where an organ has been modified cumulatively
in some one direction, until it has reached a development too seriously
out of harmony with the habits of the organism taken collectively, then
the organism holds itself excused from further effort, throws up the
whole concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation and reconstruction
of death. It is only on the relinquishing of further effort that
this death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on from change
to change, altering and being altered - that is to say, either killing
themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or killing the
surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves. There is a ceaseless
higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle between these
two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both have in no
small part to re-enter into the womb from whence they came and be born
again in some form which shall give greater satisfaction.
All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth.
Change is the common substratum which underlies both life and death;
life and death are not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to
one another; in the highest life there is still much death, and in the
most complete death there is still not a little life. La vie,
says Claud Bernard, {73a}
c’est la mort: he might have added, and perhaps did, et
la mort ce n’est que la vie transformée. Life
and death are the extreme modes of something which is partly both and
wholly neither; this something is common, ordinary change; solve any
change and the mystery of life and death will be revealed; show why
and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than what
it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left in any
other change. One is not in its ultimate essence more miraculous
that another; it may be more striking - a greater congeries of
shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but not more miraculous;
all change is quâ us absolutely incomprehensible and miraculous;
the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its essence, as
apart from its phenomena, be inquired into.
But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a
dissolution, or a combination of the two. Growth is the coming
together of elements with quasi similar characteristics.
I understand it is believed to be the coming together of matter in certain
states of motion with other matter in states so nearly similar that
the rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence reinforce the rhythms
pre-existing in the other - making, rather than marring and undoing
them. Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are an
untuning; both involve a succession of greater or smaller attunings
and untunings; organic life is “the diapason closing full in man”;
it is the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the
harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges through every degree of
complexity from the endless combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death
which we find in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the
amœba. Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree
of complexity. All pleasant changes are recreative; they are pro
tanto births; all unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as such,
pro tanto deaths, but we can no more exhaust either wholly of
the other, than we can exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure
and pain lurk within one another, as life in death, and death in life