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Title: Life and Habit

Author: Samuel Butler

Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6138]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on November 18, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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Transcribed from the 1910 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




LIFE AND HABIT




PREFACE



Since Samuel Butler published "Life and Habit" thirty-three {1} years
have elapsed--years fruitful in change and discovery, during which
many of the mighty have been put down from their seat and many of the
humble have been exalted.  I do not know that Butler can truthfully
be called humble, indeed, I think he had very few misgivings as to
his ultimate triumph, but he has certainly been exalted with a
rapidity that he himself can scarcely have foreseen.  During his
lifetime he was a literary pariah, the victim of an organized
conspiracy of silence.  He is now, I think it may be said without
exaggeration, universally accepted as one of the most remarkable
English writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century.  I will
not weary my readers by quoting the numerous tributes paid by
distinguished contemporary writers to Butler's originality and force
of mind, but I cannot refrain from illustrating the changed attitude
of the scientific world to Butler and his theories by a reference to
"Darwin and Modern Science," the collection of essays published in
1909 by the University of Cambridge, in commemoration of the Darwin
centenary.  In that work Professor Bateson, while referring
repeatedly to Butler's biological works, speaks of him as "the most
brilliant and by far the most interesting of Darwin's opponents,
whose works are at length emerging from oblivion."  With the growth
of Butler's reputation "Life and Habit" has had much to do.  It was
the first and is undoubtedly the most important of his writings on
evolution.  From its loins, as it were, sprang his three later books,
"Evolution Old and New," "Unconscious Memory," and "Luck or Cunning",
which carried its arguments further afield.  It will perhaps interest
Butler's readers if I here quote a passage from his note-books,
lately published in the "New Quarterly Review" (Vol. III. No. 9), in
which he summarizes his work in biology:

"To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have
been mainly these

"1.  The identification of heredity and memory, and the corollaries
relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena
of old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids, and the
principles underlying longevity--all of which follow as a matter of
course.  This was 'Life and Habit' [1877].

"2.  The re-introduction of teleology into organic life, which to me
seems hardly, if at all, less important than the 'Life and Habit'
theory.  This was 'Evolution Old and New' [1879].

"3.  An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory.
This was Unconscious Memory' [1880].  I was alarmed by the suggestion
and fathered it upon Professor Hering, who never, that I can see,
meant to say anything of the kind, but I forced my view upon him, as
it were, by taking hold of a sentence or two in his lecture, 'On
Memory as a Universal Function of Organised Matter,' and thus
connected memory with vibrations.

"What I want to do now (1885) is to connect vibrations not only with
memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the
memory resides, thus adopting Newland's law (sometimes called
Mendelejeff's law) that there is only one substance, and that the
characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given
time will determine whether it will appear to us as, we will say,
hydrogen, or sodium, or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the
other."  [This is touched upon in the concluding chapter of "Luck or
Cunning?" 1887].

The present edition of "Life and Habit" is practically a re-issue of
that of 1878.  I find that about the year 1890, although the original
edition was far from being exhausted, Butler began to make
corrections of the text of "Life and Habit," presumably with the
intention of publishing a revised edition.  The copy of the book so
corrected is now in my possession.  In the first five chapters there
are numerous emendations, very few of which, however, affect the
meaning to any appreciable extent, being mainly concerned with the
excision of redundancies and the simplification of style.  I imagine
that by the time he had reached the end of the fifth chapter Butler
realised that the corrections he had made were not of sufficient
importance to warrant a new edition, and determined to let the book
stand as it was.  I believe, therefore, that I am carrying out his
wishes in reprinting the present edition from the original plates.  I
have found, however, among his papers three entirely new passages,
which he probably wrote during the period of correction and no doubt
intended to incorporate into the revised edition.  Mr. Henry Festing
Jones has also given me a copy of a passage which Butler wrote and
gummed into Mr. Jones's copy of "Life and Habit."  These four
passages I have printed as an appendix at the end of the present
volume.

One more point deserves notice.  Butler often refers in "Life and
Habit" to Darwin's "Variations of Animals and Plants under
Domestication."  When he does so it is always under the name "Plants
and Animals."  More often still he refers to Darwin's "Origin of
Species by means Natural Selection," terming it at one time "Origin
of Species" and at another "Natural Selection," sometimes, as on p.
278, using both names within a few lines of each other.  Butler was
as a rule scrupulously careful about quotations, and I can offer no
explanation of this curious confusion of titles.

R. A. STREATFEILD.
November, 1910.



AUTHOR'S PREFACE



The Italics in the passages quoted in this book are generally mine,
but I found it almost impossible to call the reader's attention to
this upon every occasion.  I have done so once or twice, as thinking
it necessary in these cases that there should be no mistake; on the
whole, however, I thought it better to content myself with calling
attention in a preface to the fact that the author quoted is not, as
a general rule, responsible for the Italics.

S. BUTLER.
November 13, 1877.



CHAPTER I--ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS



It will be our business in the following chapters to consider whether
the unconsciousness, or quasi-unconsciousness, with which we perform
certain acquired actions, would seem to throw any light upon
Embryology and inherited instincts, and otherwise to follow the train
of thought which the class of actions above-mentioned would suggest;
more especially in so far as they appear to bear upon the origin of
species and the continuation of life by successive generations,
whether in the animal or vegetable kingdoms.

In the outset, however, I would wish most distinctly to disclaim for
these pages the smallest pretension to scientific value, originality,
or even to accuracy of more than a very rough and ready kind--for
unless a matter be true enough to stand a good deal of
misrepresentation, its truth is not of a very robust order, and the
blame will rather lie with its own delicacy if it be crushed, than
with the carelessness of the crusher.  I have no wish to instruct,
and not much to be instructed; my aim is simply to entertain and
interest the numerous class of people who, like myself, know nothing
of science, but who enjoy speculating and reflecting (not too deeply)
upon the phenomena around them.  I have therefore allowed myself a
loose rein, to run on with whatever came uppermost, without regard to
whether it was new or old; feeling sure that if true, it must be very
old or it never could have occurred to one so little versed in
science as myself; and knowing that it is sometimes pleasanter to
meet the old under slightly changed conditions, than to go through
the formalities and uncertainties of making new acquaintance.  At the
same time, I should say that whatever I have knowingly taken from any
one else, I have always acknowledged.

It is plain, therefore, that my book cannot be intended for the
perusal of scientific people; it is intended for the general public
only, with whom I believe myself to be in harmony, as knowing neither
much more nor much less than they do.

Taking then, the art of playing the piano as an example of the kind
of action we are in search of, we observe that a practised player
will perform very difficult pieces apparently without effort, often,
indeed, while thinking and talking of something quite other than his
music; yet he will play accurately and, possibly, with much
expression.  If he has been playing a fugue, say in four parts, he
will have kept each part well distinct, in such a manner as to prove
that his mind was not prevented, by its other occupations, from
consciously or unconsciously following four distinct trains of
musical thought at the same time, nor from making his fingers act in
exactly the required manner as regards each note of each part.

It commonly happens that in the course of four or five minutes a
player may have struck four or five thousand notes.  If we take into
consideration the rests, dotted notes, accidentals, variations of
time, &c., we shall find his attention must have been exercised on
many more occasions than when he was actually striking notes:  so
that it may not be too much to say that the attention of a first-rate
player may have been exercised--to an infinitesimally small extent--
but still truly exercised--on as many as ten thousand occasions
within the space of five minutes, for no note can be struck nor point
attended to without a certain amount of attention, no matter how
rapidly or unconsciously given.

Moreover, each act of attention has been followed by an act of
volition, and each act of volition by a muscular action, which is
composed of many minor actions; some so small that we can no more
follow them than the player himself can perceive them; nevertheless,
it may have been perfectly plain that the player was not attending to
what he was doing, but was listening to conversation on some other
subject, not to say joining in it himself.  If he has been playing
the violin, he may have done all the above, and may also have been
walking about.  Herr Joachim would unquestionably be able to do all
that has here been described.

So complete would the player's unconsciousness of the attention he is
giving, and the brain power he is exerting appear to be, that we
shall find it difficult to awaken his attention to any particular
part of his performance without putting him out.  Indeed we cannot do
so.  We shall observe that he finds it hardly less difficult to
compass a voluntary consciousness of what he has once learnt so
thoroughly that it has passed, so to speak, into the domain of
unconsciousness, than he found it to learn the note or passage in the
first instance.  The effort after a second consciousness of detail
baffles him--compels him to turn to his music or play slowly.  In
fact it seems as though he knew the piece too well to be able to know
that he knows it, and is only conscious of knowing those passages
which he does not know so thoroughly.

At the end of his performance, his memory would appear to be no less
annihilated than was his consciousness of attention and volition.
For of the thousands of acts requiring the exercise of both the one
and the other, which he has done during the five minutes, we will
say, of his performance, he will remember hardly one when it is over.
If he calls to mind anything beyond the main fact that he has played
such and such a piece, it will probably be some passage which he has
found more difficult than the others, and with the like of which he
has not been so long familiar.  All the rest he will forget as
completely as the breath which he has drawn while playing.

He finds it difficult to remember even the difficulties he
experienced in learning to play.  A few may have so impressed him
that they remain with him, but the greater part will have escaped him
as completely as the remembrance of what he ate, or how he put on his
clothes, this day ten years ago; nevertheless, it is plain he
remembers more than he remembers remembering, for he avoids mistakes
which he made at one time, and his performance proves that all the
notes are in his memory, though if called upon to play such and such
a bar at random from the middle of the piece, and neither more nor
less, he will probably say that he cannot remember it unless he
begins from the beginning of the phrase which leads to it.  Very
commonly he will be obliged to begin from the beginning of the
movement itself, and be unable to start at any other point unless he
have the music before him; and if disturbed, as we have seen above,
he will have to start de novo from an accustomed starting-point.

Yet nothing can be more obvious than that there must have been a time
when what is now so easy as to be done without conscious effort of
the brain was only done by means of brain work which was very keenly
perceived, even to fatigue and positive distress.  Even now, if the
player is playing something the like of which he has not met before,
we observe he pauses and becomes immediately conscious of attention.

We draw the inference, therefore, as regards pianoforte or violin
playing, that the more the familiarity or knowledge of the art, the
less is there consciousness of such knowledge; even so far as that
there should seem to be almost as much difficulty in awakening
consciousness which has become, so to speak, latent,--a consciousness
of that which is known too well to admit of recognised self-analysis
while the knowledge is being exercised--as in creating a
consciousness of that which is not yet well enough known to be
properly designated as known at all.  On the other hand, we observe
that the less the familiarly or knowledge, the greater the
consciousness of whatever knowledge there is.

Considering other like instances of the habitual exercise of
intelligence and volition, which, from long familiarity with the
method of procedure, escape the notice of the person exercising them,
we naturally think of writing.  The formation of each letter requires
attention and volition, yet in a few minutes a practised writer will
form several hundred letters, and be able to think and talk of
something else all the time he is doing so.  It will not probably
remember the formation of a single character in any page that he has
written; nor will he be able to give more than the substance of his
writing if asked to do so.  He knows how to form each letter so well,
and he knows so well each word that he is about to write, that he has
ceased to be conscious of his knowledge or to notice his acts of
volition, each one of which is, nevertheless, followed by a
corresponding muscular action.  Yet the uniformity of our
handwriting, and the manner in which we almost invariably adhere to
one method of forming the same character, would seem to suggest that
during the momentary formation of each letter our memories must
revert (with an intensity too rapid for our perception) to many if
not to all the occasions on which we have ever written the same
letter previously--the memory of these occasions dwelling in our
minds as what has been called a residuum--an unconsciously struck
balance or average of them all--a fused mass of individual
reminiscences of which no trace can be found in our consciousness,
and of which the only effect would seem to lie in the gradual changes
of handwriting which are perceptible in most people till they have
reached middle-age, and sometimes even later.  So far are we from
consciously remembering any one of the occasions on which we have
written such and such a letter, that we are not even conscious of
exercising our memory at all, any more than we are in health
conscious of the action of our heart.  But, if we are writing in some
unfamiliar way, as when printing our letters instead of writing them
in our usual running hand, our memory is so far awakened that we
become conscious of every character we form; sometimes it is even
perceptible as memory to ourselves, as when we try to remember how to
print some letter, for example a g, and cannot call to mind on which
side of the upper half of the letter we ought to put the link which
connects it with the lower, and are successful in remembering; but if
we become very conscious of remembering, it shows that we are on the
brink of only trying to remember,--that is to say, of not remembering
at all.

As a general rule, we remember for a time the substance of what we
have written, for the subject is generally new to us; but if we are
writing what we have often written before, we lose consciousness of
this too, as fully as we do of the characters necessary to convey the
substance to another person, and we shall find ourselves writing on
as it were mechanically while thinking and talking of something else.
So a paid copyist, to whom the subject of what he is writing is of no
importance, does not even notice it.  He deals only with familiar
words and familiar characters without caring to go behind them, and
thereupon writes on in a quasi-unconscious manner; but if he comes to
a word or to characters with which he is but little acquainted, he
becomes immediately awakened to the consciousness of either
remembering or trying to remember.  His consciousness of his own
knowledge or memory would seem to belong to a period, so to speak, of
twilight between the thick darkness of ignorance and the brilliancy
of perfect knowledge; as colour which vanishes with extremes of light
or of shade.  Perfect ignorance and perfect knowledge are alike
unselfconscious.

The above holds good even more noticeably in respect of reading.  How
many thousands of individual letters do our eyes run over every
morning in the "Times" newspaper, how few of them do we notice, or
remember having noticed?  Yet there was a time when we had such
difficulty in reading even the simplest words, that we had to take
great pains to impress them upon our memory so as to know them when
we came to then again.  Now, not even a single word of all we have
seen will remain with us, unless it is a new one, or an old one used
in an unfamiliar sense, in which case we notice, and may very likely
remember it.  Our memory retains the substance only, the substance
only being unfamiliar.  Nevertheless, although we do not perceive
more than the general result of our perception, there can be no doubt
of our having perceived every letter in every word that we have read
at all, for if we come upon a word misspelt our attention is at once
aroused; unless, indeed, we have actually corrected the misspelling,
as well as noticed it, unconsciously, through exceeding familiarity
with the way in which it ought to be spelt.  Not only do we perceive
the letters we have seen without noticing that we have perceived
them, but we find it almost impossible to notice that we notice them
when we have once learnt to read fluently.  To try to do so puts us
out, and prevents our being able to read.  We may even go so far as
to say that if a man can attend to the individual characters, it is a
sign that he cannot yet read fluently.  If we know how to read well,
we are as unconscious of the means and processes whereby we attain
the desired result as we are about the growth of our hair or the
circulation of our blood.  So that here again it would seem that we
only know what we know still to some extent imperfectly, and that
what we know thoroughly escapes our conscious perception though none
the less actually perceived.  Our perception in fact passes into a
latent stage, as also our memory and volition.

Walking is another example of the rapid exercise of volition with but
little perception of each individual act of exercise.  We notice any
obstacle in our path, but it is plain we do not notice that we
perceive much that we have nevertheless been perceiving; for if a man
goes down a lane by night he will stumble over many things which he
would have avoided by day, although he would not have noticed them.
Yet time was when walking was to each one of us a new and arduous
task--as arduous as we should now find it to wheel a wheelbarrow on a
tight-rope; whereas, at present, though we can think of our steps to
a certain extent without checking our power to walk, we certainly
cannot consider our muscular action in detail without having to come
to a dead stop.

Talking--especially in one's mother tongue--may serve as a last
example.  We find it impossible to follow the muscular action of the
mouth and tongue in framing every letter or syllable we utter.  We
have probably spoken for years and years before we became aware that
the letter h is a labial sound, and until we have to utter a word
which is difficult from its unfamiliarity we speak "trippingly on the
tongue" with no attention except to the substance of what we wish to
say.  Yet talking was not always the easy matter to us which it is at
present--as we perceive more readily when we are learning a new
language which it may take us months to master.  Nevertheless, when
we have once mastered it we speak it without further consciousness of
knowledge or memory, as regards the more common words, and without
even noticing our consciousness.  Here, as in the other instances
already given, as long as we did not know perfectly, we were
conscious of our acts of perception, volition, and reflection, but
when our knowledge has become perfect we no longer notice our
consciousness, nor our volition; nor can we awaken a second
artificial consciousness without some effort, and disturbance of the
process of which we are endeavouring to become conscious.  We are no
longer, so to speak, under the law, but under grace.

An ascending scale may be perceived in the above instances.

In playing, we have an action acquired long after birth, difficult of
acquisition, and never thoroughly familiarised to the power of
absolutely unconscious performance, except in the case of those who
have either an exceptional genius for music, or who have devoted the
greater part of their time to practising.  Except in the case of
these persons it is generally found easy to become more or less
conscious of any passage without disturbing the performance, and our
action remains so completely within our control that we can stop
playing at any moment we please.

In writing, we have an action generally acquired earlier, done for
the most part with great unconsciousness of detail, fairly well
within our control to stop at any moment; though not so completely as
would be imagined by those who have not made the experiment of trying
to stop in the middle of a given character when writing at fit speed.
Also, we can notice our formation of any individual character without
our writing being materially hindered.

Reading is usually acquired earlier still.  We read with more
unconsciousness of attention than we write.  We find it more
difficult to become conscious of any character without discomfiture,
and we cannot arrest ourselves in the middle of a word, for example,
and hardly before the end of a sentence; nevertheless it is on the
whole well within our control.

Walking is so early an acquisition that we cannot remember having
acquired it.  In running fast over average ground we find it very
difficult to become conscious of each individual step, and should
possibly find it more difficult still, if the inequalities and
roughness of uncultured land had not perhaps caused the development
of a power to create a second consciousness of our steps without
hindrance to our running or walking.  Pursuit and flight, whether in
the chase or in war, must for many generations have played a much
more prominent part in the lives of our ancestors than they do in our
own.  If the ground over which they had to travel had been generally
as free from obstruction as our modern cultivated lands, it is
possible that we might not find it as easy to notice our several
steps as we do at present.  Even as it is, if while we are running we
would consider the action of our muscles, we come to a dead stop, and
should probably fall if we tried to observe too suddenly; for we must
stop to do this, and running, when we have once committed ourselves
to it beyond a certain point, is not controllable to a step or two
without loss of equilibrium.

We learn to talk, much about the same time that we learn to walk, but
talking requires less muscular effort than walking, and makes
generally less demand upon our powers.  A man may talk a long while
before he has done the equivalent of a five-mile walk; it is natural,
therefore, that we should have had more practice in talking than in
walking, and hence that we should find it harder to pay attention to
our words than to our steps.  Certainly it is very hard to become
conscious of every syllable or indeed of every word we say; the
attempt to do so will often bring us to a check at once; nevertheless
we can generally stop talking if we wish to do so, unless the crying
of infants be considered as a kind of quasi-speech:  this comes
earlier, and is often quite uncontrollable, or more truly perhaps is
done with such complete control over the muscles by the will, and
with such absolute certainty of his own purpose on the part of the
wilier, that there is no longer any more doubt, uncertainty, or
suspense, and hence no power of perceiving any of the processes
whereby the result is attained--as a wheel which may look fast fixed
because it is so fast revolving. {2}

We may observe therefore in this ascending scale, imperfect as it is,
that the older the habit the longer the practice, the longer the
practice, the more knowledge--or, the less uncertainty; the less
uncertainty the less power of conscious self-analysis and control.

It will occur to the reader that in all the instances given above,
different individuals attain the unconscious stage of perfect
knowledge with very different degrees of facility.  Some have to
attain it with a great sum; others are free born.  Some learn to
play, to read, write, and talk, with hardly an effort--some show such
an instinctive aptitude for arithmetic that, like Zerah Colburn, at
eight years old, they achieve results without instruction, which in
the case of most people would require a long education.  The account
of Zerah Colburn, as quoted from Mr. Baily in Dr. Carpenter's "Mental
Physiology," may perhaps be given here.

"He raised any number consisting of ONE figure progressively to the
tenth power, giving the results (by actual multiplication and not by
memory) FASTER THAN THEY COULD BE SET DOWN IN FIGURES by the person
appointed to record them.  He raised the number 8 progressively to
the SIXTEENTH power, and in naming the last result, which consisted
of 15 figures, he was right in every one.  Some numbers consisting of
TWO figures he raised as high as the eighth power, though he found a
difficulty in proceeding when the products became very large.

"On being asked the SQUARE ROOT of 106,929, he answered 327 before
the original number could be written down.  He was then required to
find the cube root of 268,336,125, and with equal facility and
promptness he replied 645.

"He was asked how many minutes there are in 48 years, and before the
question could be taken down he replied 25,228,800, and immediately
afterwards he gave the correct number of seconds.

"On being requested to give the factors which would produce the
number 247,483, he immediately named 941 and 263, which are the only
two numbers from the multiplication of which it would result.  On
171,395 being proposed, he named 5 x 34,279, 7 x 24,485, 59 x 2905,
83 x 2065, 35 x 4897, 295 x 581, and 413 x 415.

"He was then asked to give the factors of 36,083, but he immediately
replied that it had none, which was really the case, this being a
prime number.  Other numbers being proposed to him indiscriminately,
he always succeeded in giving the correct factors except in the case
of prime numbers, which he generally discovered almost as soon as
they were proposed to him.  The number 4,294,967,297, which is 2^32 +
1, having been given him, he discovered, as Euler had previously
done, that it was not the prime number which Fermat had supposed it
to be, but that it is the product of the factors 6,700,417 x 641.
The solution of this problem was only given after the lapse of some
weeks, but the method he took to obtain it clearly showed that he had
not derived his information from any extraneous source.

"When he was asked to multiply together numbers both consisting of
more than these figures, he seemed to decompose one or both of them
into its factors, and to work with them separately.  Thus, on being
asked to give the square of 4395, he multiplied 293 by itself, and
then twice multiplied the product by 15.  And on being asked to tell
the square of 999,999 he obtained the correct result,
999,998,000,001, by twice multiplying the square of 37,037 by 27.  He
then of his own accord multiplied that product by 49, and said that
the result (viz., 48,999,902,000,049) was equal to the square of
6,999,993.  He afterwards multiplied this product by 49, and observed
that the result (viz., 2,400,995,198,002,401) was equal to the square
of 48,999,951.  He was again asked to multiply the product by 25, and
in naming the result (viz., 60,024,879,950,060,025) he said it was
equal to the square of 244,999,755.

"On being interrogated as to the manner in which he obtained these
results, the boy constantly said he did not know HOW the answers came
into his mind.  In the act of multiplying two numbers together, and
in the raising of powers, it was evident (alike from the facts just
stated and from the motion of his lips) that SOME operation was going
forward in his mind; yet that operation could not (from the readiness
with which his answers were furnished) have been at all allied to the
usual modes of procedure, of which, indeed, he was entirely ignorant,
not being able to perform on paper a simple sum in multiplication or
division.  But in the extraction of roots, and in the discovery of
the factors of large numbers, it did not appear that any operation
COULD take place, since he gave answers IMMEDIATELY, or in a very few
seconds, which, according to the ordinary methods, would have
required very difficult and laborious calculations, and prime numbers
cannot be recognised as such by any known rule."

I should hope that many of the above figures are wrong.  I have
verified them carefully with Dr. Carpenter's quotation, but further
than this I cannot and will not go.  Also I am happy to find that in
the end the boy overcame the mathematics, and turned out a useful but
by no means particularly calculating member of society.

The case, however, is typical of others in which persons have been
found able to do without apparent effort what in the great majority
of cases requires a long apprenticeship.  It is needless to multiply
instances; the point that concerns us is, that knowledge under such
circumstances being very intense, and the ease with which the result
is produced extreme, it eludes the conscious apprehension of the
performer himself, who only becomes conscious when a difficulty
arises which taxes even his abnormal power.  Such a case, therefore,
confirms rather than militates against our opinion that consciousness
of knowledge vanishes on the knowledge becoming perfect--the only
difference between those possessed of any such remarkable special
power and the general run of people being, that the first are born
with such an unusual aptitude for their particular specialty that
they are able to dispense with all or nearly all the preliminary
exercise of their faculty, while the latter must exercise it for a
considerable time before they can get it to work smoothly and easily;
but in either case when once the knowledge is intense it is
unconscious.

Nor again would such an instance as that of Zerah Colburn warrant us
in believing that this white heat, as it were, of unconscious
knowledge can be attained by any one without his ever having been
originally cold.  Young Colburn, for example, could not extract roots
when he was an embryo of three weeks' standing.  It is true we can
seldom follow the process, but we know there must have been a time in
every case when even the desire for information or action had not
been kindled; the forgetfulness of effort on the part of those with
exceptional genius for a special subject is due to the smallness of
the effort necessary, so that it makes no impression upon the
individual himself, rather than to the absence of any effort at all.
{3}

It would, therefore, appear as though perfect knowledge and perfect
ignorance were extremes which meet and become indistinguishable from
one another; so also perfect volition and perfect absence of
volition, perfect memory and utter forgetfulness; for we are
unconscious of knowing, willing, or remembering, either from not yet
having known or willed, or from knowing and willing so well and so
intensely as to be no longer conscious of either.  Conscious
knowledge and volition are of attention; attention is of suspense;
suspense is of doubt; doubt is of uncertainty; uncertainty is of
ignorance; so that the mere fact of conscious knowing or willing
implies the presence of more or less novelty and doubt.

It would also appear as a general principle on a superficial view of
the foregoing instances (and the reader may readily supply himself
with others which are perhaps more to the purpose), that unconscious
knowledge and unconscious volition are never acquired otherwise than
as the result of experience, familiarity, or habit; so that whenever
we observe a person able to do any complicated action unconsciously,
we may assume both that he must have done it very often before he
could acquire so great proficiency, and also that there must have
been a time when he did not know how to do it at all.

We may assume that there was a time when he was yet so nearly on the
point of neither knowing nor willing perfectly, that he was quite
alive to whatever knowledge or volition he could exert; going further
back, we shall find him still more keenly alive to a less perfect
knowledge; earlier still, we find him well aware that he does not
know nor will correctly, but trying hard to do both the one and the
other; and so on, back and back, till both difficulty and
consciousness become little more than a sound of going in the brain,
a flitting to and fro of something barely recognisable as the desire
to will or know at all--much less as the desire to know or will
definitely this or that.  Finally, they retreat beyond our ken into
the repose--the inorganic kingdom--of as yet unawakened interest.

In either case,--the repose of perfect ignorance or of perfect
knowledge--disturbance is troublesome.  When first starting on an
Atlantic steamer, our rest is hindered by the screw; after a short
time, it is hindered if the screw stops.  A uniform impression is
practically no impression.  One cannot either learn or unlearn
without pains or pain.



CHAPTER II--CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS--THE LAW AND GRACE




In this chapter we shall show that the law, which we have observed to
hold as to the vanishing tendency of knowledge upon becoming perfect,
holds good not only concerning acquired actions or habits of body,
but concerning opinions, modes of thought, and mental habits
generally, which are no more recognised as soon as firmly fixed, than
are the steps with which we go about our daily avocations.  I am
aware that I may appear in the latter part of the chapter to have
wandered somewhat beyond the limits of my subject, but, on the whole,
decide upon leaving what I have written, inasmuch as it serves to
show how far-reaching is the principle on which I am insisting.
Having said so much, I shall during the remainder of the book keep
more closely to the point.

Certain it is that we know best what we are least conscious of
knowing, or at any rate least able to prove, as, for example, our own
existence, or that there is a country England.  If any one asks us
for proof on matters of this sort, we have none ready, and are justly
annoyed at being called to consider what we regard as settled
questions.  Again, there is hardly anything which so much affects our
actions as the centre of the earth (unless, perhaps, it be that still
hotter and more unprofitable spot the centre of the universe), for we
are incessantly trying to get as near it as circumstances will allow,
or to avoid getting nearer than is for the time being convenient.
Walking, running, standing, sitting, lying, waking, or sleeping, from
birth till death it is a paramount object with us; even after death--
if it be not fanciful to say so--it is one of the few things of which
what is left of us can still feel the influence; yet what can engross
less of our attention than this dark and distant spot so many
thousands of miles away?

The air we breathe, so long as it is neither too hot nor cold, nor
rough, nor full of smoke--that is to say, so long as it is in that
state within which we are best acquainted--seldom enters into our
thoughts; yet there is hardly anything with which we are more
incessantly occupied night and day.

Indeed, it is not too much to say that we have no really profound
knowledge upon any subject--no knowledge on the strength of which we
are ready to act at all moments unhesitatingly without either
preparation or after-thought--till we have left off feeling conscious
of the possession of such knowledge, and of the grounds on which it
rests.  A lesson thoroughly learned must be like the air which feels
so light, though pressing so heavily against us, because every pore
of our skin is saturated, so to speak, with it on all sides equally.
This perfection of knowledge sometimes extends to positive disbelief
in the thing known, so that the most thorough knower shall believe
himself altogether ignorant.  No thief, for example, is such an utter
thief--so GOOD a thief--as the kleptomaniac.  Until he has become a
kleptomaniac, and can steal a horse as it were by a reflex action, he
is still but half a thief, with many unthievish notions still
clinging to him.  Yet the kleptomaniac is probably unaware that he
can steal at all, much less that he can steal so well.  He would be
shocked if he were to know the truth.  So again, no man is a great
hypocrite until he has left off knowing that he is a hypocrite.  The
great hypocrites of the world are almost invariably under the
impression that they are among the very few really honest people to
be found and, as we must all have observed, it is rare to find any
one strongly under this impression without ourselves having good
reason to differ from him.

Our own existence is another case in point.  When we have once become
articulately conscious of existing, it is an easy matter to begin
doubting whether we exist at all.  As long as man was too
unreflecting a creature to articulate in words his consciousness of
his own existence, he knew very well that he existed, but he did not
know that he knew it.  With introspection, and the perception
recognised, for better or worse, that he was a fact, came also the
perception that he had no solid ground for believing that he was a
fact at all.  That nice, sensible, unintrospective people who were
too busy trying to exist pleasantly to trouble their heads as to
whether they existed or no--that this best part of mankind should
have gratefully caught at such a straw as "cogito ergo sum," is
intelligible enough.  They felt the futility of the whole question,
and were thankful to one who seemed to clench the matter with a cant
catchword, especially with a catchword in a foreign language; but how
one, who was so far gone as to recognise that he could not prove his
own existence, should be able to comfort himself with such a begging
of the question, would seem unintelligible except upon the ground of
sheer exhaustion.

At the risk of appearing to wander too far from the matter in hand, a
few further examples may perhaps be given of that irony of nature, by
which it comes about that we so often most know and are, what we
least think ourselves to know and be--and on the other hand hold most
strongly what we are least capable of demonstrating.

Take the existence of a Personal God,--one of the most profoundly-
received and widely-spread ideas that have ever prevailed among
mankind.  Has there ever been a DEMONSTRATION of the existence of
such a God as has satisfied any considerable section of thinkers for
long together?  Hardly has what has been conceived to be a
demonstration made its appearance and received a certain acceptance
as though it were actual proof, when it has been impugned with
sufficient success to show that, however true the fact itself, the
demonstration is naught.  I do not say that this is an argument
against the personality of God; the drift, indeed, of the present
reasoning would be towards an opposite conclusion, inasmuch as it
insists upon the fact that what is most true and best known is often
least susceptible of demonstration owing to the very perfectness with
which it is known; nevertheless, the fact remains that many men in
many ages and countries--the subtlest thinkers over the whole world
for some fifteen hundred years--have hunted for a demonstration of
God's personal existence; yet though so many have sought,--so many,
and so able, and for so long a time--none have found.  There is no
demonstration which can be pointed to with any unanimity as settling
the matter beyond power of reasonable cavil.  On the contrary, it may
be observed that from the attempt to prove the existence of a
personal God to the denial of that existence altogether, the path is
easy.  As in the case of our own existence, it will be found that
they alone are perfect believers in a personal Deity and in the
Christian religion who have not yet begun to feel that either stands
in need of demonstration.  We observe that most people, whether
Christians, or Jews, or Mohammedans, are unable to give their reasons
for the faith that is in them with any readiness or completeness; and
this is sure proof that they really hold it so utterly as to have no
further sense that it either can be demonstrated or ought to be so,
but feel towards it as towards the air which they breathe but do not
notice.  On the other hand, a living prelate was reported in the
"Times" to have said in one of his latest charges:  "My belief is
that a widely extended good practice must be founded upon Christian
doctrine."  The fact of the Archbishop's recognising this as among
the number of his beliefs is conclusive evidence with those who have
devoted attention to the laws of thought, that his mind is not yet
clear as to whether or no there is any connection at all between
Christian doctrine and widely extended good practice. {4}

Again, it has been often and very truly said that it is not the
conscious and self-styled sceptic, as Shelley for example, who is the
true unbeliever.  Such a man as Shelley will, as indeed his life
abundantly proves, have more in common than not with the true
unselfconscious believer.  Gallio again, whose indifference to
religious animosities has won him the cheapest immortality which, so
far as I can remember, was ever yet won, was probably if the truth
were known, a person of the sincerest piety.  It is the unconscious
unbeliever who is the true infidel, however greatly he would be
surprised to know the truth.  Mr. Spurgeon was reported as having
recently asked the Almighty to "change our rulers AS SOON AS
POSSIBLE."  There lurks a more profound distrust of God's power in
these words than in almost any open denial of His existence.

So it rather shocks us to find Mr. Darwin writing ("Plants and
Animals under Domestication," vol. ii., p. 275):  "No doubt, in every
case there must have been some exciting cause."  And again, six or
seven pages later:  "No doubt, each slight variation must have its
efficient cause."  The repetition within so short a space of this
expression of confidence in the impossibility of causeless effects
would suggest that Mr. Darwin's mind at the time of writing was,
unconsciously to himself, in a state of more or less uneasiness as to
whether effects could not occasionally come about of themselves, and
without cause of any sort,--that he may have been standing, in fact,
for a short time upon the brink of a denial of the indestructibility
of force and matter.

In like manner, the most perfect humour and irony is generally quite
unconscious.  Examples of both are frequently given by men whom the
world considers as deficient in humour; it is more probably true that
these persons are unconscious of their own delightful power through
the very mastery and perfection with which they hold it.  There is a
play, for instance, of genuine fun in some of the more serious
scientific and theological journals which for some time past we have
looked for in vain in " ---  ."

The following extract, from a journal which I will not advertise, may
serve as an example:

"Lycurgus, when they had abandoned to his revenge him who had put out
his eyes, took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was
sedulous instructions to virtue."  Yet this truly comic paper does
not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac
knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when
he wrote a hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in
composing a treatise on divorce.  No more again did Goethe know how
exquisitely humorous he was when he wrote, in his Wilhelm Meister,
that a beautiful tear glistened in Theresa's right eye, and then went
on to explain that it glistened in her right eye and not in her left,
because she had had a wart on her left which had been removed--and
successfully.  Goethe probably wrote this without a chuckle; he
believed what a good many people who have never read Wilhelm Meister
believe still, namely, that it was a work full of pathos, of fine and
tender feeling; yet a less consummate humorist must have felt that
there was scarcely a paragraph in it from first to last the chief
merit of which did not lie in its absurdity.

Another example may be taken from Bacon of the manner in which
sayings which drop from men unconsciously, give the key of their
inner thoughts to another person, though they themselves know not
that they have such thoughts at all; much less that these thoughts
are their only true convictions.  In his Essay on Friendship the
great philosopher writes:  "Reading good books on morality is a
little flat and dead."  Innocent, not to say pathetic, as this
passage may sound it is pregnant with painful inferences concerning
Bacon's moral character.  For if he knew that he found reading good
books of morality a little flat and dead, it follows he must have
tried to read them; nor is he saved by the fact that he found them a
little flat and dead; for though this does indeed show that he had
begun to be so familiar with a few first principles as to find it
more or less exhausting to have his attention directed to them
further--yet his words prove that they were not so incorporate with
him that he should feel the loathing for further discourse upon the
matter which honest people commonly feel now.  It will be remembered
that he took bribes when he came to be Lord Chancellor.

It is on the same principle that we find it so distasteful to hear
one praise another for earnestness.  For such praise raises a
suspicion in our minds (pace the late Dr. Arnold and his following)
that the praiser's attention must have been arrested by sincerity, as
by something more or less unfamiliar to himself.  So universally is
this recognised that the world has for some time been discarded
entirely by all reputable people.  Truly, if there is one who cannot
find himself in the same room with the life and letters of an earnest
person without being made instantly unwell, the same is a just man
and perfect in all his ways.

But enough has perhaps been said.  As the fish in the sea, or the
bird in the air, so unreasoningly and inarticulately safe must a man
feel before he can be said to know.  It is only those who are
ignorant and uncultivated who can know anything at all in a proper
sense of the words.  Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of
the uncertainty even of his most assured convictions.  It is perhaps
fortunate for our comfort that we can none of us be cultivated upon
very many subjects, so that considerable scope for assurance will
still remain to us; but however this may be, we certainly observe it
as a fact that the greatest men are they who are most uncertain in
spite of certainty, and at the same time most certain in spite of
uncertainty, and who are thus best able to feel that there is nothing
in such complete harmony with itself as a flat contradiction in
terms.  For nature hates that any principle should breed, so to
speak, hermaphroditically, but will give to each an help meet for it
which shall cross it and be the undoing of it; as in the case of
descent with modification, of which the essence would appear to be
that every offspring should resemble its parents, and yet, at the
same time, that no offspring should resemble its parents.  But for
the slightly irritating stimulant of this perpetual crossing, we
should pass our lives unconsciously as though in slumber.

Until we have got to understand that though black is not white, yet
it may be whiter than white itself (and any painter will readily
paint that which shall show obviously as black, yet it shall be
whiter than that which shall show no less obviously as white), we may
be good logicians, but we are still poor reasoners.  Knowledge is in
an inchoate state as long as it is capable of logical treatment; it
must be transmuted into that sense or instinct which rises altogether
above the sphere in which words can have being at all, otherwise it
is not yet vital.  For sense is to knowledge what conscience is to
reasoning about right and wrong; the reasoning must be so rapid as to
defy conscious reference to first principles, and even at times to be
apparently subversive of them altogether, or the action will halt.
It must, in fact, become automatic before we are safe with it.  While
we are fumbling for the grounds of our conviction, our conviction is
prone to fall, as Peter for lack of faith sinking into the waves of
Galilee; so that the very power to prove at all is an a priori
argument against the truth--or at any rate the practical importance
to the vast majority of mankind--of all that is supported by
demonstration.  For the power to prove implies a sense of the need of
proof, and things which the majority of mankind find practically
important are in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred above proof.  The
need of proof becomes as obsolete in the case of assumed knowledge,
as the practice of fortifying towns in the middle of an old and long
settled country.  Who builds defences for that which is impregnable
or little likely to be assailed?  The answer is ready, that unless
the defences had been built in former times it would be impossible to
do without them now; but this does not touch the argument, which is
not that demonstration is unwise, but that as long as a demonstration
is still felt necessary, and therefore kept ready to hand, the
subject of such demonstration is not yet securely known.  Qui
s'excuse, s'accuse; and unless a matter can hold its own without the
brag and self-assertion of continual demonstration, it is still more
or less of a parvenu, which we shall not lose much by neglecting till
it has less occasion to blow its own trumpet.  The only alternative
is that it is an error in process of detection, for if evidence
concerning any opinion has long been denied superfluous, and ever
after this comes to be again felt necessary, we know that the opinion
is doomed.

If there is any truth in the above, it should follow that our
conception of the words "science" and "scientific" should undergo
some modification.  Not that we should speak slightingly of science,
but that we should recognise more than we do, that there are two
distinct classes of scientific people corresponding not inaptly with
the two main parties unto which the political world is divided.  The
one class is deeply versed in those sciences which have already
become the common property of mankind; enjoying, enforcing,
perpetuating, and engraving still more deeply unto the mind of man
acquisitions already approved by common experience, but somewhat
careless about extension of empire, or at any rate disinclined, for
the most part, to active effort on their own part for the sake of
such extension--neither progressive, in fact, nor aggressive--but
quiet, peaceable people, who wish to live and let live, as their
fathers before them; while the other class is chiefly intent upon
pushing forward the boundaries of science, and is comparatively
indifferent to what is known already save in so far as necessary for
purposes of extension.  These last are called pioneers of science,
and to them alone is the title "scientific" commonly accorded; but
pioneers, unimportant to an army as they are, are still not the army
itself; which can get on better without the pioneers than the
pioneers without the army.  Surely the class which knows thoroughly
well what it knows, and which adjudicates upon the value of the
discoveries made by the pioneers--surely this class has as good a
right or better to be called scientific than the pioneers themselves.

These two classes above described blend into one another with every
shade of gradation.  Some are admirably proficient in the well-known
sciences--that is to say, they have good health, good looks, good
temper, common sense, and energy, and they hold all these good things
in such perfection as to lie altogether without introspection--to be
not under the law, but so utterly and entirely under grace that every
one who sees them likes them.  But such may, and perhaps more
commonly will, have very little inclination to extend the boundaries
of human knowledge; their aim is in another direction altogether.  Of
the pioneers, on the other hand, some are agreeable people, well
versed in the older sciences, though still more eminent as pioneers,
while others, whose services in this last capacity have been of
inestimable value, are noticeably ignorant of the sciences which have
already become current with the larger part of mankind--in other
words, they are ugly, rude, and disagreeable people, very
progressive, it may be, but very aggressive to boot.

The main difference between these two classes lies in the fact that
the knowledge of the one, so far as it is new, is known consciously,
while that of the other is unconscious, consisting of sense and
instinct rather than of recognised knowledge.  So long as a man has
these, and of the same kind as the more powerful body of his fellow-
countrymen, he is a true man of science, though he can hardly read or
write.  As my great namesake said so well, "He knows what's what, and
that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly."  As usual, these true and
thorough knowers do not know that they are scientific, and can seldom
give a reason for the faith that is in them.  They believe themselves
to be ignorant, uncultured men, nor can even the professors whom they
sometimes outwit in their own professorial domain perceive that they
have been outwitted by men of superior scientific attainments to
their own.  The following passage from Dr. Carpenter's "Mesmerism,
Spiritualism," &c., may serve as an illustration:-

"It is well known that persons who are conversant with the geological
structure of a district are often able to indicate with considerable
certainty in what spot and at what depth water will be found; and men
OF LESS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, BUT OF CONSIDERABLE PRACTICAL
EXPERIENCE"--(so that in Dr. Carpenter's mind there seems to be some
sort of contrast or difference in kind between the knowledge which is
derived from observation of facts and scientific knowledge)--
"frequently arrive at a true conclusion upon this point without being
able to assign reasons for their opinions.

"Exactly the same may be said in regard to the mineral structure of a
mining district; the course of a metallic vein being often correctly
indicated by the shrewd guess of an OBSERVANT workman, when THE
SCIENTIFIC REASONING of the mining engineer altogether fails."

Precisely.  Here we have exactly the kind of thing we are in search
of:  the man who has observed and observed till the facts are so
thoroughly in his head that through familiarity he has lost sight
both of them and of the processes whereby he deduced his conclusions
from them--is apparently not considered scientific, though he knows
how to solve the problem before him; the mining engineer, on the
other hand, who reasons scientifically--that is to say, with a
knowledge of his own knowledge--is found not to know, and to fail in
discovering the mineral.

"It is an experience we are continually encountering in other walks
of life," continues Dr. Carpenter, "that particular persons are
guided--some apparently by an original and others by AN ACQUIRED
INTUITION--to conclusions for which they can give no adequate reason,
but which subsequent events prove to have been correct."  And this, I
take it, implies what I have been above insisting on, namely, that on
becoming intense, knowledge seems also to become unaware of the
grounds on which it rests, or that it has or requires grounds at all,
or indeed even exists.  The only issue between myself and Dr.
Carpenter would appear to be, that Dr. Carpenter, himself an
acknowledged leader in the scientific world, restricts the term
"scientific" to the people who know that they know, but are beaten by
those who are not so conscious of their own knowledge; while I say
that the term "scientific" should be applied (only that they would
not like it) to the nice sensible people who know what's what rather
than to the discovering class.

And this is easily understood when we remember that the pioneer
cannot hope to acquire any of the new sciences in a single lifetime
so perfectly as to become unaware of his own knowledge.  As a general
rule, we observe him to be still in a state of active consciousness
concerning whatever particular science he is extending, and as long
as he is in this state he cannot know utterly.  It is, as I have
already so often insisted on, those who do not know that they know so
much who have the firmest grip of their knowledge:  the best class,
for example, of our English youth, who live much in the open air,
and, as Lord Beaconsfield finely said, never read.  These are the
people who know best those things which are best worth knowing--that
is to say, they are the most truly scientific.  Unfortunately, the
apparatus necessary for this kind of science is so costly as to be
within the reach of few, involving, as it does, an experience in the
use of it for some preceding generations.  Even those who are born
with the means within their reach must take no less pains, and
exercise no less self-control, before they can attain the perfect
unconscious use of them, than would go to the making of a James Watt
or a Stephenson; it is vain, therefore, to hope that this best kind
of science can ever be put within the reach of the many; nevertheless
it may be safely said that all the other and more generally
recognised kinds of science are valueless except in so far as they
tend to minister to this the highest kind.  They have no raison
d'etre except so far as they tend to do away with the necessity for
work, and to diffuse good health, and that good sense which is above
self-consciousness.  They are to be encouraged because they have
rendered the most fortunate kind of modern European possible, and
because they tend to make possible a still more fortunate kind than
any now existing.  But the man who devotes himself to science cannot-
-with the rarest, if any, exceptions--belong to this most fortunate
class himself.  He occupies a lower place, both scientifically and
morally, for it is not possible but that his drudgery should somewhat
soil him both in mind and health of body, or, if this be denied,
surely it must let him and hinder him in running the race for
unconsciousness.  We do not feel that it increases the glory of a
king or great nobleman that he should excel in what is commonly
called science.  Certainly he should not go further than Prince
Rupert's drops.  Nor should he excel in music, art, literature, or
theology--all which things are more or less parts of science.  He
should be above them all, save in so far as he can without effort
reap renown from the labours of others.  It is a lache in him that he
should write music or books, or paint pictures at all; but if he must
do so, his work should be at best contemptible.  Much as we must
condemn Marcus Aurelius, we condemn James I. ever more severely.

It is a pity there should exist so general a confusion of thought
upon this subject, for it may be asserted without fear of
contradiction that there is hardly any form of immorality now rife
which produces more disastrous effects upon those who give themselves
up to it, and upon society in general, than the so-called science of
those who know that they know too well to be able to know truly.
With very clever people--the people who know that they know--it is
much as with the members of the early Corinthian Church, to whom St.
Paul wrote, that if they looked their numbers over, they would not
find many wise, nor powerful, nor well-born people among them.  Dog-
fanciers tell us that performing dogs never carry their tails; such
dogs have eaten of the tree of knowledge, and are convinced of sin
accordingly--they know that they know things, in respect of which,
therefore, they are no longer under grace, but under the law, and
they have yet so much grace left as to be ashamed.  So with the human
clever dog; he may speak with the tongues of men and angels, but so
long as he knows that he knows, his tail will droop.  More especially
does this hold in the case of those who are born to wealth and of old
family.  We must all feel that a rich young nobleman with a taste for
science and principles is rarely a pleasant object.  We do not even
like the rich young man in the Bible who wanted to inherit eternal
life, unless, indeed, he merely wanted to know whether there was not
some way by which he could avoid dying, and even so he is hardly
worth considering.  Principles are like logic, which never yet made a
good reasoner of a bad one, but might still be occasionally useful if
they did not invariably contradict each other whenever there is any
temptation to appeal to them.  They are like fire, good servants but
bad masters.  As many people or more have been wrecked on principle
as from want of principle.  They are, as their name implies, of an
elementary character, suitable for beginners only, and he who has so
little mastered them as to have occasion to refer to them
consciously, is out of place in the society of well-educated people.
The truly scientific invariably hate him, and, for the most part, the
more profoundly in proportion to the unconsciousness with which they
do so.

If the reader hesitates, let him go down into the streets and look in
the shop-windows at the photographs of eminent men, whether literary,
artistic, or scientific, and note the work which the consciousness of
knowledge has wrought on nine out of every ten of them; then let him
go to the masterpieces of Greek and Italian art, the truest preachers
of the truest gospel of grace; let him look at the Venus of Milo, the
Discobolus, the St. George of Donatello.  If it had pleased these
people to wish to study, there was no lack of brains to do it with;
but imagine "what a deal of scorn" would "look beautiful" upon the
Venus of Milo's face if it were suggested to her that she should
learn to read.  Which, think you, knows most, the Theseus, or any
modern professor taken at random?  True, the advancement of learning
must have had a great share in the advancement of beauty, inasmuch as
beauty is but knowledge perfected and incarnate--but with the
pioneers it is sic vos non vobis; the grace is not for them, but for
those who come after.  Science is like offences.  It must needs come,
but woe unto that man through whom it comes; for there cannot be much
beauty where there is consciousness of knowledge, and while knowledge
is still new it must in the nature of things involve much
consciousness.

It is not knowledge, then, that is incompatible with beauty; there
cannot be too much knowledge, but it must have passed through many
people who it is to be feared must be more or less disagreeable,
before beauty or grace will have anything to say to it; it must be so
incarnate in a man's whole being that he shall not be aware of it, or
it will fit him constrainedly as one under the law, and not as one
under grace.

And grace is best, for where grace is, love is not distant.  Grace!
the old Pagan ideal whose charm even unlovely Paul could not
understand, but, as the legend tells us, his soul fainted within him,
his heart misgave him, and, standing alone on the seashore at dusk,
he "troubled deaf heaven with his bootless cries," his thin voice
pleading for grace after the flesh.

The waves came in one after another, the sea-gulls cried together
after their kind, the wind rustled among the dried canes upon the
sandbanks, and there came a voice from heaven saying, "Let My grace
be sufficient for thee."  Whereon, failing of the thing itself, he
stole the word and strove to crush its meaning to the measure of his
own limitations.  But the true grace, with her groves and high
places, and troups of young men and maidens crowned with flowers, and
singing of love and youth and wine--the true grace he drove out into
the wilderness--high up, it may be, into Piora, and into such-like
places.  Happy they who harboured her in her ill report.

It is common to hear men wonder what new faith will be adopted by
mankind if disbelief in the Christian religion should become general.
They seem to expect that some new theological or quasi-theological
system will arise, which, mutatis mutandis, shall be Christianity
over again.  It is a frequent reproach against those who maintain
that the supernatural element of Christianity is without foundation,
that they bring forward no such system of their own.  They pull down
but cannot build.  We sometimes hear even those who have come to the
same conclusions as the destroyers say, that having nothing new to
set up, they will not attack the old.  But how can people set up a
new superstition, knowing it to be a superstition?  Without faith in
their own platform, a faith as intense as that manifested by the
early Christians, how can they preach?  A new superstition will come,
but it is in the very essence of things that its apostles should have
no suspicion of its real nature; that they should no more recognise
the common element between the new and the old than the early
Christians recognised it between their faith and Paganism.  If they
did, they would be paralysed.  Others say that the new fabric may be
seen rising on every side, and that the coming religion is science.
Certainly its apostles preach it without misgiving, but it is not on
that account less possible that it may prove only to be the coming
superstition--like Christianity, true to its true votaries, and, like
Christianity, false to those who follow it introspectively.

It may well be we shall find we have escaped from one set of
taskmasters to fall into the hands of others far more ruthless.  The
tyranny of the Church is light in comparison with that which future
generations may have to undergo at the hands of the doctrinaires.
The Church did uphold a grace of some sort as the summum bonum, in
comparison with which all so-called earthly knowledge--knowledge,
that is to say, which had not passed through so many people as to
have become living and incarnate--was unimportant.  Do what we may,
we are still drawn to the unspoken teaching of her less introspective
ages with a force which no falsehood could command.  Her buildings,
her music, her architecture, touch us as none other on the whole can
do; when she speaks there are many of us who think that she denies
the deeper truths of her own profounder mind, and unfortunately her
tendency is now towards more rather than less introspection.  The
more she gives way to this--the more she becomes conscious of
knowing--the less she will know.  But still her ideal is in grace.

The so-called man of science, on the other hand, seems now generally
inclined to make light of all knowledge, save of the pioneer
character.  His ideal is in self-conscious knowledge.  Let us have no
more Lo, here, with the professor; he very rarely knows what he says
he knows; no sooner has he misled the world for a sufficient time
with a great flourish of trumpets than he is toppled over by one more
plausible than himself.  He is but medicine-man, augur, priest, in
its latest development; useful it may be, but requiring to be well
watched by those who value freedom.  Wait till he has become more
powerful, and note the vagaries which his conceit of knowledge will
indulge in.  The Church did not persecute while she was still weak.
Of course every system has had, and will have, its heroes, but, as we
all very well know, the heroism of the hero is but remotely due to
system; it is due not to arguments, nor reasoning, nor to any
consciously recognised perceptions, but to those deeper sciences
which lie far beyond the reach of self-analysis, and for the sturdy
of which there is but one schooling--to have had good forefathers for
many generations.

Above all things, let no unwary reader do me the injustice of
believing in ME.  In that I write at all I am among the dammed.  If
he must believe in anything, let him believe in the music of Handel,
the painting of Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of
St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians.

But to return.  Whenever we find people knowing that they know this
or that, we have the same story over and over again.  They do not yet
know it perfectly.

We come, therefore, to the conclusion that our knowledge and
reasoning thereupon, only become perfect, assured, unhesitating, when
they have become automatic, and are thus exercised without further
conscious effort of the mind, much in the same way as we cannot walk
nor read nor write perfectly till we can do so automatically.



CHAPTER III--APPLICATION OF FOREGOING CHAPTERS TO CERTAIN HABITS
ACQUIRED AFTER BIRTH WHICH ARE COMMONLY CONSIDERED INSTINCTIVE.



What is true of knowing is also true of willing.  The more intensely
we will, the less is our will deliberate and capable of being
recognised as will at all.  So that it is common to hear men declare
under certain circumstances that they had no will, but were forced
into their own action under stress of passion or temptation.  But in
the more ordinary actions of life, we observe, as in walking or
breathing, that we do not will anything utterly and without remnant
of hesitation, till we have lost sight of the fact that we are
exercising our will.

The question, therefore, is forced upon us, how far this principle
extends, and whether there may not be unheeded examples of its
operation which, if we consider them, will land us in rather
unexpected conclusions.  If it be granted that consciousness of
knowledge and of volition vanishes when the knowledge and the
volition have become intense and perfect, may it not be possible that
many actions which we do without knowing how we do them, and without
any conscious exercise of the will--actions which we certainly could
not do if we tried to do them, nor refrain from doing if for any
reason we wished to do so--are done so easily and so unconsciously
owing to excess of knowledge or experience rather than deficiency, we
having done them too often, knowing how to do them too well, and
having too little hesitation as to the method of procedure, to be
capable of following our own action without the utter derangement of
such action altogether; or, in other cases, because we have so long
settled the question, that we have stowed away the whole apparatus
with which we work in corners of our system which we cannot now
conveniently reach?

It may be interesting to see whether we can find any class or classes
of actions which would seem to link actions which for some time after
birth we could not do at all, and in which our proficiency has
reached the stage of unconscious performance obviously through
repeated effort and failure, and through this only, with actions
which we could do as soon as we were born, and concerning which it
would at first sight appear absurd to say that they can have been
acquired by any process in the least analogous to that which we
commonly call experience, inasmuch as the creature itself which does
them has only just begun to exist, and cannot, therefore, in the very
nature of things, have had experience.

Can we see that actions, for the acquisition of which experience is
such an obvious necessity, that whenever we see the acquisition we
assume the experience, gradate away imperceptibly into actions which
would seem, according to all reasonable analogy, to presuppose
experience, of which, however, the time and place seem obscure, if
not impossible?

Eating and drinking would appear to be such actions.  The new-born
child cannot eat, and cannot drink, but he can swallow as soon as he
is born; and swallowing would appear (as we may remark in passing) to
have been an earlier faculty of animal life than that of eating with
teeth.  The ease and unconsciousness with which we eat and drink is
clearly attributable to practice; but a very little practice seems to
go a long way--a suspiciously small amount of practice--as though
somewhere or at some other time there must have been more practice
than we can account for.  We can very readily stop eating or
drinking, and can follow our own action without difficulty in either
process; but, as regards swallowing, which is the earlier habit, we
have less power of self-analysis and control:  when we have once
committed ourselves beyond a certain point to swallowing, we must
finish doing so,--that is to say, our control over the operation
ceases.  Also, a still smaller experience seems necessary for the
acquisition of the power to swallow than appeared necessary in the
case of eating; and if we get into a difficulty we choke, and are
more at a loss how to become introspective than we are about eating
and drinking.

Why should a baby be able to swallow--which one would have said was
the more complicated process of the two--with so much less practice
than it takes him to learn to eat?  How comes it that he exhibits in
the case of the more difficult operation all the phenomena which
ordinarily accompany a more complete mastery and longer practice?
Analogy would certainly seem to point in the direction of thinking
that the necessary experience cannot have been wanting, and that,
too, not in such a quibbling sort as when people talk about inherited
habit or the experience of the race, which, without explanation, is
to plain-speaking persons very much the same, in regard to the
individual, as no experience at all, but bona fide in the child's own
person.

Breathing, again, is an action acquired after birth, generally with
some little hesitation and difficulty, but still acquired in a time
seldom longer, as I am informed, than ten minutes or a quarter of an
hour.  For an ant which has to be acquired at all, there would seem
here, as in the case of eating, to be a disproportion between, on the
one hand, the intricacy of the process performed, and on the other,
the shortness of the time taken to acquire the practice, and the ease
and unconsciousness with which its exercise is continued from the
moment of acquisition.

We observe that in later life much less difficult and intricate
operations than breathing acquire much longer practice before they
can be mastered to the extent of unconscious performance.  We observe
also that the phenomena attendant on the learning by an infant to
breathe are extremely like those attendant upon the repetition of
some performance by one who has done it very often before, but who
requires just a little prompting to set him off, on getting which,
the whole familiar routine presents itself before him, and he repeats
his task by rote.  Surely then we are justified in suspecting that
there must have been more bona fide personal recollection and
experience, with more effort and failure on the part of the infant
itself than meet the eye.

It should be noticed, also, that our control over breathing is very
limited.  We can hold our breath a little, or breathe a little faster
for a short time, but we cannot do this for long, and after having
gone without air for a certain time we must breath.

Seeing and hearing require some practice before their free use is
mastered, but not very much.  They are so far within our control that
we can see more by looking harder, and hear more by listening
attentively--but they are beyond our control in so far as that we
must see and hear the greater part of what presents itself to us as
near, and at the same time unfamiliar, unless we turn away or shut
our eyes, or stop our ears by a mechanical process; and when we do
this it is a sign that we have already involuntarily seen or heard
more than we wished.  The familiar, whether sight or sound, very
commonly escapes us.

Take again the processes of digestion, the action of the heart, and
the oxygenisation of the blood--processes of extreme intricacy, done
almost entirely unconsciously, and quite beyond the control of our
volition.

Is it possible that our unconsciousness concerning our own
performance of all these processes arises from over-experience?

Is there anything in digestion, or the oxygenisation of the blood,
different in kind to the rapid unconscious action of a man playing a
difficult piece of music on the piano?  There may be in degree, but
as a man who sits down to play what he well knows, plays on, when
once started, almost, as we say, mechanically, so, having eaten his
dinner, he digests it as a matter of course, unless it has been in
some way unfamiliar to him, or he to it, owing to some derangement or
occurrence with which he is unfamiliar, and under which therefore he
is at a loss now to comport himself, as a player would be at a loss
how to play with gloves on, or with gout in his fingers, or if set to
play music upside down.

Can we show that all the acquired actions of childhood and after-
life, which we now do unconsciously, or without conscious exercise of
the will, are familiar acts--acts which we have already done a very
great number of times?

Can we also show that there are no acquired actions which we can
perform in this automatic manner, which were not at one time
difficult, requiring attention, and liable to repeated failure, our
volition failing to command obedience from the members which should
carry its purposes into execution?

If so, analogy will point in the direction of thinking that other
acts which we do even more unconsciously may only escape our power of
self-examination and control because they are even more familiar--
because we have done them oftener; and we may imagine that if there
were a microscope which could show us the minutest atoms of
consciousness and volition, we should find that even the apparently
most automatic actions were yet done in due course, upon a balance of
considerations, and under the deliberate exercise of the will.

We should also incline to think that even such an action as the
oxygenisation of its blood by an infant of ten minutes' old, can only
be done so well and so unconsciously, after repeated failures on the
part of the infant itself.

True, as has been already implied, we do not immediately see when the
baby could have made the necessary mistakes and acquired that
infinite practice without which it could never go through such
complex processes satisfactorily; we have therefore invented the
words "hereditary instinct," and consider them as accounting for the
phenomenon; but a very little reflection will show that though these
words may be a very good way of stating the difficulty, they do
little or nothing towards removing it.

Why should hereditary instinct enable a creature to dispense with the
experience which we see to be necessary in all other cases before
difficult operations can be performed successfully?

What is this talk that is made about the experience OF THE RACE, as
though the experience of one man could profit another who knows
nothing about him?  If a man eats his dinner, it nourishes HIM and
not his neighbour; if he learns a different art, it is HE that can do
it and not his neighbour.  Yet, practically, we see that the
vicarious experience, which seems so contrary to our common
observation, does nevertheless appear to hold good in the case of
creatures and their descendants.  Is there, then, any way of bringing
these apparently conflicting phenomena under the operation of one
law?  Is there any way of showing that this experience of the race,
of which so much is said without the least attempt to show in what
way it may or does become the experience of the individual, is in
sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, repeating
in a great many different ways certain performances with which he has
become exceedingly familiar?

It would seem that we must either suppose the conditions of
experience to differ during the earlier stages of life from those
which we observe them to become during the heyday of any existence--
and this would appear very gratuitous, tolerable only as a suggestion
because the beginnings of life are so obscure, that in such twilight
we may do pretty much whatever we please without danger of
confutation--or that we must suppose the continuity of life and
sameness between living beings, whether plants or animals, and their
descendants, to be far closer than we have hitherto believed; so that
the experience of one person is not enjoyed by his successor, so much
as that the successor is bona fide but a part of the life of his
progenitor, imbued with all his memories, profiting by all his
experiences--which are, in fact, his own--and only unconscious of the
extent of his own memories and experiences owing to their vastness
and already infinite repetitions.

Certainly it presents itself to us at once as a singular coincidence
-

I.  That we are MOST CONSCIOUS OF, AND HAVE MOST CONTROL OVER, such
habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences, which
are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after
birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not
become entirely human.

II.  That we are LESS CONSCIOUS OF, AND HAVE LESS CONTROL OVER,
eating and drinking, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing, which
were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had
provided ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw
light, but which are still, geologically speaking, recent, or
comparatively recent.

III.  That we are MOST UNCONSCIOUS OF, AND HAVE LEAST CONTROL OVER,
our digestion and circulation, which belonged even to our
invertebrate ancestry, and which are habits, geologically speaking,
of extreme antiquity.

There is something too like method in this for it to be taken as the
result of mere chance--chance again being but another illustration of
Nature's love of a contradiction in terms; for everything is chance,
and nothing is chance.  And you may take it that all is chance or
nothing chance, according as you please, but you must not have half
chance and half not chance.

Does it not seem as though the older and more confirmed the habit,
the more unquestioning the act of volition, till, in the case of the
oldest habits, the practice of succeeding existences has so
formulated the procedure, that, on being once committed to such and
such a line beyond a certain point, the subsequent course is so clear
as to be open to no further doubt, to admit of no alternative, till
the very power of questioning is gone, and even the consciousness of
volition?  And this too upon matters which, in earlier stages of a
man's existence, admitted of passionate argument and anxious
deliberation whether to resolve them thus or thus, with heroic hazard
and experiment, which on the losing side proved to be vice, and on
the winning virtue.  For there was passionate argument once what
shape a man's teeth should be, nor can the colour of his hair be
considered as ever yet settled, or likely to be settled for a very
long time.

It is one against legion when a creature tries to differ from his own
past selves.  He must yield or die if he wants to differ widely, so
as to lack natural instincts, such as hunger or thirst, or not to
gratify them.  It is more righteous in a man that he should "eat
strange food," and that his cheek should "so much as lank not," than
that he should starve if the strange food be at his command.  His
past selves are living in him at this moment with the accumulated
life of centuries.  "Do this, this, this, which we too have done, and
found our profit in it," cry the souls of his forefathers within him.
Faint are the far ones, coming and going as the sound of bells wafted
on to a high mountain; loud and clear are the near ones, urgent as an
alarm of fire.  "Withhold," cry some.  "Go on boldly," cry others.
"Me, me, me, revert hitherward, my descendant," shouts one as it were
from some high vantage-ground over the heads of the clamorous
multitude.  "Nay, but me, me, me," echoes another; and our former
selves fight within us and wrangle for our possession.  Have we not
here what is commonly called an INTERNAL TUMULT, when dead pleasures
and pains tug within us hither and thither?  Then may the battle be
decided by what people are pleased to call our own experience.  Our
own indeed!  What is our own save by mere courtesy of speech?  A
matter of fashion.  Sanction sanctifieth and fashion fashioneth.  And
so with death--the most inexorable of all conventions.

However this may be, we may assume it as an axiom with regard to
actions acquired after birth, that we never do them automatically
save as the result of long practice, and after having thus acquired
perfect mastery over the action in question.

But given the practice or experience, and the intricacy of the
process to be performed appears to matter very little.  There is
hardly anything conceivable as being done by man, which a certain
amount of familiarity will not enable him to do, as it were
mechanically and without conscious effort.  "The most complex and
difficult movements," writes Mr Darwin, "can in time be performed
without the least effort or consciousness."  All the main business of
life is done thus unconsciously or semi-unconsciously.  For what is
the main business of life?  We work that we may eat and digest,
rather than eat and digest that we may work; this, at any rate, is
the normal state of things:  the more important business then is that
which is carried on unconsciously.  So again the action of the brain,
which goes on prior to our realising the idea in which it results, is
not perceived by the individual.  So also all the deeper springs of
action and conviction.  The residuum with which we fret and worry
ourselves is a mere matter of detail, as the higgling and haggling of
the market, which is not over the bulk of the price, but over the
last halfpenny.

Shall we say, then, that a baby of a day old sucks (which involves
the whole principle of the pump, and hence a profound practical
knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests,
oxygenises its blood (millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy
discovered oxygen), sees and hears--all most difficult and
complicated operations, involving a knowledge of the facts concerning
optics and acoustics, compared with which the discoveries of Newton
sink into utter insignificance?  Shall we say that a baby can do all
these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly, without
being even able to direct its attention to them, and without mistake,
and at the same time not know how to do them, and never have done
them before?

Such an assertion would be a contradiction to the whole experience of
mankind.  Surely the onus probandi must rest with him who makes it.

A man may make a lucky hit now and again by what is called a fluke,
but even this must be only a little in advance of his other
performances of the same kind.  He may multiply seven by eight by a
fluke after a little study of the multiplication table, but he will
not be able to extract the cube root of 4913 by a fluke, without long
training in arithmetic, any more than an agricultural labourer would
be able to operate successfully for cataract.  If, then, a grown man
cannot perform so simple an operation as that we will say, for
cataract, unless he have been long trained in other similar
operations, and until he has done what comes to the same thing many
times over, with what show of reason can we maintain that one who is
so far less capable than a grown man, can perform such vastly more
difficult operations, without knowing how to do them, and without
ever having done them before?  There is no sign of "fluke" about the
circulation of a baby's blood.  There may perhaps be some little
hesitation about its earliest breathing, but this, as a general rule,
soon passes over, both breathing and circulation, within an hour
after birth, being as regular and easy as at any time during life.
Is it reasonable, then, to say that the baby does these things
without knowing how to do them, and without ever having done them
before, and continues to do them by a series of lifelong flukes?

It would be well if those who feel inclined to hazard such an
assertion would find some other instances of intricate processes gone
through by people who know nothing about them, and never had any
practice therein.  What IS to know how to do a thing?  Surely to do
it.  What is proof that we know how to do a thing?  Surely the fact
that we can do it.  A man shows that he knows how to throw the
boomerang by throwing the boomerang.  No amount of talking or writing
can get over this; ipso facto, that a baby breathes and makes its
blood circulate, it knows how to do so and the fact that it does not
know its own knowledge is only proof of the perfection of that
knowledge, and of the vast number of past occasions on which it must
have been exercised already.  As we have said already, it is less
obvious when the baby could have gained its experience, so as to be
able so readily to remember exactly what to do; but it is more easy
to suppose that the necessary occasions cannot have been wanting,
than that the power which we observe should have been obtained
without practice and memory.

If we saw any self-consciousness on the baby's part about its
breathing or circulation, we might suspect that it had had less
experience, or profited less by its experience, than its neighbours--
exactly in the same manner as we suspect a deficiency of any quality
which we see a man inclined to parade.  We all become introspective
when we find that we do not know our business, and whenever we are
introspective we may generally suspect that we are on the verge of
unproficiency.  Unfortunately, in the case of sickly children, we
observe that they sometimes do become conscious of their breathing
and circulation, just as in later life we become conscious that we
have a liver or a digestion.  In that case there is always something
wrong.  The baby that becomes aware of its breathing does not know
how to breathe, and will suffer for his ignorance and incapacity,
exactly in the same way as he will suffer in later life for ignorance
and incapacity in any other respect in which his peers are commonly
knowing and capable.  In the case of inability to breath, the
punishment is corporal, breathing being a matter of fashion, so old
and long settled that nature can admit of no departure from the
established custom, and the procedure in case of failure is as much
formulated as the fashion itself in the case of the circulation, the
whole performance has become one so utterly of rote, that the mere
discovery that we could do it at all was considered one of the
highest flights of human genius.

It has been said a day will come when the Polar ice shall have
accumulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet
above the level of the sea, all of solid ice.  The weight of this
mass will, it is believed, cause the world to topple over on its
axis, so that the earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a
ploughshare.  In that day time icebergs will come crunching against
our proudest cities, razing them from off the face of the earth as
though they were made of rotten blotting-paper.  There is no respect
now of Handel nor of Shakespeare; the works of Rembrandt and Bellini
fossilise at the bottom of the sea.  Grace, beauty, and wit, all that
is precious in music, literature, and art--all gone.  In the morning
there was Europe.  In the evening there are no more populous cities
nor busy hum of men, but a sea of jagged ice, a lurid sunset, and the
doom of many ages.  Then shall a scared remnant escape in places, and
settle upon the changed continent when the waters have subsided--a
simple people, busy hunting shellfish on the drying ocean beds, and
with little time for introspection yet they can read and write and
sum, for by that time these accomplishments will have become
universal, and will be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk;
but they do so as a matter of course, and without self-consciousness.
Also they make the simpler kinds of machinery too easily to be able
to follow their own operations--the manner of their own
apprenticeship being to them as a buried city.  May we not imagine
that, after the lapse of another ten thousand years or so, some one
of them may again become cursed with lust of introspection, and a
second Harvey may astonish the world by discovering that it can read
and write, and that steam-engines do not grow, but are made?  It may
be safely prophesied that he will die a martyr, and be honoured in
the fourth generation.



CHAPTER IV--APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES TO ACTIONS AND
HABITS ACQUIRED BEFORE BIRTH



But if we once admit the principle that consciousness and volition
have a tendency to vanish as soon as practice has rendered any habit
exceedingly familiar, so that the mere presence of an elaborate but
unconscious performance shall carry with it a presumption of infinite
practice, we shall find it impossible to draw the line at those
actions which we see acquired after birth, no matter at how early a
period.  The whole history and development of the embryo in all its
stages forces itself on our consideration.  Birth has been made too
much of.  It is a salient feature in the history of the individual,
but not more salient than a hundred others, and far less so than the
commencement of his existence as a single cell uniting in itself
elements derived from both parents, or perhaps than any point in his
whole existence as an embryo.  For many years after we are born we
are still very incomplete.  We cease to oxygenise our blood
vicariously as soon as we are born, but we still derive our
sustenance from our mothers.  Birth is but the beginning of doubt,
the first hankering after scepticism, the dreaming of a dawn of
trouble, the end of certainty and of settled convictions.  Not but
what before birth there have been unsettled convictions (more's the
pity) with not a few, and after birth we have still so made up our
minds upon many points as to have no further need of reflection
concerning them; nevertheless, in the main, birth is the end of that
time when we really knew our business, and the beginning of the days
wherein we know not what we would do, or do.  It is therefore the
beginning of consciousness, and infancy is as the dosing of one who
turns in his bed on waking, and takes another short sleep before he
rises.  When we were yet unborn, our thoughts kept the roadway
decently enough; then were we blessed; we thought as every man
thinks, and held the same opinions as our fathers and mothers had
done upon nearly every subject.  Life was not an art--and a very
difficult art--much too difficult to be acquired in a lifetime; it
was a science of which we were consummate masters.

In this sense, then, birth may indeed be looked upon as the most
salient feature in a man's life; but this is not at all the sense in
which it is commonly so regarded.  It is commonly considered as the
point at which we begin to live.  More truly it is the point at which
we leave off knowing how to live.

A chicken, for example, is never so full of consciousness, activity,
reasoning faculty, and volition, as when it is an embryo in the
eggshell, making bones, and flesh, and feathers, and eyes, and claws,
with nothing but a little warmth and white of egg to make them from.
This is indeed to make bricks with but a small modicum of straw.
There is no man in the whole world who knows consciously and
articulately as much as a half-hatched hen's egg knows unconsciously.
Surely the egg in its own way must know quite as much as the chicken
does.  We say of the chicken that it knows how to run about as soon
as it is hatched.  So it does; but had it no knowledge before it was
hatched?  What made it lay the foundations of those limbs which
should enable it to run about?  What made it grow a horny tip to its
bill before it was hatched, so that it might peck all round the
larger end of the eggshell and make a hole for itself to get out at?
Having once got outside the eggshell, the chicken throws away this
horny tip; but is it reasonable to suppose that it would have grown
it at all unless it had known that it would want something with which
to break the eggshell?  And again, is it in the least agreeable to
our experience that such elaborate machinery should be made without
endeavour, failure, perseverance, intelligent contrivance,
experience, and practice?

In the presence of such considerations, it seems impossible to
refrain from thinking that there must be a closer continuity of
identity, life, and memory, between successive generations than we
generally imagine.  To shear the thread of life, and hence of memory,
between one generation and its successor, is so to speak, a brutal
measure, an act of intellectual butchery, and like all such strong
high-handed measures, a sign of weakness in him who is capable of it
till all other remedies have been exhausted.  It is mere horse
science, akin to the theories of the convulsionists in the geological
kingdom, and of the believers in the supernatural origin of the
species of plants and animals.  Yet it is to be feared that we have
not a few among us who would feel shocked rather at the attempt
towards a milder treatment of the facts before them, than at a
continuance of the present crass tyranny with which we try to crush
them inside our preconceived opinions.  It is quite common to hear
men of education maintain that not even when it was on the point of
being hatched, had the chicken sense enough to know that it wanted to
get outside the eggshell.  It did indeed peck all round the end of
the shell, which, if it wanted to get out, would certainly be the
easiest way of effecting its purpose; but it did not, they say, peck
because it was aware of this, but "promiscuously."  Curious, such a
uniformity of promiscuous action among so many eggs for so many
generations.  If we see a man knock a hole in a wall on finding that
he cannot get out of a place by any other means, and if we see him
knock this hole in a very workmanlike way, with an implement with
which he has been at great pains to make for a long the past, but
which he throws away as soon as he has no longer use for it, thus
showing that he had made it expressly for the purpose of escape, do
we say that this person made the implement and broke the wall of his
prison promiscuously?  No jury would acquit a burglar on these
grounds.  Then why, without much more evidence to the contrary than
we have, or can hope to have, should we not suppose that with
chickens, as with men, signs of contrivance are indeed signs of
contrivance, however quick, subtle, and untraceable, the contrivance
may be?  Again, I have heard people argue that though the chicken,
when nearly hatched, had such a glimmering of sense that it pecked
the shell because it wanted to get out, yet that it is not
conceivable that, so long before it was hatched, it should have had
the sense to grow the horny tip to its bill for use when wanted.
This, at any rate, they say, it must have grown, as the persons
previously referred to would maintain, promiscuously.

Now no one indeed supposes that the chicken does what it does, with
the same self-consciousness with which a tailor makes a suit of
clothes.  Not any one who has thought upon the subject is likely to
do it so great an injustice.  The probability is that it knows what
it is about to an extent greater than any tailor ever did or will,
for, to say the least of it, many thousands of years to come.  It
works with such absolute certainty and so vast an experience, that it
is utterly incapable of following the operations of its own mind--as
accountants have been known to add up long columns of pounds,
shillings, and pence, running the three fingers of one hand, a finger
for each column, up the page, and putting the result down correctly
at the bottom, apparently without an effort.  In the case of the
accountant, we say that the processes which his mind goes through are
so rapid and subtle as to elude his own power of observation as well
as ours.  We do not deny that his mind goes though processes of some
kind; we very readily admit that it must do so, and say that these
processes are so rapid and subtle, owing, as a general rule, to long
experience in addition.  Why then should we find it so difficult to
conceive that this principle, which we observe to play so large a
part in mental physiology, wherever we can observe mental physiology
at all, may have a share also in the performance of intricate
operations otherwise inexplicable, though the creature performing
them is not man, or man only in embryo?

Again, after the chicken is hatched, it grows more feathers and bones
and blood, but we still say that it knows nothing about all this.
What then do we say it DOES know?  One is almost ashamed to confess
that we only credit it with knowing what it appears to know by
processes which we find it exceedingly easy to follow, or perhaps
rather, which we find it absolutely impossible to avoid following, as
recognising too great a family likeness between them, and those which
are most easily followed in our own minds, to be able to sit down in
comfort under a denial of the resemblance.  Thus, for example, if we
see a chicken running away from a fox, we do admit that the chicken
knows the fox would kill it if it caught it.

On the other hand, if we allow that the half-hatched chicken grew the
horny tip to be ready for use, with an intensity of unconscious
contrivance which can be only attributed to experience, we are driven
to admit that from the first moment the men began to sit upon it--and
earlier too than this--the egg was always full of consciousness and
volition, and that during its embryological condition the unhatched
chicken is doing exactly what it continues doing from the moment it
is hatched till it dies; that is to say, attempting to better itself,
doing (as Aristotle says all creatures do all things upon all
occasions) what it considers most for its advantage under the
existing circumstances.  What it may think most advantageous will
depend, while it is in the eggshell, upon exactly the same causes as
will influence its opinions in later life--to wit, upon its habits,
its past circumstances and ways of thinking; for there is nothing, as
Shakespeare tells us, good or ill, but thinking makes it so.

The egg thinks feathers much more to its advantage than hair or fur,
and much more easily made.  If it could speak, it would probably tell
us that we could make them ourselves very easily after a few lessons,
if we took the trouble to try, but that hair was another matter,
which it really could not see how any protoplasm could be got to
make.  Indeed, during the more intense and active part of our
existence, in the earliest stages, that is to say, of our
embryological life, we could probably have turned our protoplasm into
feathers instead of hair if we had cared about doing so.  If the
chicken can make feathers, there seems no sufficient reason for
thinking that we cannot do so, beyond the fact that we prefer hair,
and have preferred it for so many ages that we have lost the art
along with the desire of making feathers, if indeed any of our
ancestors ever possessed it.  The stuff with which we make hair is
practically the same as that with which chickens make feathers.  It
is nothing but protoplasm, and protoplasm is like certain prophecies,
out of which anything can be made by the creature which wants to make
it.  Everything depends upon whether a creature knows its own mind
sufficiently well, and has enough faith in its own powers of
achievement.  When these two requisites are wanting, the strongest
giant cannot lift a two-ounce weight; when they are given, a bullock
can take an eyelash out of its eye with its hind-foot, or a minute
jelly speck can build itself a house out of various materials which
it will select according to its purpose with the nicest care, though
it have neither brain to think with, nor eyes to see with, nor hands
nor feet to work with, nor is it anything but a minute speck of
jelly--faith and protoplasm only.

That this is indeed so, the following passage from Dr. Carpenter's
"Mental Physiology" may serve to show:-

"The simplest type of an animal consists of a minute mass of
'protoplasm,' or living jelly, which is not yet DIFFERENTIATED into
'organs;' every part having the same endowments, and taking an equal
share in every action which the creature performs.  One of these
'jelly specks,' the amoeba, moves itself about by changing the form
of its body, extemporising a foot (or pseudopodium), first in one
direction, and then in another; and then, when it has met with a
nutritive particle, extemporises a stomach for its reception, by
wrapping its soft body around it.  Another, instead of going about in
search of food, remains in one place, but projects its protoplasmic
substance into long pseudopodia, which entrap and draw in very minute
particles, or absorb nutrient material from the liquid through which
they extend themselves, and are continually becoming fused (as it
were) into the central body, which is itself continually giving off
new pseudopodia.  Now we can scarcely conceive that a creature of
such simplicity should possess any distinct CONSCIOUSNESS of its
needs" (why not?), "or that its actions should be directed by any
INTENTION of its own; and yet the writer has lately found results of
the most singular elaborateness to be wrought out by the
instrumentality of these minute jelly specks, which build up tests or
casings of the most regular geometrical symmetry of form, and of the
most artificial construction."

On this Dr. Carpenter remarks:- "Suppose a human mason to be put down
by the side of a pile of stones of various shapes and sizes, and to
be told to build a dome of these, smooth on both surfaces, without
using more than the least possible quantity of a very tenacious, but
very costly, cement, in holding the stones together.  If he
accomplished this well, he would receive credit for great
intelligence and skill.  Yet this is exactly what these little 'jelly
specks' do on a most minute scale; the 'tests' they construct, when
highly magnified, bearing comparison with the most skilful masonry of
man.  From THE SAME SANDY BOTTOM one species picks up the COARSER
quartz grains, cements them together with PHOSPHATE OF IRON secreted
from its own substance" (should not this rather be, "which it has
contrived in some way or other to manufacture"?) and thus constructs
a flask-shaped 'test,' having a short neck and a large single
orifice.  Another picks up the FINEST grains, and puts them together,
with the same cement, into perfectly spherical 'tests' of the most
extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores disposed
at pretty regular intervals.  Another selects the MINUTEST sand
grains and the terminal portions of sponge spicules, and works them
up together--apparently with no cement at all, by the mere laying of
the spicules--into perfect white spheres, like homoeopathic globules,
each having a single-fissured orifice.  And another, which makes a
straight, many-chambered 'test,' that resembles in form the chambered
shell of an orthoceratite--the conical mouth of each chamber
projecting into the cavity of the next--while forming the walls of
its chambers of ordinary sand grains rather loosely held together,
shapes the conical mouth of the successive chambers by firmly
cementing together grains of ferruginous quartz, which it must have
picked out from the general mass."

"To give these actions," continues Dr. Carpenter, "the vague
designation of 'instinctive' does not in the least help us to account
for them, since what we want is to discover the MECHANISM by which
they are worked out; and it is most difficult to conceive how so
artificial a selection can be made by a creature so simple" (Mental
Physiology, 4th ed. pp. 41-43)

This is what protoplasm can do when it has the talisman of faith--of
faith which worketh all wonders, either in the heavens above, or in
the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.  Truly if a man
have faith, even as a grain of mustard seed, though he may not be
able to remove mountains, he will at any rate be able to do what is
no less difficult--make a mustard plant.

Yet this is but a barren kind of comfort, for we have not, and in the
nature of things cannot have, sufficient faith in the unfamiliar,
inasmuch as the very essence of faith involves the notion of
familiarity, which can grow but slowly, from experience to
confidence, and can make no sudden leap at any time.  Such faith
cannot be founded upon reason,--that is to say, upon a recognised
perception on the part of the person holding it that he is holding
it, and of the reasons for his doing so--or it will shift as other
reasons come to disturb it.  A house built upon reason is a house
built upon the sand.  It must be built upon the current cant and
practice of one's peers, for this is the rock which, though not
immovable, is still most hard to move.

But however this may be, we observe broadly that the intensity of the
will to make this or that, and of the confidence that one can make
it, depends upon the length of time during which the maker's
forefathers have wanted the same thing before it; the older the
custom the more inveterate the habit, and, with the exception,
perhaps, that the reproductive system is generally the crowning act
of development--an exception which I will hereafter explain--the
earlier its manifestation, until, for some reason or another, we
relinquish it and take to another, which we must, as a general rule,
again adhere to for a vast number of generations, before it will
permanently supplant the older habit.  In our own case, the habit of
breathing like a fish through gills may serve as an example.  We have
now left off this habit, yet we did it formerly for so many
generations that we still do it a little; it still crosses our
embryological existence like a faint memory or dream, for not easily
is an inveterate habit broken.  On the other hand--again speaking
broadly--the more recent the habit the later the fashion of its
organ, as with the teeth, speech, and the higher intellectual powers,
which are too new for development before we are actually born.

But to return for a short time to Dr. Carpenter.  Dr. Carpenter
evidently feels, what must indeed be felt by every candid mind, that
there is no sufficient reason for supposing that these little specks
of jelly, without brain or eyes, or stomach, or hands, or feet, but
the very lowest known form of animal life, are not imbued with a
consciousness of their needs, and the reasoning faculties which shall
enable them to gratify those needs in a manner, all things
considered, equalling the highest flights of the ingenuity of the
highest animal--man.  This is no exaggeration.  It is true, that in
an earlier part of the passage, Dr. Carpenter has said that we can
scarcely conceive so simple a creature to "possess any distinct
CONSCIOUSNESS of its needs, or that its actions should be directed by
any intention of its own;" but, on the other hand, a little lower
down he says, that if a workman did what comes to the same thing as
what the amoeba does, he "would receive credit for great intelligence
and skill."  Now if an amoeba can do that, for which a workman would
receive credit as for a highly skilful and intelligent performance,
the amoeba should receive no less credit than the workman; he should
also be no less credited with skill and intelligence, which words
unquestionably involve a distinct consciousness of needs and an
action directed by an intention of its own.  So that Dr. Carpenter
seems rather to blow hot and cold with one breath.  Nevertheless
there can be no doubt to which side the minds of the great majority
of mankind will incline upon the evidence before them; they will say
that the creature is highly reasonable and intelligent, though they
would readily admit that long practice and familiarity may have
exhausted its powers of attention to all the stages of its own
performance, just as a practised workman in building a wall certainly
does not consciously follow all the processes which he goes through.

As an example, however, of the extreme dislike which philosophers of
a certain school have for making the admissions which seem somewhat
grudgingly conceded by Dr. Carpenter, we may take the paragraph which
immediately follows the ones which we have just quoted.  Dr.
Carpenter there writes:-

"The writer has often amused himself and others, when by the seaside,
with getting a terebella (a marine worm that cases its body in a
sandy tube) out of its house, and then, putting it into a saucer of
water with a supply of sand and comminuted shell, watching its
appropriation of these materials in constructing a new tube.  The
extended tentacles soon spread themselves over the bottom of the
saucer and lay hold of whatever comes in their way, 'all being fish
that comes to their net,' and in half an hour or thereabouts the new
house is finished, though on a very rude and artificial type.  Now
here the organisation is far higher; the instrumentality obviously
serves the needs of the animal and suffices for them; and we
characterise the action, on account of its uniformity and apparent
UNintelligence, as instinctive."

No comment will, one would think, be necessary to make the reader
feel that the difference between the terebella and the amoeba is one
of degree rather than kind, and that if the action of the second is
as conscious and reasonable as that, we will say, of a bird making
her nest, the action of the first should be so also.  It is only a
question of being a little less skilful, or more so, but skill and
intelligence would seem present in both cases.  Moreover, it is more
clever of the terebella to have made itself the limbs with which it
can work, than of the amoeba to be able to work without the limbs;
and perhaps it is more sensible also to want a less elaborate
dwelling, provided it is sufficient for practical purposes.  But
whether the terebella be less intelligent than the amoeba or not, it
does quite enough to establish its claim to intelligence of a higher
order; and one does not see ground for the satisfaction which Dr.
Carpenter appears to find at having, as it were, taken the taste of
the amoeba's performance out of our mouth, by setting us about the
less elaborate performance of the terebella, which he thinks we can
call unintelligent and instinctive.

I may be mistaken in the impression I have derived from the
paragraphs I have quoted.  I commonly say they give me the impression
that I have tried to convey to the reader, i.e., that the writer's
assent to anything like intelligence, or consciousness of needs, an
animal low down in the scale of life, is grudging, and that he is
more comfortable when he has got hold of onto to which he can point
and say that mere, at any rate, is an unintelligent and merely
instinctive creature.  I have only called attention to the passage as
an example of the intellectual bias of a large number of exceedingly
able and thoughtful persons, among whom, so far as I am able to form
an opinion at all, few have greater claims to our respectful
attention than Dr. Carpenter himself.

For the embryo of a chicken, then, we damn exactly the same kind of
reasoning power and contrivance which we damn for the amoeba, or for
our own intelligent performances in later life.  We do not claim for
it much, if any, perception of its own forethought, for we know very
well that it is among the most prominent features of intellectual
activity that, after a number of repetitions, it ceases to be
perceived, and that it does not, in ordinary cases, cease to be
perceived till after a very great number of repetitions.  The fact
that the embryo chicken makes itself always as nearly as may be in
the same way, would lead us to suppose that it would be unconscious
of much of its own action, PROVIDED IT WERE ALWAYS THE SAME CHICKEN
WHICH MADE ITSELF OVER AND OVER AGAIN.  So far we can see, it always
IS unconscious of the greater part of its own wonderful performance.
Surely then we have a presumption that IT IS THE SAME CHICKEN WHICH
MAKES ITSELF OVER AND OVER AGAIN; for such unconsciousness is not
won, so far as our experience goes, by any other means than by
frequent repetition of the same act on the part of one and the same
individual.  How this can be we shall perceive in subsequent
chapters.  In the meantime, we may say that all knowledge and
volition would seem to be merely parts of the knowledge and volition
of the primordial cell (whatever this may be), which slumbers but
never dies--which has grown, and multiplied, and differentiated
itself into the compound life of the womb, and which never becomes
conscious of knowing what it has once learnt effectually, till it is
for some reason on the point of, or in danger of, forgetting it.

The action, therefore, of an embryo making its way up in the world
from a simple cell to a baby, developing for itself eyes, ears,
hands, and feet while yet unborn, proves to be exactly of one and the
same kind as that of a man of fifty who goes into the City and tells
his broker to buy him so many Great Northern A shares--that is to
say, an effort of the will exercised in due course on a balance of
considerations as to the immediate expediency, and guided by past
experience; while children who do not reach birth are but prenatal
spendthrifts, ne'er-do-weels, inconsiderate innovators, the
unfortunate in business, either through their own fault or that of
others, or through inevitable mischances, beings who are culled out
before birth instead of after; so that even the lowest idiot, the
most contemptible in health or beauty, may yet reflect with pride
that they were BORN.  Certainly we observe that those who have had
good fortune (mother and sole cause of virtue, and sole virtue in
itself), and have profited by their experience, and known their
business best before birth, so that they made themselves both to be
and to look well, do commonly on an average prove to know it best in
after-life:  they grow their clothes best who have grown their limbs
best.  It is rare that those who have not remembered how to finish
their own bodies fairly well should finish anything well in later
life.  But how small is the addition to their unconscious attainments
which even the Titans of human intellect have consciously
accomplished, in comparison with the problems solved by the meanest
baby living, nay, even by one whose birth is untimely!  In other
words, how vast is that back knowledge over which we have gone fast
asleep, through the prosiness of perpetual repetition; and how little
in comparison, is that whose novelty keeps it still within the scope
of our conscious perception!  What is the discovery of the laws of
gravitation as compared with the knowledge which sleeps in every
hen's egg upon a kitchen shelf?

It is all a matter of habit and fashion.  Thus we see kings and
councillors of the earth admired for facing death before what they
are pleased to call dishonour.  If, on being required to go without
anything they have been accustomed to, or to change their habits, or
do what is unusual in the case of other kings under like
circumstances, then, if they but fold their cloak decently around
them, and die upon the spot of shame at having had it even required
of them to do thus or thus, then are they kings indeed, of old race,
that know their business from generation to generation.  Or if, we
will say, a prince, on having his dinner brought to him ill-cooked,
were to feel the indignity so keenly as that he should turn his face
to the wall, and breathe out his wounded soul in one sigh, do we not
admire him as a "REAL prince," who knows the business of princes so
well that he can conceive of nothing foreign to it in connection with
himself, the bare effort to realise a state of things other than what
princes have been accustomed to being immediately fatal to him?  Yet
is there no less than this in the demise of every half-hatched hen's
egg, shaken rudely by a schoolboy, or neglected by a truant mother;
for surely the prince would not die if he knew how to do otherwise,
and the hen's egg only dies of being required to do something to
which it is not accustomed.

But the further consideration of this and other like reflections
would too long detain us.  Suffice it that we have established the
position that all living creatures which show any signs of
intelligence, must certainly each one have already gone through the
embryonic stages an infinite number of times, or they could no more
have achieved the intricate process of self-development
unconsciously, than they could play the piano unconsciously without
any previous knowledge of the instrument.  It remains, therefore, to
show the when and where of their having done so, and this leads us
naturally to the subject of the following chapter--Personal Identity.



CHAPTER V--PERSONAL IDENTITY



"Strange difficulties have been raised by some," says Bishop Butler,
"concerning personal identity, or the sameness of living agents as
implied in the notion of our existing now and hereafter, or indeed in
any two consecutive moments."  But in truth it is not easy to see the
strangeness of the difficulty, if the words either "personal" or
"identity" are used in any strictness.

Personality is one of those ideas with which we are so familiar that
we have lost sight of the foundations upon which it rests.  We regard
our personality as a simple definite whole; as a plain, palpable,
individual thing, which can be seen going about the streets or
sitting indoors at home, which lasts us our lifetime, and about the
confines of which no doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable
people.  But in truth this "we," which looks so simple and definite,
is a nebulous and indefinable aggregation of many component parts
which war not a little among themselves, our perception of our
existence at all being perhaps due to this very clash of warfare, as
our sense of sound and light is due to the jarring of vibrations.
Moreover, as the component parts of our identity change from moment
to moment, our personality becomes a thing dependent upon the
present, which has no logical existence, but lives only upon the
sufferance of times past and future, slipping out of our hands into
the domain of one or other of these two claimants the moment we try
to apprehend it.  And not only is our personality as fleeting as the
present moment, but the parts which compose it blend some of them so
imperceptibly into, and are so inextricably linked on to, outside
things which clearly form no part of our personality, that when we
try to bring ourselves to book, and determine wherein we consist, or
to draw a line as to where we begin or end, we find ourselves
completely baffled.  There is nothing but fusion and confusion.

Putting theology on one side, and dealing only with the common daily
experience of mankind, our body is certainly part of our personality.
With the destruction of our bodies, our personality, as far as we can
follow it, comes to a full stop; and with every modification of them
it is correspondingly modified.  But what are the limits of our
bodies?  They are composed of parts, some of them so unessential as
to be hardly included in personality at all, and to be separable from
ourselves without perceptible effect, as the hair, nails, and daily
waste of tissue.  Again, other parts are very important, as our
hands, feet, arms, legs, &c., but still are no essential parts of our
"self" or "soul," which continues to exist in spite of their
amputation.  Other parts, as the brain, heart, and blood, are so
essential that they cannot be dispensed with, yet it is impossible to
say that personality consists in any one of them.

Each one of these component members of our personality is continually
dying and being born again, supported in this process by the food we
eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe; which three things
link us on, and fetter us down, to the organic and inorganic world
about us.  For our meat and drink, though no part of our personality
before we eat and drink, cannot, after we have done so, be separated
entirely from us without the destruction of our personality
altogether, so far as we can follow it; and who shall say at what
precise moment our food has or has not become part of ourselves?  A
famished man eats food; after a short time his whole personality is
so palpably affected that we know the food to have entered into him
and taken, as it were, possession of him; but who can say at what
precise moment it did so?  Thus we find that we are rooted into
outside things and melt away into them, nor can any man say he
consists absolutely in this or that, nor define himself so certainly
as to include neither more nor less than himself; many undoubted
parts of his personality being more separable from it, and changing
it less when so separated, both to his own senses and those of other
people, than other parts which are strictly speaking no parts at all.

A man's clothes, for example, as they lie on a chair at night are no
part of him, but when he wears them they would appear to be so, as
being a kind of food which warms him and hatches him, and the loss of
which may kill him of cold.  If this be denied, and a man's clothes
be considered as no part of his self, nevertheless they, with his
money, and it may perhaps be added his religious opinions, stamp a
man's individuality as strongly as any natural feature could stamp
it.  Change in style of dress, gain or loss of money, make a man feel
and appear more changed than having his chin shaved or his nails cut.
In fact, as soon as we leave common parlance on one side, and try for
a scientific definition of personality, we find that there is none
possible, any more than there can be a demonstration of the fact that
we exist at all--a demonstration for which, as for that of a personal
God, many have hunted but none have found.  The only solid foundation
is, as in the case of the earth's crust, pretty near the surface of
things; the deeper we try to go, the damper and darker and altogether
more uncongenial we find it.  There is no knowing into what quagmire
of superstition we may not find ourselves drawn, if we once cut
ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of things, in which
alone our nature permits us to be comforted.

Common parlance, however, settles the difficulty readily enough (as
indeed it settles most others if they show signs of awkwardness) by
the simple process of ignoring it:  we decline, and very properly, to
go into the question of where personality begins and ends, but assume
it to be known by every one, and throw the onus of not knowing it
upon the over-curious, who had better think as their neighbours do,
right or wrong, or there is no knowing into what villainy they may
not presently fall.

Assuming, then, that every one knows what is meant by the word
"person" (and such superstitious bases as this are the foundations
upon which all action, whether of man, beast, or plant, is
constructed and rendered possible; for even the corn in the fields
grows upon a superstitious basis as to its own existence, and only
turns the earth and moisture into wheat through the conceit of its
own ability to do so, without which faith it were powerless; and the
lichen only grows upon the granite rock by first saying to itself, "I
think I can do it;" so that it would not be able to grow unless it
thought it could grow, and would not think it could grow unless it
found itself able to grow, and thus spends its life arguing in a most
vicious circle, basing its action upon a hypothesis, which hypothesis
is in turn based upon its action)--assuming that we know what is
meant by the word "person," we say that we are one and the same from
the moment of our birth to the moment of our death, so that whatever
is done by or happens to any one between birth and death, is said to
happen to or be done by one individual.  This in practice is found to
be sufficient for the law courts and the purposes of daily life,
which, being full of hurry and the pressure of business, can only
tolerate compromise, or conventional rendering of intricate
phenomena.  When facts of extreme complexity have to be daily and
hourly dealt with by people whose time is money, they must be
simplified, and treated much as a painter treats them, drawing them
in squarely, seizing the more important features, and neglecting all
that does not assert itself as too essential to be passed over--hence
the slang and cant words of every profession, and indeed all
language; for language at best is but a kind of "patter," the only
way, it is true, in many cases, of expressing our ideas to one
another, but still a very bad way, and not for one moment comparable
to the unspoken speech which we may sometimes have recourse to.  The
metaphors and facons de parler to which even in the plainest speech
we are perpetually recurring (as, for example, in this last two
lines, "plain," "perpetually," and "recurring," are all words based
on metaphor, and hence more or less liable to mislead) often deceive
us, as though there were nothing more than what we see and say, and
as though words, instead of being, as they are, the creatures of our
convenience, had some claim to be the actual ideas themselves
concerning which we are conversing.

This is so well expressed in a letter I have recently received from a
friend, now in New Zealand, and certainly not intended by him for
publication, that I shall venture to quote the passage, but should
say that I do so without his knowledge or permission which I should
not be able to receive before this book must be completed.

"Words, words, words," he writes, "are the stumbling-blocks in the
way of truth.  Until you think of things as they are, and not of the
words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly.  Words
produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none.
Words divide; thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey,
while they are all only differentiations of the same thing.  To think
of a thing they must be got rid of:  they are the clothes that
thoughts wear--only the clothes.  I say this over and over again, for
there is nothing of more importance.  Other men's words will stop you
at the beginning of an investigation.  A man may play with words all
his life, arranging them and rearranging them like dominoes.  If I
could THINK to you without words you would understand me better."

If such remarks as the above hold good at all, they do so with the
words "personal identity."  The least reflection will show that
personal identity in any sort of strictness is an impossibility.  The
expression is one of the many ways in which we are obliged to scamp
our thoughts through pressure of other business which pays us better.
For surely all reasonable people will feel that an infant an hour
before birth, when in the eye of the law he has no existence, and
could not be called a peer for another sixty minutes, though his
father were a peer, and already dead,--surely such an embryo is more
personally identical with the baby into which he develops within an
hour's time than the born baby is so with itself (if the expression
may be pardoned), one, twenty, or it may be eighty years after birth.
There is more sameness of matter; there are fewer differences of any
kind perceptible by a third person; there is more sense of continuity
on the part of the person himself; and far more of all that goes to
make up our sense of sameness of personality between an embryo an
hour before birth and the child on being born, than there is between
the child just born and the man of twenty.  Yet there is no
hesitation about admitting sameness of personality between these two
last.

On the other hand, if that hazy contradiction in terms, "personal
identity," be once allowed to retreat behind the threshold of the
womb, it has eluded us once for all.  What is true of one hour before
birth is true of two, and so on till we get back to the impregnate
ovum, which may fairly claim to have been personally identical with
the man of eighty into which it ultimately developed, in spite of the
fact that there is no particle of same matter nor sense of continuity
between them, nor recognised community of instinct, nor indeed of
anything which goes to the making up of that which we call identity.

There is far more of all these things common to the impregnate ovum
and the ovum immediately before impregnation, or again between the
impregnate ovum, and both the ovum before impregnation and the
spermatozoon which impregnated it.  Nor, if we admit personal
identity between the ovum and the octogenarian, is there any
sufficient reason why we should not admit it between the impregnate
ovum and the two factors of which it is composed, which two factors
are but offshoots from two distinct personalities, of which they are
as much part as the apple is of the apple-tree; so that an impregnate
ovum cannot without a violation of first principles be debarred from
claiming personal identity with both its parents, and hence, by an
easy chain of reasoning, WITH EACH OF THE IMPREGNATE OVA FROM WHICH
ITS PARENTS WERE DEVELOPED.

So that each ovum when impregnate should be considered not as
descended from its ancestors, but as being a continuation of the
personality of every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every
ovum IT ACTUALLY IS quite as truly as the octogenarian IS the same
identity with the ovum from which he has been developed.

This process cannot stop short of the primordial cell, which again
will probably turn out to be but a brief resting-place.  We therefore
prove each one of us to BE ACTUALLY the primordial cell which never
died nor dies, but has differentiated itself into the life of the
world, all living beings whatever, being one with it, and members one
of another.

To look at the matter for a moment in another light, it will be
admitted that if the primordial cell had been killed before leaving
issue, all its possible descendants would have been killed at one and
the same time.  It is hard to see how this single fact does not
establish at the point, as it were, of a logical bayonet, an
identity, between any creature and all others that are descended from
it.

In Bishop Butler's first dissertation on personality, we find
expressed very much the same opinions as would follow from the above
considerations, though they are mentioned by the Bishop only to be
condemned, namely, "that personality is not a permanent but a
transient thing; that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually;
that no man can any more remain one and the same person two moments
together, than two successive moments can be one and the same
moment;" in which case, he continues, our present self would not be
"in reality the same with the self of yesterday, but another like
self or person coming up in its room and mistaken for it, to which
another self will succeed to-morrow."  This view the Bishop proceeds
to reduce to absurdity by saying, "It must be a fallacy upon
ourselves to charge our present selves with anything we did, or to
imagine our present selves interested in anything which befell us
yesterday; or that our present self will be interested in what will
befall us to-morrow.  This, I say, must follow, for if the self or
person of to-day and that of to-morrow are not the same, but only
like persons, the person of to-day is really no more interested in
what will befall the person of to-morrow than in what will befall any
other person.  It may be thought, perhaps, that this is not a just
representation of the opinion we are speaking of, because those who
maintain it allow that a person is the same as far back as his
remembrance reaches.  And indeed they do use the words IDENTITY and
SAME PERSON.  Nor will language permit these words to be laid aside,
since, if they were, there must be I know not what ridiculous
periphrasis substituted in the room of them.  But they cannot
consistently with themselves mean that the person is really the same.
For it is self-evident that the personality cannot be really the
same, if, as they expressly assert, that in which it consists is not
the same.  And as consistently with themselves they cannot, so I
think it appears they do not mean that the person is really the same,
but only that he is so in a fictitious sense; in such a sense only as
they assert--for this they do assert--that any number of persons
whatever may be the same person.  The bare unfolding of this notion,
and laying it thus naked and open, seems the best confutation of it."

This fencing, for it does not deserve the name of serious
disputation, is rendered possible by the laxness with which the words
"identical" and "identity" are commonly used.  Bishop Butler would
not seriously deny that personality undergoes great changes between
infancy and old age, and hence that it must undergo some change from
moment to moment.  So universally is this recognised, that it is
common to hear it said of such and such a man that he is not at all
the person he was, or of such and such another that he is twice the
man he used to be--expressions than which none nearer the truth can
well be found.  On the other hand, those whom Bishop Butler is
intending to confute would be the first to admit that, though there
are many changes between infancy and old age, yet they come about in
any one individual under such circumstances as we are all agreed in
considering as the factors of personal identity rather than as
hindrances thereto--that is to say, there has been no death on the
part of the individual between any two phases of his existence, and
any one phase has had a permanent though perhaps imperceptible effect
upon all succeeding ones.  So that no one ever seriously argued in
the manner supposed by Bishop Butler, unless with modifications and
saving clauses, to which it does not suit his purpose to call
attention.

Identical strictly means "one and the same;" and if it were tied down
to its strictest usage, it would indeed follow very logically, as we
have said already, that no such thing as personal identity is
possible, but that the case actually is as Bishop Butler has supposed
his opponents without qualification to maintain it.  In common use,
however, the word "identical" is taken to mean anything so like
another that no vital or essential differences can be perceived
between them; as in the case of two specimens of the same kind of
plant, when we say they are identical in spite of considerable
individual differences.  So with two impressions of a print from the
same plate; so with the plate itself, which is somewhat modified with
every impression taken from it.  In like manner "identity" is not
held to its strict meaning--absolute sameness--but is predicated
rightly of a past and present which are now very widely asunder,
provided they have been continuously connected by links so small as
not to give too sudden a sense of change at any one point; as, for
instance, in the case of the Thames at Oxford and Windsor or again at
Greenwich, we say the same river flows by all three places, by which
we mean that much of the water at Greenwich has come down from Oxford
and Windsor in a continuous stream.  How sudden a change at any one
point, or how great a difference between the two extremes is
sufficient to bar identity, is one of the most uncertain things
imaginable, and seems to be decided on different grounds in different
cases, sometimes very intelligibly, and again at others arbitrarily
and capriciously.

Personal identity is barred at one end, in the common opinion, by
birth, and at the other by death.  Before birth, a child cannot
complain either by himself or another, in such way as to set the law
in motion; after death he is in like manner powerless to make himself
felt by society, except in so far as he can do so by acts done before
the breath has left his body.  At any point between birth and death
he is liable, either by himself or another, to affect his fellow-
creatures; hence, no two other epochs can be found of equal
convenience for social purposes, and therefore they have been seized
by society as settling the whole question of when personal identity
begins and ends--society being rightly concerned with its own
practical convenience, rather than with the abstract truth concerning
its individual members.  No one who is capable of reflection will
deny that the limitation of personality is certainly arbitrary to a
degree as regards birth, nor yet that it is very possibly arbitrary
as regards death; and as for intermediate points, no doubt it would
be more strictly accurate to say, "you are the now phase of the
person I met last night," or "you are the being which has been
evolved from the being I met last night," than "you are the person I
met last night."  But life is too short for the pen-phrases which
would crowd upon us from every quarter, if we did not set our face
against all that is under the surface of things, unless, that is to
say, the going beneath the surface is, for some special chance of
profit, excusable or capable of extenuation.



CHAPTER VI--PERSONAL IDENTITY--(Continued)



How arbitrary current notions concerning identity really are, may
perhaps be perceived by reflecting upon some of the many different
phases of reproduction.

Direct reproduction in which a creation reproduces another, the
facsimile, or nearly so, of itself may perhaps occur among the lowest
forms of animal life; but it is certainly not the rule among beings
of a higher order.

A hen lays an egg, which egg becomes a chicken, which chicken, in the
course of time, becomes a hen.

A moth lays an egg, which egg becomes a caterpillar, which
caterpillar, after going through several stages, becomes a chrysalis,
which chrysalis becomes a moth.

A medusa begets a ciliated larva, the larva begets a polyp, the polyp
begets a strobila, and the strobila begets a medusa again; the cycle
of reproduction being completed in the fourth generation.

A frog lays an egg, which egg becomes a tadpole; the tadpole, after
more or fewer intermediate stages, becomes a frog.

The mammals lay eggs, which they hatch inside their own bodies,
instead of outside them; but the difference is one of degree and not
of kind.  In all these cases how difficult is it to say where
identity begins or ends, or again where death begins or ends, or
where reproduction begins or ends.

How small and unimportant is the difference between the changes which
a caterpillar undergoes before becoming a moth, and those of a
strobila before becoming a medusa.  Yet in the one case we say the
caterpillar does not die, but is changed (though, if the various
changes in its existence be produced metagenetically, as is the case
with many insects, it would appear to make a clean sweep of every
organ of its existence, and start de novo, growing a head where its
feet were, and so on--at least twice between its lives as caterpillar
and butterfly); in this case, however, we say the caterpillar does
not die, but is changed; being, nevertheless, one personality with
the moth, into which it is developed.  But in the case of the
strobila we say that it is not changed, but dies, and is no part of
the personality of the medusa.

We say the egg becomes the caterpillar, not by the death of the egg
and birth of the caterpillar, but by the ordinary process of
nutrition and waste--waste and repair--waste and repair continually.
In like manner we say the caterpillar becomes the chrysalis, and the
chrysalis the moth, not through the death of either one or the other,
but by the development of the same creature, and the ordinary
processes of waste and repair.  But the medusa after three or four
cycles becomes the medusa again, not, we say, by these same processes
of nutrition and waste, but by a series of generations, each one
involving an actual birth and an actual death.  Why this difference?
Surely only because the changes in the offspring of the medusa are
marked by the leaving a little more husk behind them, and that husk
less shrivelled, than is left on the occasion of each change between
the caterpillar and the butterfly.  A little more residuum, which
residuum, it may be, can move about; and though shrivelling from hour
to hour, may yet leave a little more offspring before it is reduced
to powder; or again, perhaps, because in the one case, though the
actors are changed, they are changed behind the scenes, and come on
in parts and dresses, more nearly resembling those of the original
actors, than in the other.

When the caterpillar emerges from the egg, almost all that was inside
the egg has become caterpillar; the shell is nearly empty, and cannot
move; therefore we do not count it, and call the caterpillar a
continuation of the egg's existence, and personally identical with
the egg.  So with the chrysalis and the moth; but after the moth has
laid her eggs she can still move her wings about, and she looks
nearly as large as she did before she laid them; besides, she may yet
lay a few more, therefore we do not consider the moth's life as
continued in the life of her eggs, but rather in their husk, which we
still call the moth, and which we say dies in a day or two, and there
is an end of it.  Moreover, if we hold the moth's life to be
continued in that of her eggs, we shall be forced to admit her to be
personally identical with each single egg, and, hence, each egg to be
identical with every other egg, as far as the past, and community of
memories, are concerned; and it is not easy at first to break the
spell which words have cast around us, and to feel that one person
may become many persons, and that many different persons may be
practically one and the same person, as far as their past experience
is concerned; and again, that two or more persons may unite and
become one person, with the memories and experiences of both, though
this has been actually the case with every one of us.

Our present way of looking at these matters is perfectly right and
reasonable, so long as we bear in mind that it is a facon de parler,
a sort of hieroglyphic which shall stand for the course of nature,
but nothing more.  Repair (as is now universally admitted by
physiologists) is only a phase of reproduction, or rather
reproduction and repair are only phases of the same power; and again,
death and the ordinary daily waste of tissue, are phases of the same
thing.  As for identity it is determined in any true sense of the
word, not by death alone, but by a combination of death and failure
of issue, whether of mind or body.

To repeat.  Wherever there is a separate centre of thought and
action, we see that it is connected with its successive stages of
being, by a series of infinitely small changes from moment to moment,
with, perhaps, at times more startling and rapid changes, but,
nevertheless, with no such sudden, complete, and unrepaired break up
of the preceding condition, as we shall agree in calling death.  The
branching out from it at different times of new centres of thought
and action, has commonly as little appreciable effect upon the
parent-stock as the fall of an apple full of ripe seeds has upon an
apple-tree; and though the life of the parent, from the date of the
branching off of such personalities, is more truly continued in these
than in the residuum of its own life, we should find ourselves
involved in a good deal of trouble if we were commonly to take this
view of the matter.  The residuum has generally the upper hand.  He
has more money, and can eat up his new life more easily than his new
life, him.  A moral residuum will therefore prefer to see the
remainder of his life in his own person, than in that of his
descendants, and will act accordingly.  Hence we, in common with most
other living beings, ignore the offspring as forming part of the
personality of the parent, except in so far as that we make the
father liable for its support and for its extravagances (than which
no greater proof need be wished that the law is at heart a
philosopher, and perceives the completeness of the personal identity
between father and son) for twenty-one years from birth.  In other
respects we are accustomed, probably rather from considerations of
practical convenience than as the result of pure reason, to ignore
the identity between parent and offspring as completely as we ignore
personality before birth.  With these exceptions, however, the common
opinion concerning personal identity is reasonable enough, and is
found to consist neither in consciousness of such identity, nor yet
in the power of recollecting its various phases (for it is plain that
identity survives the distinction or suspension of both these), but
in the fact that the various stages appear to the majority of people
to have been in some way or other linked together.

For a very little reflection will show that identity, as commonly
predicated of living agents, does not consist in identity of matter,
of which there is no same particle in the infant, we will say, and
the octogenarian into whom he has developed.  Nor, again, does it
depend upon sameness of form or fashion; for personality is felt to
survive frequent and radical modification of structure, as in the
case of caterpillars and other insects.  Mr. Darwin, quoting from
Professor Owen, tells us (Plants and Animals under Domestication,
vol. ii. p. 362, ed. 1875), that in the case of what is called
metagenetic development, "the new parts are not moulded upon the
inner surfaces of the old ones.  The plastic force has changed its
mode of operation.  THE OUTER CASE, AND ALL THAT GAVE FORM AND
CHARACTER TO THE PRECEDENT INDIVIDUAL, PERISH, AND ARE CAST OFF; THEY
ARE NOT CHANGED into the corresponding parts of the same individual.
These are due to a new and distinct developmental process."
Assuredly, there is more birth and death in the world than is dreamt
of by the greater part of us; but it is so masked, and on the whole,
so little to our purpose, that we fail to see it.  Yet radical and
sweeping as the changes of organism above described must be, we do
not feel them to be more a bar to personal identity than the
considerable changes which take place in the structure of our own
bodies between youth and old age.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of this is to be found in the
case of some Echinoderms, concerning which Mr. Darwin tells us, that
"the animal in the second stage of development is formed almost like
a bud within the animal of the first stage, the latter being then
cast off like an old vestment, yet sometimes maintaining for a short
period an independent vitality" ("Plants and Animals under
Domestication," vol. ii. p. 362, ed. 1875).

Nor yet does personality depend upon any consciousness or sense of
such personality on the part of the creature itself--it is not likely
that the moth remembers having been a caterpillar, more than we
ourselves remember having been children of a day old.  It depends
simply upon the fact that the various phases of existence have been
linked together, by links which we agree in considering sufficient to
cause identity, and that they have flowed the one out of the other in
what we see as a continuous, though it may be at times, a troubled
stream.  This is the very essence of personality, but it involves the
probable unity of all animal and vegetable life, as being, in
reality, nothing but one single creature, of which the component
members are but, as it were, blood corpuscles or individual cells;
life being a sort of leaven, which, if once introduced into the
world, will leaven it altogether; or of fire, which will consume all
it can burn; or of air or water, which will turn most things into
themselves.  Indeed, no difficulty would probably be felt about
admitting the continued existence of personal identity between
parents and their offspring through all time (there being no SUDDEN
break at any time between the existence of any maternal parent and
that of its offspring), were it not that after a certain time the
changes in outward appearance between descendants and ancestors
become very great, the two seeming to stand so far apart, that it
seems absurd in any way to say that they are one and the same being;
much in the same way as after a time--though exactly when no one can
say--the Thames becomes the sea.  Moreover, the separation of the
identity is practically of far greater importance to it than its
continuance.  We want to be ourselves; we do not want any one else to
claim part and parcel of our identity.  This community of identities
is not found to answer in everyday life.  When then our love of
independence is backed up by the fact that continuity of life between
parents and offspring is a matter which depends on things which are a
good deal hidden, and that thus birth gives us an opportunity of
pretending that there has been a sudden leap into a separate life;
when also we have regard to the utter ignorance of embryology, which
prevailed till quite recently, it is not surprising that our ordinary
language should be found to have regard to what is important and
obvious, rather than to what is not quite obvious, and is quite
unimportant.

Personality is the creature of time and space, changing, as time
changes, imperceptibly; we are therefore driven to deal with it as
with all continuous and blending things; as with time, for example,
itself, which we divide into days, and seasons, and times, and years,
into divisions that are often arbitrary, but coincide, on the whole,
as nearly as we can make them do so, with the more marked changes
which we can observe.  We lay hold, in fact, of anything we can
catch; the most important feature in any existence as regards
ourselves being that which we can best lay hold of rather than that
which is most essential to the existence itself.  We can lay hold of
the continued personality of the egg and the moth into which the egg
develops, but it is less easy to catch sight of the continued
personality between the moth and the eggs which she lays; yet the one
continuation of personality is just as true and free from quibble as
the other.  A moth becomes each egg that she lays, and that she does
so, she will in good time show by doing, now that she has got a fresh
start, as near as may be what she did when first she was an egg, and
then a moth, before; and this I take it, so far as I can gather from
looking at life and things generally, she would not be able to do if
she had not travelled the same road often enough already, to be able
to know it in her sleep and blindfold, that is to say, to remember it
without any conscious act of memory.

So also a grain of wheat is linked with an ear, containing, we will
say, a dozen grains, by a series of changes so subtle that we cannot
say at what moment the original grain became the blade, nor when each
ear of the head became possessed of an individual centre of action.
To say that each grain of the head is personally identical with the
original grain would perhaps be an abuse of terms; but it can be no
abuse to say that each grain is a continuation of the personality of
the original grain, and if so, of every grain in the chain of its own
ancestry; and that, as being such a continuation, it must be stored
with the memories and experiences of its past existences, to be
recollected under the circumstances most favourable to recollection,
i.e., when under similar conditions to those when the impression was
last made and last remembered.  Truly, then, in each case the new egg
and the new grain IS the egg, and the grain from which its parent
sprang, as completely as the full-grown ox is the calf from which it
has grown.

Again, in the case of some weeping trees, whose boughs spring up into
fresh trees when they have reached the ground, who shall say at what
time they cease to be members of the parent tree?  In the case of
cuttings from plants it is easy to elude the difficulty by making a
parade of the sharp and sudden act of separation from the parent
stock, but this is only a piece of mental sleight of hand; the
cutting remains as much part of its parent plant as though it had
never been severed from it; it goes on profiting by the experience
which it had before it was cut off, as much as though it had never
been cut off at all.  This will be more readily seen in the case of
worms which have been cut in half.  Let a worm be cut in half, and
the two halves will become fresh worms; which of them is the original
worm?  Surely both.  Perhaps no simpler case than this could readily
be found of the manner in which personality eludes us, the moment we
try to investigate its real nature.  There are few ideas which on
first consideration appear so simple, and none which becomes more
utterly incapable of limitation or definition as soon as it is
examined closely.

Finally, Mr. Darwin ("Plants and Animals under Domestication," vol.
ii. p. 38, ed. 1875), writes -

"Even with plants multiplied by bulbs, layers, &c., which may IN ONE
SENSE be said to form part of the same individual," &c., &c.; and
again, p. 58, "The same rule holds good with plants when propagated
by bulbs, offsets, &c., which IN ONE SENSE still form parts of the
same individual," &c.  In each of these passages it is plain that the
difficulty of separating the personality of the offspring from that
of the parent plant is present to his mind.  Yet, p. 351 of the same
volume as above, he tells us that asexual generation "is effected in
many ways--by the formation of buds of various kinds, and by
fissiparous generation, that is, by spontaneous or artificial
division."  The multiplication of plants by bulbs and layers clearly
comes under this head, nor will any essential difference be felt
between one kind of asexual generation and another; if, then, the
offspring formed by bulbs and layers is in one sense part of the
original plant, so also, it would appear, is all offspring developed
by asexual generation in its manifold phrases.

If we now turn to p. 357, we find the conclusion arrived at, as it
would appear, on the most satisfactory evidence, that "sexual and
asexual reproduction are not seen to differ essentially; and . . . .
that asexual reproduction, the power of regrowth, and development are
all parts of one and the same great law."  Does it not then follow,
quite reasonably and necessarily, that all offspring, however
generated, is IN ONE SENSE part of the individuality of its parent or
parents.  The question, therefore, turns upon "in what sense" this
may be said to be the case?  To which I would venture to reply, "In
the same sense as the parent plant (which is but the representative
of the outside matter which it has assimilated during growth, and of
its own powers of development) is the same individual that it was
when it was itself an offset, or a cow the same individual that it
was when it was a calf--but no otherwise."

Not much difficulty will be felt about supposing the offset of a
plant, to be imbued with the memory of the past history of the plant
of which it is an offset.  It is part of the plant itself; and will
know whatever the plant knows.  Why, then, should there be more
difficulty in supposing the offspring of the highest mammals, to
remember in a profound but unselfconscious way, the anterior history
of the creatures of which they too have been part and parcel?

Personal identity, then, is much like species itself.  It is now,
thanks to Mr. Darwin, generally held that species blend or have
blended into one another; so that any possibility of arrangement and
apparent subdivision into definite groups, is due to the suppression
by death both of individuals and whole genera, which, had they been
now existing, would have linked all living beings by a series of
gradations so subtle that little classification could have been
attempted.  How it is that the one great personality of life as a
whole, should have split itself up into so many centres of thought
and action, each one of which is wholly, or at any rate nearly,
unconscious of its connection with the other members, instead of
having grown up into a huge polyp, or as it were coral reef or
compound animal over the whole world, which should be conscious but
of its own one single existence; how it is that the daily waste of
this creature should be carried on by the conscious death of its
individual members, instead of by the unconscious waste of tissue
which goes on in the bodies of each individual (if indeed the tissue
which we waste daily in our own bodies is so unconscious of its birth
and death as we suppose); how, again, that the daily repair of this
huge creature life should have become decentralised, and be carried
on by conscious reproduction on the part of its component items,
instead of by the unconscious nutrition of the whole from a single
centre, as the nutrition of our own bodies would appear (though
perhaps falsely) to be carried on; these are matters upon which I
dare not speculate here, but on which some reflections may follow in
subsequent chapters.



CHAPTER VII--OUR SUBORDINATE PERSONALITIES



We have seen that we can apprehend neither the beginning nor the end
of our personality, which comes up out of infinity as an island out
of the sea, so gently, that none can say when it is first visible on
our mental horizon, and fades away in the case of those who leave
offspring, so imperceptibly that none can say when it is out of
sight.  But, like the island, whether we can see it or no, it is
always there.  Not only are we infinite as regards time, but we are
so also as regards extension, being so linked on to the external
world that we cannot say where we either begin or end.  If those who
so frequently declare that man is a finite creature would point out
his boundaries, it might lead to a better understanding.

Nevertheless, we are in the habit of considering that our
personality, or soul, no matter where it begins or ends, and no
matter what it comprises, is nevertheless a single thing,
uncompounded of other souls.  Yet there is nothing more certain than
that this is not at all the case, but that every individual person is
a compound creature, being made up of an infinite number of distinct
centres of sensation and will, each one of which is personal, and has
a soul and individual existence, a reproductive system, intelligence,
and memory of its own, with probably its hopes and fears, its times
of scarcity and repletion, and a strong conviction that it is itself
the centre of the universe.

True, no one is aware of more than one individuality in his own
person at one time.  We are, indeed, often greatly influenced by
other people, so much so, that we act on many occasions in accordance
with their will rather than our own, making our actions answer to
their sensations, and register the conclusions of their cerebral
action and not our own; for the time being, we become so completely
part of them, that we are ready to do things most distasteful and
dangerous to us, if they think it for their advantage that we should
do so.  Thus we sometimes see people become mere processes of their
wives or nearest relations.  Yet there is a something which blinds
us, so that we cannot see how completely we are possessed by the
souls which influence us upon these occasions.  We still think we are
ourselves, and ourselves only, and are as certain as we can be of any
fact, that we are single sentient beings, uncompounded of other
sentient beings, and that our action is determined by the sole
operation of a single will.

But in reality, over and above this possession of our souls by others
of our own species, the will of the lower animals often enters into
our bodies and possesses them, making us do as they will, and not as
we will; as, for example, when people try to drive pigs, or are run
away with by a restive horse, or are attacked by a savage animal
which masters them.  It is absurd to say that a person is a single
"ego" when he is in the clutches of a lion.  Even when we are alone,
and uninfluenced by other people except in so far as we remember
their wishes, we yet generally conform to the usages which the
current feeling of our peers has taught us to respect; their will
having so mastered our original nature, that, do what we may, we can
never again separate ourselves and dwell in the isolation of our own
single personality.  And even though we succeeded in this, and made a
clean sweep of every mental influence which had ever been brought to
bear upon us, and though at the same time we were alone in some
desert where there was neither beast nor bird to attract our
attention or in any way influence our action, yet we could not escape
the parasites which abound within us; whose action, as every medical
man well knows, is often such as to drive men to the commission of
grave crimes, or to throw them into convulsions, make lunatics of
them, kill them--when but for the existence and course of conduct
pursued by these parasites they would have done no wrong to any man.

These parasites--are they part of us or no?  Some are plainly not so
in any strict sense of the word, yet their action may, in cases which
it is unnecessary to detail, affect us so powerfully that we are
irresistibly impelled to act in such or such a manner; and yet we are
as wholly unconscious of any impulse outside of our own "ego" as
though they were part of ourselves; others again are essential to our
very existence, as the corpuscles of the blood, which the best
authorities concur in supposing to be composed of an infinite number
of living souls, on whose welfare the healthy condition of our blood,
and hence of our whole bodies, depends.  We breathe that they may
breathe, not that we may do so; we only care about oxygen in so far
as the infinitely small beings which course up and down in our veins
care about it:  the whole arrangement and mechanism of our lungs may
be our doing, but is for their convenience, and they only serve us
because it suits their purpose to do so, as long as we serve them.
Who shall draw the line between the parasites which are part of us,
and the parasites which are not part of us?  Or again, between the
influence of those parasites which are within us, but are yet not US,
and the external influence of other sentient beings and our fellow-
men?  There is no line possible.  Everything melts away into
everything else; there are no hard edges; it is only from a little
distance that we see the effect as of individual features and
existences.  When we go close up, there is nothing but a blur and
confused mass of apparently meaningless touches, as in a picture by
Turner.

The following passage from Mr. Darwin's provisional theory of
Pangenesis, will sufficiently show that the above is no strange and
paradoxical view put forward wantonly, but that it follows as a
matter of course from the conclusions arrived at by those who are
acknowledged leaders in the scientific world.  Mr. Darwin writes
thus:-

"THE FUNCTIONAL INDEPENDENCE OF THE ELEMENTS OR UNITS OF THE BODY.--
Physiologists agree that the whole organism consists of a multitude
of elemental parts, which are to a great extent independent of one
another.  Each organ, says Claude Bernard, has its proper life, its
autonomy; it can develop and reproduce itself independently of the
adjoining tissues.  A great German authority, Virchow, asserts still
more emphatically that each system consists of 'an enormous mass of
minute centres of action. . . .  Every element has its own special
action, and even though it derive its stimulus to activity from other
parts, yet alone effects the actual performance of duties. . . .
Every single epithelial and muscular fibre-cell leads a sort of
parasitical existence in relation to the rest of the body. . . .
Every single bone corpuscle really possesses conditions of nutrition
peculiar to itself.'  Each element, as Sir J. Paget remarks, lives
its appointed time, and then dies, and is replaced after being cast
off and absorbed.  I presume that no physiologist doubts that, for
instance, each bone corpuscle of the finger differs from the
corresponding corpuscle of the corresponding joint of the toe," &c.,
&c.  ("Plants and Animals under Domestication," vol ii. pp. 364, 365,
ed. 1875).

In a work on heredity by M. Ribot, I find him saying, "Some recent
authors attribute a memory" (and if so, surely every attribute of
complete individuality) "to every organic element of the body;" among
them Dr. Maudsley, who is quoted by M. Ribot, as saying, "The
permanent effects of a particular virus, such as that of the variola,
in the constitution, shows that the organic element remembers for the
remainder of its life certain modifications it has received.  The
manner in which a cicatrix in a child's finger grows with the growth
of the body, proves, as has been shown by Paget, that the organic
element of the part does not forget the impression it has received.
What has been said about the different nervous centres of the body
demonstrates the existence of a memory in the nerve cells diffused
through the heart and intestines; in those of the spinal cord, in the
cells of the motor ganglia, and in the cells of the cortical
substance of the cerebal hemispheres."

Now, if words have any meaning at all, it must follow from the
passages quoted above, that each cell in the human body is a person
with an intelligent soul, of a low class, perhaps, but still
differing from our own more complex soul in degree, and not in kind;
and, like ourselves, being born, living, and dying.  So that each
single creature, whether man or beast, proves to be as a ray of white
light, which, though single, is compounded of the red, blue, and
yellow rays.  It would appear, then, as though "we," "our souls," or
"selves," or "personalities," or by whatever name we may prefer to be
called, are but the CONSENSUS and full flowing stream of countless
sensations and impulses on the part of our tributary souls or
"selves," who probably know no more that we exist, and that they
exist as part of us, than a microscopic water-flea knows the results
of spectrum analysis, or than an agricultural labourer knows the
working of the British constitution:  and of whom we know no more,
until some misconduct on our part, or some confusion of ideas on
theirs, has driven them into insurrection, than we do of the habits
and feelings of some class widely separated from our own.

These component souls are of many and very different natures, living
in territories which are to them vast continents, and rivers, and
seas, but which are yet only the bodies of our other component souls;
coral reefs and sponge-beds within us; the animal itself being a kind
of mean proportional between its house and its soul, and none being
able to say where house ends and animal begins, more than they can
say where animal ends and soul begins.  For our bones within us are
but inside walls and buttresses, that is to say, houses constructed
of lime and stone, as it were, by coral insects; and our houses
without us are but outside bones, a kind of exterior skeleton or
shell, so that we perish of cold if permanently and suddenly deprived
of the coverings which warm us and cherish us, as the wing of a hen
cherishes her chickens.  If we consider the shells of many living
creatures, we shall find it hard to say whether they are rather
houses, or part of the animal itself, being, as they are, inseparable
from the animal, without the destruction of its personality.

Is it possible, then, to avoid imagining that if we have within us so
many tributary souls, so utterly different from the soul which they
unite to form, that they neither can perceive us, nor we them, though
it is in us that they live and move and have their being, and though
we are what we are, solely as the result of their co-operation--is it
possible to avoid imagining that we may be ourselves atoms,
undesignedly combining to form some vaster being, though we are
utterly incapable of perceiving that any such being exists, or of
realising the scheme or scope of our own combination?  And this, too,
not a spiritual being, which, without matter, or what we think matter
of some sort, is as complete nonsense to us as though men bade us
love and lean upon an intelligent vacuum, but a being with what is
virtually flesh and blood and bones; with organs, senses, dimensions,
in some way analogous to our own, into some other part of which
being, at the time of our great change we must infallibly re-enter,
starting clean anew, with bygones bygones, and no more ache for ever
from either age or antecedents.  Truly, sufficient for the life is
the evil thereof.  Any speculations of ours concerning the nature of
such a being, must be as futile and little valuable as those of a
blood corpuscle might be expected to be concerning the nature of man;
but if I were myself a blood corpuscle, I should be amused at making
the discovery that I was not only enjoying life in my own sphere, but
was bona fide part of an animal which would not die with myself, and
in which I might thus think of myself as continuing to live to all
eternity, or to what, as far as my power of thought would carry me,
must seem practically eternal.  But, after all, the amusement would
be of a rather dreary nature.

On the other hand, if I were the being of whom such an introspective
blood corpuscle was a component item, I should conceive he served me
better by attending to my blood and making himself a successful
corpuscle, than by speculating about my nature.  He would serve me
best by serving himself best, without being over curious.  I should
expect that my blood might suffer if his brain were to become too
active.  If, therefore, I could discover the vein in which he was, I
should let him out to begin life anew in some other and, qua me, more
profitable capacity.

With the units of our bodies it is as with the stars of heaven:
there is neither speech nor language, but their voices are heard
among them.  Our will is the fiat of their collective wisdom, as
sanctioned in their parliament, the brain; it is they who make us do
whatever we do--it is they who should be rewarded if they have done
well, or hanged if they have committed murder.  When the balance of
power is well preserved among them, when they respect each other's
rights and work harmoniously together, then we thrive and are well;
if we are ill, it is because they are quarrelling with themselves, or
are gone on strike for this or that addition to their environment,
and our doctor must pacify or chastise them as best he may.  They are
we and we are they; and when we die it is but a redistribution of the
balance of power among them or a change of dynasty, the result, it
may be, of heroic struggle, with more epics and love romances than we
could read from now to the Millennium, if they were so written down
that we could comprehend them.

It is plain, then, that the more we examine the question of
personality the more it baffles us, the only safeguard against utter
confusion and idleness of thought being to fall back upon the
superficial and common sense view, and refuse to tolerate discussions
which seem to hold out little prospect of commercial value, and which
would compel us, if logically followed, to be at the inconvenience of
altering our opinions upon matters which we have come to consider as
settled.

And we observe that this is what is practically done by some of our
ablest philosophers, who seem unwilling, if one may say so without
presumption, to accept the conclusions to which their own experiments
and observations would seem to point.

Dr. Carpenter, for example, quotes the well-known experiments upon
headless frogs.  If we cut off a frog's head and pinch any part of
its skin, the animal at once begins to move away with the same
regularity as though the brain had not been removed.  Flourens took
guinea-pigs, deprived them of the cerebral lobes, and then irritated
their skin; the animals immediately walked, leaped, and trotted
about, but when the irritation was discontinued they ceased to move.
Headless birds, under excitation, can still perform with their wings
the rhythmic movements of flying.  But here are some facts more
curious still, and more difficult of explanation.  If we take a frog
or a strong and healthy triton, and subject it to various
experiments; if we touch, pinch, or burn it with acetic acid, and if
then, after decapitating the animal, we subject it to the same
experiments, it will be seen that the reactions are exactly the same;
it will strive to be free of the pain, and to shake off the acetic
acid that is burning it; it will bring its foot up to the part of its
body that is irritated, and this movement of the member will follow
the irritation wherever it may be produced.

The above is mainly taken from M. Ribot's work on heredity rather
than Dr. Carpenter's, because M. Ribot tells us that the head of the
frog was actually cut off, a fact which does not appear so plainly in
Dr. Carpenter's allusion to the same experiments.  But Dr. Carpenter
tells us that AFTER THE BRAIN OF A FROG HAS BEEN REMOVED--which would
seem to be much the same thing as though its head were cut off--"if
acetic acid be applied over the upper and under part of the thigh,
the foot of the same side will wipe it away; BUT IF THAT FOOT BE CUT
OFF, AFTER SOME INEFFECTUAL EFFORTS AND A SHORT PERIOD OF INACTION,"
during which it is hard not to surmise that the headless body is
considering what it had better do under the circumstances, "THE SAME
MOVEMENT WILL BE MADE BY THE FOOT OF THE OPPOSITE SIDE," which, to
ordinary people, would convey the impression that the headless body
was capable of feeling the impressions it had received, and of
reasoning upon them by a psychological act; and this of course
involves the possession of a soul of some sort.

Here is a frog whose right thigh you burn with acetic acid.  Very
naturally it tries to get at the place with its right foot to remove
the acid.  You then cut off the frog's head, and put more acetic acid
on the some place:  the headless frog, or rather the body of the late
frog, does just what the frog did before its head was cut off--it
tries to get at the place with its right foot.  You now cut off its
right foot:  the headless body deliberates, and after a while tries
to do with its left foot what it can no longer do with its right.
Plain matter-of-fact people will draw their own inference.  They will
not be seduced from the superficial view of the matter.  They will
say that the headless body can still, to some extent, feel, think,
and act, and if so, that it must have a living soul.

Dr. Carpenter writes as follows:- "Now the performance of these, as
well as of many other movements, that show a most remarkable
adaptation to a purpose, might be supposed to indicate that
sensations are called up by the IMPRESSIONS, and that the animal can
not only FEEL, but can voluntarily direct its movements so as to get
rid of the irritation which annoys it.  But such an inference would
be inconsistent with other facts.  In the first place, the motions
performed under such circumstances are never spontaneous, but are
always excited by a stimulus of some kind."

Here we pause to ask ourselves whether any action of any creature
under any circumstances is ever excited without "stimulus of some
kind," and unless we can answer this question in the affirmative, it
is not easy to see how Dr. Carpenter's objection is valid.

"Thus," he continues, "a decapitated frog" (here then we have it that
the frog's head was actually cut off) "after the first violent
convulsive moments occasioned by the operation have passed away,
remains at rest until it is touched; and then the leg, or its whole
body may be thrown into sudden action, which suddenly subsides
again."  (How does this quiescence when it no longer feels anything
show that the "leg or whole body" had not perceived something which
made it feel when it was not quiescent?)--"Again we find that such
movements may be performed not only when the brain has been removed,
the spinal cord remaining entire, but also when the spinal cord has
been itself cut across, so as to be divided into two or more
portions, each of them completely isolated from each other, and from
other parts of the nervous centres.  Thus, if the head of a frog be
cut off, and its spinal cord be divided in the middle of the back, so
that its fore legs remain connected with the upper part, and its hind
legs with the lower, each pair of members may be excited to movements
by stimulants applied to itself; but the two pairs will not exhibit
any consentaneous motions, as they will do when the spinal cord is
undivided."

This may be put perhaps more plainly thus.  If you take a frog and
cut it into three pieces--say, the head for one piece, the fore legs
and shoulder for another, and the hind legs for a third--and then
irritate any one of these pieces, you will find it move much as it
would have moved under like irritation if the animal had remained
undivided, but you will no longer find any concert between the
movements of the three pieces; that is to say, if you irritate the
head, the other two pieces will remain quiet, and if you irritate the
hind legs, you will excite no action in the fore legs or head.

Dr. Carpenter continues:  "Or if the spinal cord be cut across
without the removal of the brain, the lower limbs may be EXCITED to
movement by an appropriate stimulant, though the animal has clearly
no power over them, whilst the upper part remains under its control
as completely as before."

Why are the head and shoulders "the animal" more than the hind legs
under these circumstances?  Neither half can exist long without the
other; the two parts, therefore, being equally important to each
other, we have surely as good a right to claim the title of "the
animal" for the hind legs, and to maintain that they have no power
over the head and shoulders, as any one else has to claim the
animalship for these last.  What we say is, that the animal has
ceased to exist as a frog on being cut in half, and that the two
halves are no longer, either of them, the frog, but are simply pieces
of still living organism, each of which has a soul of its own, being
capable of sensation, and of intelligent psychological action as the
consequence of sensations, though the one part has probably a much
higher and more intelligent soul than the other, and neither part has
a soul for a moment comparable in power and durability to that of the
original frog.

"Now it is scarcely conceivable," continues Dr Carpenter, "that in
this last case sensations should be felt and volition exercised
through the instrumentality of that portion of the spinal cord which
remains connected with the nerves of the posterior extremities, but
which is cut off from the brain.  For if it were so, there must be
two distinct centres of sensation and will in the same animal, the
attributes of the brain not being affected; and by dividing the
spinal cord into two or more segments we might thus create in the
body of one animal two or more such independent centres in addition
to that which holds its proper place in the head."

In the face of the facts before us, it does not seen far-fetched to
suppose that there ARE two, or indeed an infinite number of centres
of sensation and will in an animal, the attributes of whose brain are
not affected but that these centres, while the brain is intact,
habitually act in connection with and in subordination to that
central authority; as in the ordinary state of the fish trade, fish
is caught, we will say, at Yarmouth, sent up to London, and then sent
down to Yarmouth again to be eaten, instead of being eaten at
Yarmouth when caught.  But from the phenomena exhibited by three
pieces of an animal, it is impossible to argue that the causes of the
phenomena were present in the quondam animal itself; the memory of an
infinite series of generations having so habituated the local centres
of sensation and will, to act in concert with the central government,
that as long as they can get at that government, they are absolutely
incapable of acting independently.  When thrown on their own
resources, they are so demoralised by ages of dependence on the
brain, that they die after a few efforts at self-assertion, from
sheer unfamiliarity with the position, and inability to recognise
themselves when disjointed rudely from their habitual associations.

In conclusion, Dr. Carpenter says, "To say that two or more distinct
centres of sensation and will are present in such a case, would
really be the same as saying that we have the power of constituting
two or more distinct egos in one body, WHICH IS MANIFESTLY ABSURD."
One sees the absurdity of maintaining that we can make one frog into
two frogs by cutting a frog into two pieces, but there is no
absurdity in believing that the two pieces have minor centres of
sensation and intelligence within themselves, which, when the animal
is entire, act in much concert with the brain, and with each other,
that it is not easy to detect their originally autonomous character,
but which, when deprived of their power of acting in concert, are
thrown back upon earlier habit, now too long forgotten to be capable
of permanent resumption.

Illustrations are apt to mislead, nevertheless they may perhaps be
sometimes tolerated.  Suppose, for example, that London to the
extent, say, of a circle with a six-mile radius from Charing Cross,
were utterly annihilated in the space of five minutes during the
Session of Parliament.  Suppose, also, that two entirely impassable
barriers, say of five miles in width, half a mile high, and red hot,
were thrown across England; one from Gloucester to Harwich, and
another from Liverpool to Hull, and at the same time the sea were to
become a mass of molten lava, so no water communication should be
possible; the political, mercantile, social, and intellectual life of
the country would be convulsed in a manner which it is hardly
possible to realise.  Hundreds of thousands would die through the
dislocation of existing arrangements.  Nevertheless, each of the
three parts into which England was divided would show signs of
provincial life for which it would find certain imperfect organisms
ready to hand.  Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester,
accustomed though they are to act in subordination to London, would
probably take up the reins of government in their several sections;
they would make their town councils into local governments, appoint
judges from the ablest of their magistrates, organise relief
committees, and endeavour as well as they could to remove any acetic
acid that might be now poured on Wiltshire, Warwickshire, or
Northumberland, but no concert between the three divisions of the
country would be any longer possible.  Should we be justified, under
these circumstances, in calling any of the three parts of England,
England?  Or, again, when we observed the provincial action to be as
nearly like that of the original undivided nation as circumstances
would allow, should we be justified in saying that the action, such
as it was, was not political?  And, lastly, should we for a moment
think that an admission that the provincial action was of a bona fide
political character would involve the supposition that England,
undivided, had more than one "ego" as England, no matter how many
subordinate "egos" might go to the making of it, each one of which
proved, on emergency, to be capable of a feeble autonomy?

M. Ribot would seem to take a juster view of the phenomenon when he
says (p. 222 of the English translation) -

"We can hardly say that here the movements are co-ordinated like
those of a machine; the acts of the animal are adapted to a special
end; we find in them the characters of intelligence and will, a
knowledge and choice of means, since they are as variable as the
cause which provokes them.

"If these, then, and similar acts, were such that both the
impressions which produced them and the acts themselves were
perceived by the animal, would they not be called psychological?  Is
there not in them all that constitutes an intelligent act--adaptation
of means to ends; not a general and vague adaptation, but a
determinate adaptation to a determinate end?  In the reflex action we
find all that constitutes in some sort the very groundwork of an
intelligent act--that is to say, the same series of stages, in the
same order, with the same relations between them.  We have thus, in
the reflex act, all that constitutes the psychological act except
consciousness.  The reflex act, which is physiological, differs in
nothing from the psychological act, save only in this--that it is
without consciousness."

The only remark which suggests itself upon this, is that we have no
right to say that the part of the animal which moves does not also
perceive its own act of motion, as much as it has perceived the
impression which has caused it to move.  It is plain "the animal"
cannot do so, for the animal cannot be said to be any longer in
existence.  Half a frog is not a frog; nevertheless, if the hind legs
are capable, as M. Ribot appears to admit, of "perceiving the
impression" which produces their action, and if in that action there
is (and there would certainly appear to be so) "all that constitutes
an intelligent act, . . . a determinate adaptation to a determinate
end," one fails to see on what ground they should be supposed to be
incapable of perceiving their own action, in which case the action of
the hind legs becomes distinctly psychological.

Secondly, M. Ribot appears to forget that it is the tendency of all
psychological action to become unconscious on being frequently
repeated, and that no line can be drawn between psychological acts
and those reflex acts which he calls physiological.  All we can say
is, that there are acts which we do without knowing that we do them;
but the analogy of many habits which we have been able to watch in
their passage from laborious consciousness to perfect
unconsciousness, would suggest that all action is really
psychological, only that the soul's action becomes invisible to
ourselves after it has been repeated sufficiently often--that there
is, in fact, a law as simple as in the case of optics or gravitation,
whereby conscious perception of any action shall vary inversely as
the square, say, of its being repeated.

It is easy to understand the advantage to the individual of this
power of doing things rightly without thinking about them; for were
there no such power, the attention would be incapable of following
the multitude of matters which would be continually arresting it;
those animals which had developed a power of working automatically,
and without a recurrence to first principles when they had once
mastered any particular process, would, in the common course of
events, stand a better chance of continuing their species, and thus
of transmitting their new power to their descendants.

M. Ribot declines to pursue the subject further, and has only
cursorily alluded to it.  He writes, however, that, on the "obscure
problem" of the difference between reflex and psychological actions,
some say, "when there can be no consciousness, because the brain is
wanting, there is, in spite of appearances, only mechanism," whilst
others maintain, that "when there is selection, reflection, psychical
action, there must also be consciousness in spite of appearances."  A
little later (p. 223), he says, "It is quite possible that if a
headless animal could live a sufficient length of time" (that is to
say, if THE HIND LEGS OF AN ANIMAL could live a sufficient length of
time without the brain), "there would be found in it" (THEM) "a
consciousness like that of the lower species, which would consist
merely in the faculty of apprehending the external world."  (Why
merely?  It is more than apprehending the outside world to be able to
try to do a thing with one's left foot, when one finds that one
cannot do it with one's right.)  "It would not be correct to say that
the amphioxus, the only one among fishes and vertebrata which has a
spinal cord without a brain, has no consciousness because it has no
brain; and if it be admitted that the little ganglia of the
invertebrata can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for the
spinal cord."

We conclude, therefore, that it is within the common scope and
meaning of the words "personal identity," not only that one creature
can become many as the moth becomes manifold in her eggs, but that
each individual may be manifold in the sense of being compounded of a
vast number of subordinate individualities which have their separate
lives within him, with their hopes, and fears, and intrigues, being
born and dying within us, many generations, of them during our single
lifetime.

"An organic being," writes Mr. Darwin, "is a microcosm, a little
universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms,
inconceivably minute, and numerous as the stars in heaven."

As these myriads of smaller organisms are parts and processes of us,
so are we but parts and processes of life at large.



CHAPTER VIII--APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS--THE ASSIMILATION
OF OUTSIDE MATTER



Let us now return to the position which we left at the end of the
fourth chapter.  We had then concluded that the self-development of
each new life in succeeding generations--the various stages through
which it passes (as it would appear, at first sight, without rhyme or
reason)--the manner in which it prepares structures of the most
surpassing intricacy and delicacy, for which it has no use at the
time when it prepares them--and the many elaborate instincts which it
exhibits immediately on, and indeed before, birth--all point in the
direction of habit and memory, as the only causes which could produce
them.

Why should the embryo of any animal go through so many stages--
embryological allusions to forefathers of a widely different type?
And why, again, should the germs of the same kind of creature always
go through the same stages?  If the germ of any animal now living is,
in its simplest state, but part of the personal identity of one of
the original germs of all life whatsoever, and hence, if any now
living organism must be considered without quibble as being itself
millions of years old, and as imbued with an intense though
unconscious memory of all that it has done sufficiently often to have
made a permanent impression; if this be so, we can answer the above
questions perfectly well.  The creature goes through so many
intermediate stages between its earliest state as life at all, and
its latest development, for the simplest of all reasons, namely,
because this is the road by which it has always hitherto travelled to
its present differentiation; this is the road it knows, and into
every turn and up or down of which, it has been guided by the force
of circumstances and the balance of considerations.  These, acting in
such a manner for such and such a time, caused it to travel in such
and such fashion, which fashion having been once sufficiently
established, becomes a matter of trick or routine to which the
creature is still a slave, and in which it confirms itself by
repetition in each succeeding generation.

Thus I suppose, as almost every one else, so far as I can gather,
supposes, that we are descended from ancestors of widely different
characters to our own.  If we could see some of our forefathers a
million years back, we should find them unlike anything we could call
man; if we were to go back fifty million years, we should find them,
it may be, fishes pure and simple, breathing through gills, and
unable to exist for many minutes in air.

It is admitted on all hands that there is more or less analogy
between the embryological development of the individual, and the
various phases or conditions of life through which his forefathers
have passed.  I suppose, then, that the fish of fifty million years
back and the man of to-day are one single living being, in the same
sense, or very nearly so, as the octogenarian is one single living
being with the infant from which he has grown; and that the fish has
lived himself into manhood, not as we live out our little life,
living, and living, and living till we die, but living by pulsations,
so to speak; living so far, and after a certain time going into a new
body, and throwing off the old; making his body much as we make
anything that we want, and have often made already, that is to say,
as nearly as may be in the same way as he made it last time; also
that he is as unable as we ourselves are, to make what he wants
without going through the usual processes with which he is familiar,
even though there may be other better ways of doing the same thing,
which might not be far to seek, if the creature thought them better,
and had not got so accustomed to such and such a method, that he
would only be baffled and put out by any attempt to teach him
otherwise.

And this oneness of personality between ourselves and our supposed
fishlike ancestors of many millions of years ago, must hold also
between each individual one of us and the single pair of fishes from
which we are each (on the present momentary hypothesis) descended;
and it must also hold between such pair of fishes and all their
descendants besides man, it may be some of them birds, and others
fishes; all these descendants, whether human or otherwise, being but
the way in which the creature (which was a pair of fishes when we
first took it in hand though it was a hundred thousand other things
as well, and had been all manner of other things before any part of
it became fishlike) continues to exist--its manner, in fact, of
growing.  As the manner in which the human body grows is by the
continued birth and death, in our single lifetime, of many
generations of cells which we know nothing about, but say that we
have had only one hand or foot all our lives, when we have really had
many, one after another; so this huge compound creature, LIFE,
probably thinks itself but one single animal whose component cells,
as it may imagine, grow, and it may be waste and repair, but do not
die.

It may be that the cells of which we are built up, and which we have
already seen must be considered as separate persons, each one of them
with a life and memory of its own--it may be that these cells reckon
time in a manner inconceivable by us, so that no word can convey any
idea of it whatever.  What may to them appear a long and painful
process may to us be so instantaneous as to escape us altogether, we
wanting some microscope to show us the details of time.  If, in like
manner, we were to allow our imagination to conceive the existence of
a being as much in need of a microscope for our time and affairs as
we for those of our own component cells, the years would be to such a
being but as the winkings or the twinklings of an eye.  Would he
think, then, that all the ants and flies of one wink were different
from those of the next? or would he not rather believe that they were
always the same flies, and, again, always the same men and women, if
he could see them at all, and if the whole human race did not appear
to him as a sort of spreading and lichen-like growth over the earth,
not differentiated at all into individuals?  With the help of a
microscope and the intelligent exercise of his reason, he would in
time conceive the truth.  He would put Covent Garden Market on the
field of his microscope, and would perhaps write a great deal of
nonsense about the unerring "instinct" which taught each costermonger
to recognise his own basket or his own donkey-cart; and this, mutatis
mutandis, is what we are getting to do as regards our own bodies.
What I wish is, to make the same sort of step in an upward direction
which has already been taken in a downward one, and to show reason
for thinking that we are only component atoms of a single compound
creature, LIFE, which has probably a distinct conception of its own
personality though none whatever of ours, more than we of our own
units.  I wish also to show reason for thinking that this creature,
LIFE, has only come to be what it is, by the same sort of process as
that by which any human art or manufacture is developed, i.e.,
through constantly doing the same thing over and over again,
beginning from something which is barely recognisable as faith, or as
the desire to know, or do, or live at all, and as to the origin of
which we are in utter darkness,--and growing till it is first
conscious of effort, then conscious of power, then powerful with but
little consciousness, and finally, so powerful and so charged with
memory as to be absolutely without all self-consciousness whatever,
except as regards its latest phases in each of its many
differentiations, or when placed in such new circumstances as compel
it to choose between death and a reconsideration of its position.

No conjecture can be hazarded as to how the smallest particle of
matter became so imbued with faith that it must be considered as the
beginning of LIFE, or as to what such faith is, except that it is the
very essence of all things, and that it has no foundation.

In this way, then, I conceive we can fairly transfer the experience
of the race to the individual, without any other meaning to our words
than what they would naturally suggest; that is to say, that there is
in every impregnate ovum a bona fide memory, which carries it back
not only to the time when it was last an impregnate ovum, but to that
earlier date when it was the very beginning of life at all, which
same creature it still is, whether as man or ovum, and hence imbued,
so far as time and circumstance allow, with all its memories.  Surely
this is no strained hypothesis; for the mere fact that the germ, from
the earliest moment that we are able to detect it, appears to be so
perfectly familiar with its business, acts with so little hesitation
and so little introspection or reference to principles, this alone
should incline us to suspect that it must be armed with that which,
so far as we observe in daily life, can alone ensure such a result--
to wit, long practice, and the memory of many similar performances.

The difficulty is, that we are conscious of no such memory in our own
persons, and beyond the one great proof of memory given by the actual
repetition of the performance--and of some of the latest deviations
from the ordinary performance (and this proof ought in itself, one
would have thought, to outweigh any save the directest evidence to
the contrary) we can detect no symptom of any such mental operation
as recollection on the part of the embryo.  On the other hand, we
have seen that we know most intensely those things that we are least
conscious of knowing; we will most intensely what we are least
conscious of willing; we feel continually without knowing that we
feel, and our attention is hourly arrested without our attention
being arrested by the arresting of our attention.  Memory is no less
capable of unconscious exercise, and on becoming intense through
frequent repetition, vanishes no less completely as a conscious
action of the mind than knowledge and volition.  We must all be aware
of instances in which it is plain we must have remembered, without
being in the smallest degree conscious of remembering.  Is it then
absurd to suppose that our past existences have been repeated on such
a vast number of occasions that the germ, linked on to all preceding
germs, and, by once having become part of their identity, imbued with
all their memories, remembers too intensely to be conscious of
remembering, and works on with the same kind of unconsciousness with
which we play, or walk, or read, until something unfamiliar happens
to us? and is it not singularly in accordance with this view that
consciousness should begin with that part of the creature's
performance with which it is least familiar, as having repeated it
least often--that is to say, in our own case, with the commencement
of our human life--at birth, or thereabouts?

It is certainly noteworthy that the embryo is never at a loss, unless
something happens to it which has not usually happened to its
forefathers, and which in the nature of things it cannot remember.

When events are happening to it which have ordinarily happened to its
forefathers, and which it would therefore remember, if it was
possessed of the kind of memory which we are here attributing to it,
IT ACTS PRECISELY AS IT WOULD ACT IF IT WERE POSSESSED OF SUCH
MEMORY.

When, on the other hand, events are happening to it which, if it has
the kind of memory we are attributing to it, would baffle that
memory, or which have rarely or never been included in the category
of its recollections, IT ACTS PRECISELY AS A CREATURE ACTS WHEN ITS
RECOLLECTION IS DISTURBED, OR WHEN IT IS REQUIRED TO DO SOMETHING
WHICH IT HAS NEVER DONE BEFORE.

We cannot remember having been in the embryonic stage, but we do not
on that account deny that we ever were in such a stage at all.  On a
little reflection it will appear no more reasonable to maintain that,
when we were in the embryonic stage, we did not remember our past
existences, than to say that we never were embryos at all.  We cannot
remember what we did or did not recollect in that state; we cannot
now remember having grown the eyes which we undoubtedly did grow,
much less can we remember whether or not we then remembered having
grown them before; but it is probable that our memory was then, in
respect of our previous existences as embryos, as much more intense
than it is now in respect of our childhood, as our power of acquiring
a new language was greater when we were one or two years old, than
when we were twenty.  And why should this power of acquiring
languages be greater at two years than at twenty, but that for many
generations we have learnt to speak at about this age, and hence look
to learn to do so again on reaching it, just as we looked to making
eyes, when the time came at which we were accustomed to make them.

If we once had the memory of having been infants (which we had from
day to day during infancy), and have lost it, we may well have had
other and more intense memories which we have lost no less
completely.  Indeed, there is nothing more extraordinary in the
supposition that the impregnate ovum has an intense sense of its
continuity with, and therefore of its identity with, the two
impregnate ova from which it has sprung, than in the fact that we
have no sense of our continuity with ourselves as infants.  If then,
there is no a priori objection to this view, and if the impregnate
ovum acts in such a manner as to carry the strongest conviction that
it must have already on many occasions done what it is doing now, and
that it has a vivid though unconscious recollection of what all, and
more especially its nearer, ancestral ova did under similar
circumstances, there would seem to be little doubt what conclusion we
ought to come to.

A hen's egg, for example, as soon as the hen begins to sit, sets to
work immediately to do as nearly as may be what the two eggs from
which its father and mother were hatched did when hens began to sit
upon them.  The inference would seem almost irresistible,--that the
second egg remembers the course pursued by the eggs from which it has
sprung, and of whose present identity it is unquestionably a part-
phase; it also seems irresistibly forced upon us to believe that the
intensity of this memory is the secret of its easy action.

It has, I believe, been often remarked, that a hen is only an egg's
way of making another egg.  Every creature must be allowed to "run"
its own development in its own way; the egg's way may seem a very
roundabout manner of doing things; but it IS its way, and it is one
of which man, upon the whole, has no great reason to complain.  Why
the fowl should be considered more alive than the egg, and why it
should be said that the hen lays the egg, and not that the egg lays
the hen, these are questions which lie beyond the power of
philosophic explanation, but are perhaps most answerable by
considering the conceit of man, and his habit, persisted in during
many ages, of ignoring all that does not remind him of himself, or
hurt him, or profit him; also by considering the use of language,
which, if it is to serve at all, can only do so by ignoring a vast
number of facts which gradually drop out of mind from being out of
sight.  But, perhaps, after all, the real reason is, that the egg
does not cackle when it has laid the hen, and that it works towards
the hen with gradual and noiseless steps, which we can watch if we be
so minded; whereas, we can less easily watch the steps which lead
from the hen to the egg, but hear a noise, and see an egg where there
was no egg.  Therefore, we say, the development of the fowl from the
egg bears no sort of resemblance to that of the egg from the fowl,
whereas, in truth, a hen, or any other living creature, is only the
primordial cell's way of going back upon itself.

But to return.  We see an egg, A, which evidently knows its own
meaning perfectly well, and we know that a twelvemonth ago there were
two other such eggs, B and C, which have now disappeared, but from
which we know A to have been so continuously developed as to be part
of the present form of their identity.  A's meaning is seen to be
precisely the same as B and C's meaning; A's personal appearance is,
to all intents and purposes, B and C's personal appearance; it would
seem, then, unreasonable to deny that A is only B and C come back,
with such modification as they may have incurred since their
disappearance; and that, in spite of any such modification, they
remember in A perfectly well what they did as B and C.

We have considered the question of personal identity so as to see
whether, without abuse of terms, we can claim it as existing between
any two generations of living agents (and if between two, then
between any number up to infinity), and we found that we were not
only at liberty to claim this, but that we are compelled irresistibly
to do so, unless, that is to say, we would think very differently
concerning personal identity than we do at present.  We found it
impossible to hold the ordinary common sense opinions concerning
personal identity, without admitting that we are personally identical
with all our forefathers, who have successfully assimilated outside
matter to themselves, and by assimilation imbued it with all their
own memories; we being nothing else than this outside matter so
assimilated and imbued with such memories.  This, at least, will, I
believe, balance the account correctly.

A few remarks upon the assimilation of outside matter by living
organisms may perhaps be hazarded here.

As long as any living organism can maintain itself in a position to
which it has been accustomed, more or less nearly, both in its own
life and in those of its forefathers, nothing can harm it.  As long
as the organism is familiar with the position, and remembers its
antecedents, nothing can assimilate it.  It must be first dislodged
from the position with which it is familiar, as being able to
remember it, before mischief can happen to it.  Nothing can
assimilate living organism.

On the other hand, the moment living organism loses sight of its own
position and antecedents, it is liable to immediate assimilation, and
to be thus familiarised with the position and antecedents of some
other creature.  If any living organism be kept for but a very short
time in a position wholly different from what it has been accustomed
to in its own life, and in the lives of its forefathers, it commonly
loses its memories completely, once and for ever; but it must
immediately acquire new ones, for nothing can know nothing;
everything must remember either its own antecedents, or some one
else's.  And as nothing can know nothing, so nothing can believe in
nothing.

A grain of corn, for example, has never been accustomed to find
itself in a hen's stomach--neither it nor its forefathers.  For a
grain so placed leaves no offspring, and hence cannot transmit its
experience.  The first minute or so after being eaten, it may think
it has just been sown, and begin to prepare for sprouting, but in a
few seconds, it discovers the environment to be unfamiliar; it
therefore gets frightened, loses its head, is carried into the
gizzard, and comminuted among the gizzard stones.  The hen succeeded
in putting it into a position with which it was unfamiliar; from this
it was an easy stage to assimilating it entirely.  Once assimilated,
the grain ceases to remember any more as a grain, but becomes
initiated into all that happens to, and has happened to, fowls for
countless ages.  Then it will attack all other grains whenever it
sees them; there is no such persecutor of grain, as another grain
when it has once fairly identified itself with a hen.

We may remark in passing, that if anything be once familiarised with
anything, it is content.  The only things we really care for in life
are familiar things; let us have the means of doing what we have been
accustomed to do, of dressing as we have been accustomed to dress, of
eating as we have been accustomed to eat, and let us have no less
liberty than we are accustomed to have, and last, but not least, let
us not be disturbed in thinking as we have been accustomed to think,
and the vast majority of mankind will be very fairly contented--all
plants and animals will certainly be so.  This would seem to suggest
a possible doctrine of a future state; concerning which we may
reflect that though, after we die, we cease to be familiar with
ourselves, we shall nevertheless become immediately familiar with
many other histories compared with which our present life must then
seem intolerably uninteresting.

This is the reason why a very heavy and sudden shock to the nervous
system does not pain, but kills outright at once; while one with
which the system can, at any rate, try to familiarise itself is
exceedingly painful.  We cannot bear unfamiliarity.  The part that is
treated in a manner with which it is not familiar cries immediately
to the brain--its central government--for help, and makes itself
generally as troublesome as it can, till it is in some way comforted.
Indeed, the law against cruelty to animals is but an example of the
hatred we feel on seeing even dumb creatures put into positions with
which they are not familiar.  We hate this so much for ourselves,
that we will not tolerate it for other creatures if we can possibly
avoid it.  So again, it is said, that when Andromeda and Perseus had
travelled but a little way from the rock where Andromeda had so long
been chained, she began upbraiding him with the loss of her dragon,
who, on the whole, she said, had been very good to her.  The only
things we really hate are unfamiliar things, and though nature would
not be nature if she did not cross our love of the familiar with a
love also of the unfamiliar, yet there can be no doubt which of the
two principles is master.

Let us return, however, to the grain of corn.  If the grain had had
presence of mind to avoid being carried into the gizzard stones, as
many seeds do which are carried for hundreds of miles in birds'
stomachs, and if it had persuaded itself that the novelty of the
position was not greater than it could very well manage to put up
with--if, in fact, it had not known when it was beaten--it might have
stuck in the hen's stomach and begun to grow; in this case it would
have assimilated a good part of the hen before many days were over;
for hens are not familiar with grains that grow in their stomachs,
and unless the one in question was as strongminded for a hen, as the
grain that could avoid being assimilated would be for a grain, the
hen would soon cease to take an interest in her antecedents.  It is
to be doubted, however, whether a grain has ever been grown which has
had strength of mind enough to avoid being set off its balance on
finding itself inside a hen's gizzard.  For living organism is the
creature of habit and routine, and the inside of a gizzard is not in
the grain's programme.

Suppose, then, that the grain, instead of being carried into the
gizzard, had stuck in the hen's throat and choked her.  It would now
find itself in a position very like what it had often been in before.
That is to say, it would be in a damp, dark, quiet place, not too far
from light, and with decaying matter around it.  It would therefore
know perfectly well what to do, and would begin to grow until
disturbed, and again put into a position with which it might, very
possibly, be unfamiliar.

The great question between vast masses of living organism is simply
this:  "Am I to put you into a position with which your forefathers
have been unfamiliar, or are you to put me into one about which my
own have been in like manner ignorant?"  Man is only the dominant
animal on the earth, because he can, as a general rule, settle this
question in his own favour.

The only manner in which an organism, which has once forgotten its
antecedents, can ever recover its memory, is by being assimilated by
a creature of its own kind; one, moreover, which knows its business,
or is not in such a false position as to be compelled to be aware of
being so.  It was, doubtless, owing to the recognition of this fact,
that some Eastern nations, as we are told by Herodotus, were in the
habit of eating their deceased parents--for matter which has once
been assimilated by any identity or personality, becomes for all
practical purposes part of the assimilating personality.

The bearing of the above will become obvious when we return, as we
will now do, to the question of personal identity.  The only
difficulty would seem to lie in our unfamiliarity with the real
meanings which we attach to words in daily use.  Hence, while
recognising continuity without sudden break as the underlying
principle of identity, we forget that this involves personal identity
between all the beings who are in one chain of descent, the numbers
of such beings, whether in succession, or contemporaneous, going for
nothing at all.  Thus we take two eggs, one male and one female, and
hatch them; after some months the pair of fowls so hatched, having
succeeded in putting a vast quantity of grain and worms into false
positions, become full-grown, breed, and produce a dozen new eggs.

Two live fowls and a dozen eggs are the present phase of the
personality of the two original eggs.  They are also part of the
present phase of the personality of all the worms and grain which the
fowls have assimilated from their leaving the eggshell; but the
personalities of these last do not count; they have lost their grain
and worm memories, and are instinct with the memorises of the whole
ancestry of the creature which has assimilated them.

We cannot, perhaps, strictly say that the two fowls and the dozen new
eggs actually ARE the two original eggs; these two eggs are no longer
in existence, and we see the two birds themselves which were hatched
from them.  A bird cannot be called an egg without an abuse of terms.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful how far we should not say this, for it
is only with a mental reserve--and with no greater mental reserve--
that we predicate absolute identity concerning any living being for
two consecutive moments; and it is certainly as free from quibble to
say to two fowls and a dozen eggs, "you are the two eggs I had on my
kitchen shelf twelve months ago," as to say to a man, "you are the
child whom I remember thirty years ago in your mother's arms."  In
either case we mean, "you have been continually putting other
organisms into a false position, and then assimilating them, ever
since I last saw you, while nothing has yet occurred to put YOU into
such a false position as to have made you lose the memory of your
antecedents."

It would seem perfectly fair, therefore, to say to any egg of the
twelve, or to the two fowls and the whole twelve eggs together, "you
were a couple of eggs twelve months ago; twelve months before that
you were four eggs;" and so on, ad infinitum, the number neither of
the ancestors nor of the descendants counting for anything, and
continuity being the sole thing looked to.  From daily observation we
are familiar with the fact that identity does both unite with other
identities, so that a single new identity is the result, and does
also split itself up into several identities, so that the one becomes
many.  This is plain from the manner in which the male and female
sexual elements unite to form a single ovum, which we observe to be
instinct with the memories of both the individuals from which it has
been derived; and there is the additional consideration, that each of
the elements whose fusion goes to make up the impregnate ovum, is
held by some to be itself composed of a fused mass of germs, which
stand very much in the same relation to the spermatozoon and ovum, as
the living cellular units of which we are composed do to ourselves--
that is to say, are living independent organisms, which probably have
no conception of the existence of the spermatozoon nor of the ovum,
more than the spermatozoon or ovum have of theirs.

This, at least, is what I gather from Mr. Darwin's provisional theory
of Pangenesis; and, again, from one of the concluding sentences in
his "Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation," where, asking the
question why two sexes have been developed, he replies that the
answer seems to lie "in the great good which is derived from the
fusion of two somewhat differentiated individuals.  With the
exception," he continues, "or the lowest organisms this is possible
only by means of the sexual elements--THESE CONSISTING OF CELLS
SEPARATED FROM THE BODY" (i.e., separated from the bodies of each
parent) "CONTAINING THE GERMS OF EVERY PART" (i.e., consisting of the
seeds or germs from which each individual cell of the coming organism
will be developed--these seeds or germs having been shed by each
individual cell of the parent forms), "AND CAPABLE OF BEING FUSED
COMPLETELY TOGETHER" (i.e., so at least I gather, capable of being
fused completely, in the same way as the cells of our own bodies are
fused, and thus, of forming a single living personality in the case
of both the male and female element; which elements are themselves
capable of a second fusion so as to form the impregnate ovum).  This
single impregnate ovum, then, is a single identity that has taken the
place of and come up in the room of two distinct personalities, each
of whose characteristics it, to a certain extent, partakes, and which
consist, each one of them, of the fused germs of a vast mass of other
personalities.

As regards the dispersion of one identity into many, this also is a
matter of daily observation in the case of all female creatures that
are with egg or young; the identity of the young with the female
parent is in many respects so complete, as to need no enforcing, in
spite of the entrance into the offspring of all the elements derived
from the male parent, and of the gradual separation of the two
identities, which becomes more and more complete, till in time it is
hard to conceive that they can ever have been united.

Numbers, therefore, go for nothing; and, as far as identity or
continued personality goes, it is as fair to say to the two fowls,
above referred to, "you were four fowls twelve months ago," as it is
to say to a dozen eggs, "you were two eggs twelve months ago."  But
here a difficulty meets us; for if we say, "you were two eggs twelve
months ago," it follows that we mean, "you are now those two eggs;"
just as when we say to a person, "you were such and such a boy twenty
years ago," we mean, "you are now that boy, or all that represents
him;" it would seem, then, that in like manner we should say to the
two fowls, "you ARE the four fowls who between them laid the two eggs
from which you sprung."  But it may be that all these four fowls are
still to be seen running about; we should be therefore saying, "you
two fowls are really not yourselves only, but you are also the other
four fowls into the bargain;" and this might be philosophically true,
and might, perhaps, be considered so, but for the convenience of the
law courts.

The difficulty would seem to arise from the fact that the eggs must
disappear before fowls can be hatched from them, whereas, the hens so
hatched may outlive the development of other hens, from the eggs
which they in due course have laid.  The original eggs being out of
sight are out of mind, and it is without an effort that we acquiesce
in the assertion,--that the dozen new eggs actually are the two
original ones.  But the original four fowls being still in sight,
cannot be ignored, we only, therefore, see the new ones as growths
from the original ones.

The strict rendering of the facts should be, "you are part of the
present phase of the identity of such and such a past identity,"
i.e., either of the two eggs or the four fowls, as the case may be;
this will put the eggs and the fowls, as it were, into the same box,
and will meet both the philosophical and legal requirement of the
case, only it is a little long.

So far then, as regards actual identity of personality; which, we
find, will allow us to say, that eggs are part of the present phase
of a certain past identity, whether of other eggs, or of fowls, or
chickens, and in like, manner that chickens are part of the present
phase of certain other chickens, or eggs, or fowls; in fact, that
anything is part of the present phase of any past identity in the
line of its ancestry.  But as regards the actual memory of such
identity (unconscious memory, but still clearly memory), we observe
that the egg, as long as it is an egg, appears to have a very
distinct recollection of having been an egg before, and the fowl of
having been a fowl before, but that neither egg nor fowl appear to
have any recollection of any other stage of their past existences,
than the one corresponding to that in which they are themselves at
the moment existing.

So we, at six or seven years old, have no recollection of ever having
been infants, much less of having been embryos; but the manner in
which we shed our teeth and make new ones, and the way in which we
grow generally, making ourselves for the most part exceedingly like
what we made ourselves, in the person of some one of our nearer
ancestors, and not unfrequently repeating the very blunders which we
made upon that occasion when we come to a corresponding age, proves
most incontestably that we remember our past existences, though too
utterly to be capable of introspection in the matter.  So, when we
grow wisdom teeth, at the age it may be of one or two and twenty, it
is plain we remember our past existences at that age, however
completely we may have forgotten the earlier stages of our present
existence.  It may be said that it is the jaw which remembers, and
not we, but it seems hard to deny the jaw a right of citizenship in
our personality; and in the case of a growing boy, every part of him
seems to remember equally well, and if every part of him combined
does not make HIM, there would seem but little use in continuing the
argument further.

In like manner, a caterpillar appears not to remember having been an
egg, either in its present or any past existence.  It has no concern
with eggs as soon as it is hatched, but it clearly remembers not only
having been a caterpillar before, but also having turned itself into
a chrysalis before; for when the time comes for it to do this, it is
at no loss, as it would certainly be if the position was unfamiliar,
but it immediately begins doing what it did when last it was in a
like case, repeating the process as nearly as the environment will
allow, taking every step in the same order as last time, and doing
its work with that ease and perfection which we observe to belong to
the force of habit, and to be utterly incompatible with any other
supposition than that of long long practice.

Once having become a chrysalis, its memory of its caterpillarhood
appears to leave it for good and all, not to return until it again
assumes the shape of a caterpillar by process of descent.  Its memory
now overleaps all past modifications, and reverts to the time when it
was last what it is now, and though it is probable that both
caterpillar and chrysalis, on any given day of their existence in
either of these forms, have some sort of dim power of recollecting
what happened to them yesterday, or the day before; yet it is plain
their main memory goes back to the corresponding day of their last
existence in their present form, the chrysalis remembering what
happened to it on such a day far more practically, though less
consciously, than what happened to it yesterday; and naturally, for
yesterday is but once, and its past existences have been legion.
Hence, it prepares its wings in due time, doing each day what it did
on the corresponding day of its last chrysalishood and at length
becoming a moth; whereon its circumstances are so changed that it
loses all sense of its identity as a chrysalis (as completely as we,
for precisely the same reason, lose all sense of our identity with
ourselves as infants), and remembers nothing but its past existences
as a moth.

We observe this to hold throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
In any one phase of the existence of the lower animals, we observe
that they remember the corresponding stage, and a little on either
side of it, of all their past existences for a very great length of
time.  In their present existence they remember a little behind the
present moment (remembering more and more the higher they advance in
the scale of life), and being able to foresee about as much as they
could foresee in their past existences, sometimes more and sometimes
less.  As with memory, so with prescience.  The higher they advance
in the scale of life the more prescient they are.  It must, of
course, be remembered, and will later on be more fully dwelt upon,
that no offspring can remember anything which happens to its parents
after it and its parents have parted company; and this is why there
is, perhaps, more irregularity as regards our wisdom-teeth than about
anything else that we grow; inasmuch as it must not uncommonly have
happened in a long series of generations, that the offspring has been
born before the parents have grown their wisdom-teeth, and thus there
will be faults in the memory.

Is there, then, anything in memory, as we observe it in ourselves and
others, under circumstances in which we shall agree in calling it
memory pure and simple without ambiguity of terms--is there anything
in memory which bars us from supposing it capable of overleaping a
long time of abeyance, and thus of enabling each impregnate ovum, or
each grain, to remember what it did when last in a like condition,
and to go on remembering the corresponding period of its prior
developments throughout the whole period of its present growth,
though such memory has entirely failed as regards the interim between
any two corresponding periods, and is not consciously recognised by
the individual as being exercised at all?



CHAPTER IX--ON THE ABEYANCE OF MEMORY



Let us assume, for the moment, that the action of each impregnate
germ is due to memory, which, as it were, pulsates anew in each
succeeding generation, so that immediately on impregnation, the
germ's memory reverts to the last occasion on which it was in a like
condition, and recognising the position, is at no loss what to do.
It is plain that in all cases where there are two parents, that is to
say, in the greater number of cases, whether in the vegetable or
animal kingdoms, there must be two such last occasions, each of which
will have an equal claim upon the attention of the new germ.  Its
memory would therefore revert to both, and though it would probably
adhere more closely to the course which it took either as its father
or its mother, and thus come out eventually male or female, yet it
would be not a little influenced by the less potent memory.

And not only this, but each of the germs to which the memory of the
new germ reverts, is itself imbued with the memories of its own
parent germs, and these again with the memories of preceding
generations, and so on ad infinitum; so that, ex hypothesi, the germ
must become instinct with all these memories, epitomised as after
long time, and unperceived though they may well be, not to say
obliterated in part or entirely so far as many features are
concerned, by more recent impressions.  In this case, we must
conceive of the impregnate germ as of a creature which has to repeat
a performance already repeated before on countless different
occasions, but with no more variation on the more recent ones than is
inevitable in the repetition of any performance by an intelligent
being.

Now if we take the most parallel case to this which we can find, and
consider what we should ourselves do under such circumstances, that
is to say, if we consider what course is actually taken by beings who
are influenced by what we all call memory, when they repeat an
already often-repeated performance, and if we find a very strong
analogy between the course so taken by ourselves, and that which from
whatever cause we observe to be taken by a living germ, we shall
surely be much inclined to think that there must be a similarity in
the causes of action in each case; and hence, to conclude, that the
action of the germ is due to memory.

It will, therefore, be necessary to consider the general tendency of
our minds in regard to impressions made upon us, and the memory of
such impressions.

Deep impressions upon the memory are made in two ways, differing
rather in degree than kind, but with two somewhat widely different
results.  They are made:-

I.  By unfamiliar objects, or combinations, which come at
comparatively long intervals, and produce their effect, as it were,
by one hard blow.  The effect of these will vary with the
unfamiliarity of the impressions themselves, and the manner in which
they seem likely to lead to a further development of the unfamiliar,
i.e., with the question, whether they seem likely to compel us to
change our habits, either for better or worse.

Thus, if an object or incident be very unfamiliar, as, we will say, a
whale or an iceberg to one travelling to America for the first time,
it will make a deep impression, though but little affecting our
interests; but if we struck against the iceberg and were shipwrecked,
or nearly so, it would produce a much deeper impression, we should
think much more about icebergs, and remember much more about them,
than if we had merely seen one.  So, also, if we were able to catch
the whale and sell its oil, we should have a deep impression made
upon us.  In either case we see that the amount of unfamiliarity,
either present or prospective, is the main determinant of the depth
of the impression.

As with consciousness and volition, so with sudden unfamiliarity.  It
impresses us more and more deeply the more unfamiliar it is, until it
reaches such a point of impressiveness as to make no further
impression at all; on which we then and there die.  For death only
kills through unfamiliarity--that is to say, because the new
position, whatever it is, is so wide a cross as compared with the old
one, that we cannot fuse the two so as to understand the combination;
hence we lose all recognition of, and faith in, ourselves and our
surroundings.

But however much we imagine we remember concerning the details of any
remarkable impression which has been made us by a single blow, we do
not remember as much or nearly as much as we think we do.  The
subordinate details soon drop out of mind.  Those who think they
remember even such a momentous matter as the battle of Waterloo
recall now probably but half-a-dozen episodes, a gleam here, and a
gleam there, so that what they call remembering the battle of
Waterloo, is, in fact, little more than a kind of dreaming--so soon
vanishes the memory of any unrepeated occurrence.

As for smaller impressions, there is very little of what happens to
us in each week that will be in our memories a week hence; a man of
eighty remembers few of the unrepeated incidents of his life beyond
those of the last fortnight, a little here, and a little there,
forming a matter of perhaps six weeks or two months in all, if
everything that he can call to mind were acted over again with no
greater fulness than he can remember it.  As for incidents that have
been often repeated, his mind strikes a balance of its past
reminiscences, remembering the two or three last performances, and a
general method of procedure, but nothing more.

If, then, the recollection of all that is not very novel, or very
often repeated, so soon fades from our own minds, during what we
consider as our single lifetime, what wonder that the details of our
daily experience should find no place in that brief epitome of them
which is all we can give in so small a volume as offspring?

If we cannot ourselves remember the hundred-thousandth part of what
happened to us during our own childhood, how can we expect our
offspring to remember more than what, through frequent repetition,
they can now remember as a residuum, or general impression.  On the
other hand, whatever we remember in consequence of but a single
impression, we remember consciously.  We can at will recall details,
and are perfectly well aware, when we do so, that we are
recollecting.  A man who has never seen death looks for the first
time upon the dead face of some near relative or friend.  He gazes
for a few short minutes, but the impression thus made does not soon
pass out of his mind.  He remembers the room, the hour of the day or
night, and if by day, what sort of a day.  He remembers in what part
of the room, and how disposed the body of the deceased was lying.
Twenty years afterwards he can, at will, recall all these matters to
his mind, and picture to himself the scene as he originally witnessed
it.

The reason is plain; the impression was very unfamiliar, and affected
the beholder, both as regards the loss of one who was dear to him,
and as reminding him with more than common force that he will one day
die himself.  Moreover the impression was a simple one, not involving
much subordinate detail; we have in this case, therefore, an example
of the most lasting kind of impression that can be made by a single
unrepeated event.  But if we examine ourselves closely, we shall find
that after a lapse of years we do not remember as much as we think we
do, even in such a case as this; and that beyond the incidents above
mentioned, and the expression upon the face of the dead person, we
remember little of what we can so consciously and vividly recall.

II.  Deep impressions are also made by the repetition, more or less
often, of a feeble impression which, if unrepeated, would have soon
passed out of our minds.  We observe, therefore, that we remember
best what we have done least often--any unfamiliar deviation, that is
to say, from our ordinary method of procedure--and what we have done
most often, with which, therefore, we are most familiar; our memory
being mainly affected by the force of novelty and the force of
routine--the most unfamiliar, and the most familiar, incidents or
objects.

But we remember impressions which have been made upon us by force of
routine, in a very different way to that in which we remember a
single deep impression.  As regards this second class, which
comprises far the most numerous and important of the impressions with
which our memory is stored, it is often only by the fact of our
performance itself that we are able to recognise or show to others
that we remember at all.  We often do not remember how, or when, or
where we acquired our knowledge.  All we remember is, that we did
learn, and that at one time and another we have done this or that
very often.

As regards this second class of impressions we may observe:-

1.  That as a general rule we remember only the individual features
of the last few repetitions of the act--if, indeed, we remember this
much.  The influence of preceding ones is to be found only in the
general average of the procedure, which is modified by them, but
unconsciously to ourselves.  Take, for example, some celebrated
singer, or pianoforte player, who has sung the same air, or performed
the same sonata several hundreds or, it may be, thousands of times:
of the details of individual performances, he can probably call to
mind none but those of the last few days, yet there can be no
question that his present performance is affected by, and modified
by, all his previous ones; the care he has bestowed on these being
the secret of his present proficiency.

In each performance (the performer being supposed in the same state
of mental and bodily health), the tendency will be to repeat the
immediately preceding performances more nearly than remoter ones.  It
is the common tendency of living beings to go on doing what they have
been doing most recently.  The last habit is the strongest.  Hence,
if he took great pains last time, he will play better now, and will
take a like degree of pains, and play better still next time, and so
go on improving while life and vigour last.  If, on the other hand,
he took less pains last time, he will play worse now, and be inclined
to take little pains next time, and so gradually deteriorate.  This,
at least, is the common everyday experience of mankind.

So with painters, actors, and professional men of every description;
after a little while the memory of many past performances strikes a
sort of fused balance in the mind, which results in a general method
of procedure with but little conscious memory of even the latest
performances, and with none whatever of by far the greater number of
the remoter ones.

Still, it is noteworthy, that the memory of some even of these will
occasionally assert itself, so far as we can see, arbitrarily, the
reason why this or that occasion should still haunt us, when others
like them are forgotten, depending on some cause too subtle for our
powers of observation.

Even with such a simple matter as our daily dressing and undressing,
we may remember some few details of our yesterday's toilet, but we
retain nothing but a general and fused recollection of the many
thousand earlier occasions on which we have dressed, or gone to bed.
Men invariably put the same leg first into their trousers--this is
the survival of memory in a residuum; but they cannot, till they
actually put on a pair of trousers, remember which leg they DO put in
first; this is the rapid fading away of any small individual
impression.

The seasons may serve as another illustration; we have a general
recollection of the kind of weather which is seasonable for any month
in a year; what flowers are due about what time, and whether the
spring is on the whole backward or early; but we cannot remember the
weather on any particular day a year ago, unless some unusual
incident has impressed it upon our memory.  We can remember, as a
general rule, what kind of season it was, upon the whole, a year ago,
or perhaps, even two years; but more than this, we rarely remember,
except in such cases as the winter of 1854-1855, or the summer of
1868; the rest is all merged.

We observe, then, that as regards small and often repeated
impressions, our tendency is to remember best, and in most detail,
what we have been doing most recently, and what in general has
occurred most recently, but that the earlier impressions though
forgotten individually, are nevertheless, not wholly lost.

2.  When we have done anything very often, and have got into the
habit of doing it, we generally take the various steps in the same
order; in many cases this seems to be a sine qua non for our
repetition of the action at all.  Thus, there is probably no living
man who could repeat the words of "God save the Queen" backwards,
without much hesitation and many mistakes; so the musician and the
singer must perform their pieces in the order of the notes as
written, or at any rate as they ordinarily perform them; they cannot
transpose bars or read them backwards, without being put out, nor
would the audience recognise the impressions they have been
accustomed to, unless these impressions are made in the accustomed
order.

3.  If, when we have once got well into the habit of doing anything
in a certain way, some one shows us some other way of doing it, or
some way which would in part modify our procedure, or if in our
endeavours to improve, we have hit upon some new idea which seems
likely to help us, and thus we vary our course, on the next occasion
we remember this idea by reason of its novelty, but if we try to
repeat it, we often find the residuum of our old memories pulling us
so strongly into our old groove, that we have the greatest difficulty
in repeating our performance in the new manner; there is a clashing
of memories, a conflict, which if the idea is very new, and involves,
so to speak, too sudden a cross--too wide a departure from our
ordinary course--will sometimes render the performance monstrous, or
baffle us altogether, the new memory failing to fuse harmoniously
with the old.  If the idea is not too widely different from our older
ones, we can cross them with it, but with more or less difficulty, as
a general rule in proportion to the amount of variation.  The whole
process of understanding a thing consists in this, and, so far as I
can see at present, in this only.

Sometimes we repeat the new performance for a few times, in a way
which shows that the fusion of memories is still in force; and then
insensibly revert to the old, in which case the memory of the new
soon fades away, leaving a residuum too feeble to contend against
that of our many earlier memories of the same kind.  If, however, the
new way is obviously to our advantage, we make an effort to retain
it, and gradually getting into the habit of using it, come to
remember it by force of routine, as we originally remembered it by
force of novelty.  Even as regards our own discoveries, we do not
always succeed in remembering our most improved and most striking
performances, so as to be able to repeat them at will immediately:
in any such performance we may have gone some way beyond our ordinary
powers, owing to some unconscious action of the mind.  The supreme
effort has exhausted us, and we must rest on our oars a little,
before we make further progress; or we may even fall back a little,
before we make another leap in advance.

In this respect, almost every conceivable degree of variation is
observable, according to differences of character and circumstances.
Sometimes the new impression has to be made upon us many times from
without, before the earlier strain of action is eliminated; in this
case, there will long remain a tendency to revert to the earlier
habit.  Sometimes, after the impression has been once made, we repeat
our old way two or three times, and then revert to the new, which
gradually ousts the old; sometimes, on the other hand, a single
impression, though involving considerable departure from our routine,
makes its mark so deeply that we adopt the new at once, though not
without difficulty, and repeat it in our next performance, and
henceforward in all others; but those who vary their performance thus
readily will show a tendency to vary subsequent performances
according as they receive fresh ideas from others, or reason them out
independently.  They are men of genius.

This holds good concerning all actions which we do habitually,
whether they involve laborious acquirement or not.  Thus, if we have
varied our usual dinner in some way that leaves a favourable
impression upon our minds, so that our dinner may, in the language of
the horticulturist, be said to have "sported," our tendency will be
to revert to this particular dinner either next day, or as soon as
circumstances will allow, but it is possible that several hundred
dinners may elapse before we can do so successfully, or before our
memory reverts to this particular dinner.

4.  As regards our habitual actions, however unconsciously we
remember them, we, nevertheless, remember them with far greater
intensity than many individual impressions or actions, it may be of
much greater moment, that have happened to us more recently.  Thus,
many a man who has familiarised himself, for example, with the odes
of Horace, so as to have had them at his fingers' ends as the result
of many repetitions, will be able years hence to repeat a given ode,
though unable to remember any circumstance in connection with his
having learnt it, and no less unable to remember when he repeated it
last.  A host of individual circumstances, many of them not
unimportant, will have dropped out of his mind, along with a mass of
literature read but once or twice, and not impressed upon the memory
by several repetitions; but he returns to the well-known ode with so
little effort, that he would not know that he was remembering unless
his reason told him so.  The ode seems more like something born with
him.

We observe, also, that people who have become imbecile, or whose
memory is much impaired, yet frequently retain their power of
recalling impression which have been long ago repeatedly made upon
them.

In such cases, people are sometimes seen to forget what happened last
week, yesterday, or an hour ago, without even the smallest power of
recovering their recollection; but the oft repeated earlier
impression remains, though there may be no memory whatever of how it
came to be impressed so deeply.  The phenomena of memory, therefore,
are exactly like those of consciousness and volition, in so far as
that the consciousness of recollection vanishes, when the power of
recollection has become intense.  When we are aware that we are
recollecting, and are trying, perhaps hard, to recollect, it is a
sign that we do not recollect utterly.  When we remember utterly and
intensely, there is no conscious effort of recollection; our
recollection can only be recognised by ourselves and others, through
our performance itself, which testifies to the existence of a memory,
that we could not otherwise follow or detect.

5.  When circumstances have led us to change our habits of life--as
when the university has succeeded school, or professional life the
university--we get into many fresh ways, and leave many old ones.
But on revisiting the old scene, unless the lapse of time has been
inordinately great, we experience a desire to revert to old habits.
We say that old associations crowd upon us.  Let a Trinity man, after
thirty years absence from Cambridge, pace for five minutes in the
cloister of Neville's Court, and listen to the echo of his footfall,
as it licks up against the end of the cloister, or let an old Johnian
stand wherever he likes in the third Court of St. John's, in either
case he will find the thirty years drop out of his life, as if they
were half-an-hour; his life will have rolled back upon itself, to the
date when he was an undergraduate, and his instinct will be to do
almost mechanically, whatever it would have come most natural to him
to do, when he was last there at the same season of the year, and the
same hour of the day; and it is plain this is due to similarity of
environment, for if the place he revisits be much changed, there will
be little or no association.

So those who are accustomed at intervals to cross the Atlantic, get
into certain habits on board ship, different to their usual ones.  It
may be that at home they never play whist; on board ship they do
nothing else all the evening.  At home they never touch spirits; on
the voyage they regularly take a glass of something before they go to
bed.  They do not smoke at home; here they are smoking all day.  Once
the voyage is at an end, they return without an effort to their usual
habits, and do not feel any wish for cards, spirits, or tobacco.
They do not remember yesterday, when they did want all these things;
at least, not with such force as to be influenced by it in their
desires and actions; their true memory--the memory which makes them
want, and do, reverts to the last occasion on which they were in
circumstances like their present; they therefore want now what they
wanted then, and nothing more; but when the time comes for them to go
on shipboard again, no sooner do they smell the smell of the ship,
than their real memory reverts to the times when they were last at
sea, and striking a balance of their recollections, they smoke, play
cards, and drink whisky and water.

We observe it then as a matter of the commonest daily occurrence
within our own experience, that memory does fade completely away, and
recur with the recurrence of surroundings like those which made any
particular impression in the first instance.  We observe that there
is hardly any limit to the completeness and the length of time during
which our memory may remain in abeyance.  A smell may remind an old
man of eighty of some incident of his childhood, forgotten for nearly
as many years as he has lived.  In other words, we observe that when
an impression has been repeatedly made in a certain sequence on any
living organism--that impression not having been prejudicial to the
creature itself--the organism will have a tendency, on reassuming the
shape and conditions in which it was when the impression was last
made, to remember the impression, and therefore to do again now what
it did then; all intermediate memories dropping clean out of mind, so
far as they have any effect upon action.

6.  Finally, we should note the suddenness and apparent caprice with
which memory will assert itself at odd times; we have been saying or
doing this or that, when suddenly a memory of something which
happened to us, perhaps in infancy, comes into our head; nor can we
in the least connect this recollection with the subject of which we
have just been thinking, though doubtless there has been a
connection, too rapid and subtle for our apprehension.

The foregoing phenomena of memory, so far as we can judge, would
appear to be present themselves throughout the animal and vegetable
kingdoms.  This will be readily admitted as regards animals; as
regards plants it may be inferred from the fact that they generally
go on doing what they have been doing most lately, though accustomed
to make certain changes at certain points in their existence.  When
the time comes for these changes, they appear to know it, and either
bud forth into leaf or shed their leaves, as the case may be.  If we
keep a bulb in a paper bag it seems to remember having been a bulb
before, until the time comes for it to put forth roots and grow.
Then, if we supply it with earth and moisture, it seems to know where
it is, and to go on doing now whatever it did when it was last
planted; but if we keep it in the bag too long, it knows that it
ought, according to its last experience, to be treated differently,
and shows plain symptoms of uneasiness; it is distracted by the bag,
which makes it remember its bulbhood, and also by the want of earth
and water, without which associations its memory of its previous
growth cannot be duly kindled.  Its roots, therefore, which are most
accustomed to earth and water, do not grow; but its leaves, which do
not require contact with these things to jog their memory, make a
more decided effort at development--a fact which would seem to go
strongly in favour of the functional independence of the parts of all
but the very simplest living organisms, if, indeed, more evidence
were wanted in support of this.



CHAPTER X--WHAT WE SHOULD EXPECT TO FIND IF DIFFERENTIATIONS OF
STRUCTURE AND INSTINCT ARE MAINLY DUE TO MEMORY



To repeat briefly;--we remember best our last few performances of any
given kind, and our present performance is most likely to resemble
one or other of these; we only remember our earlier performances by
way of residuum; nevertheless, at times, some older feature is liable
to reappear.

We take our steps in the same order on each successive occasion, and
are for the most part incapable of changing that order.

The introduction of slightly new elements into our manner is attended
with benefit; the new can be fused with the old, and the monotony of
our action is relieved.  But if the new element is too foreign, we
cannot fuse the old and new--nature seeming equally to hate too wide
a deviation from our ordinary practice, and no deviation at all.  Or,
in plain English--if any one gives us a new idea which is not too far
ahead of us, such an idea is often of great service to us, and may
give new life to our work--in fact, we soon go back, unless we more
or less frequently come into contact with new ideas, and are capable
of understanding and making use of them; if; on the other hand, they
are too new, and too little led up to, so that we find them too
strange and hard to be able to understand them and adopt them, then
they put us out, with every degree of completeness--from simply
causing us to fail in this or that particular part, to rendering us
incapable of even trying to do our work at all, from pure despair of
succeeding.

It requires many repetitions to fix an impression firmly; but when it
is fixed, we cease to have much recollection of the manner in which
it came to be so, or of any single and particular recurrence.

Our memory is mainly called into action by force of association and
similarity in the surroundings.  We want to go on doing what we did
when we were last as we are now, and we forget what we did in the
meantime.

These rules, however, are liable to many exceptions; as for example,
that a single and apparently not very extraordinary occurrence may
sometimes produce a lasting impression, and be liable to return with
sudden force at some distant time, and then to go on returning to us
at intervals.  Some incidents, in fact, we know not how nor why,
dwell with us much longer than others which were apparently quite as
noteworthy or perhaps more so.

Now I submit that if the above observations are just, and if, also,
the offspring, after having become a new and separate personality,
yet retains so much of the old identity of which it was once
indisputably part, that it remembers what it did when it was part of
that identity as soon as it finds itself in circumstances which are
calculated to refresh its memory owing to their similarity to certain
antecedent ones, then we should expect to find:-

I.  That offspring should, as a general rule, resemble its own most
immediate progenitors; that is to say, that it should remember best
what it has been doing most recently.  The memory being a fusion of
its recollections of what it did, both when it was its father and
also when it was its mother, the offspring should have a very common
tendency to resemble both parents, the one in some respects, and the
other in others; but it might also hardly less commonly show a more
marked recollection of the one history than of the other, thus more
distinctly resembling one parent than the other.  And this is what we
observe to be the case.  Not only so far as that the offspring is
almost invariably either male or female, and generally resembles
rather the one parent than the other, but also that in spite of such
preponderance of one set of recollections, the sexual characters and
instincts of the OPPOSITE sex appear, whether in male or female,
though undeveloped and incapable of development except by abnormal
treatment, such as has occasionally caused milk to be developed in
the mammary glands of males; or by mutilation, or failure of sexual
instinct through age, upon which, male characteristics frequently
appear in the females of any species.

Brothers and sisters, each giving their own version of the same
story, though in different words, should resemble each other more
closely than more distant relations.  This too we see.

But it should frequently happen that offspring should resemble its
penultimate rather than its latest phase, and should thus be more
like a grand-parent than a parent; for we observe that we very often
repeat a performance in a manner resembling that of some earlier, but
still recent, repetition; rather than on the precise lines of our
very last performance.  First-cousins may in this case resemble each
other more closely than brothers and sisters.

More especially, we should not expect very successful men to be
fathers of particularly gifted children; for the best men are, as it
were, the happy thoughts and successes of the race--nature's
"flukes," so to speak, in her onward progress.  No creature can
repeat at will, and immediately, its highest flight.  It needs
repose.  The generations are the essays of any given race towards the
highest ideal which it is as yet able to see ahead of itself, and
this, in the nature of things, cannot be very far; so that we should
expect to see success followed by more or less failure, and failure
by success--a very successful creature being a GREAT "fluke."  And
this is what we find.

In its earlier stages the embryo should be simply conscious of a
general method of procedure on the part of its forefathers, and
should, by reason of long practice, compress tedious and complicated
histories into a very narrow compass, remembering no single
performance in particular.  For we observe this in nature, both as
regards the sleight-of-hand which practice gives to those who are
thoroughly familiar with their business, and also as regards the
fusion of remoter memories into a general residuum.

II.  We should expect to find that the offspring, whether in its
embryonic condition, or in any stage of development till it has
reached maturity, should adopt nearly the same order in going through
all its various stages.  There should be such slight variations as
are inseparable from the repetition of any performance by a living
being (as contrasted with a machine), but no more.  And this is what
actually happens.  A man may cut his wisdom-teeth a little later than
he gets his beard and whiskers, or a little earlier; but on the
whole, he adheres to his usual order, and is completely set off his
balance, and upset in his performance, if that order be interfered
with suddenly.  It is, however, likely that gradual modifications of
order have been made and then adhered to.

After any animal has reached the period at which it ordinarily begins
to continue its race, we should expect that it should show little
further power of development, or, at any rate, that few great changes
of structure or fresh features should appear; for we cannot suppose
offspring to remember anything that happens to the parent
subsequently to the parent's ceasing to contain the offspring within
itself; from the average age, therefore, of reproduction, offspring
would cease to have any further experience on which to fall back, and
would thus continue to make the best use of what it already knew,
till memory failing either in one part or another, the organism would
begin to decay.

To this cause must be referred the phenomena of old age, which
interesting subject I am unable to pursue within the limits of this
volume.

Those creatures who are longest in reaching maturity might be
expected also to be the longest lived; I am not certain, however, how
far what is called alternate generation militates against this view,
but I do not think it does so seriously.

Lateness of marriage, provided the constitution of the individuals
marrying is in no respect impaired, should also tend to longevity.

I believe that all the above will be found sufficiently well
supported by facts.  If so, when we feel that we are getting old we
should try and give our cells such treatment as they will find it
most easy to understand, through their experience of their own
individual life, which, however, can only guide them inferentially,
and to a very small extent; and throughout life we should remember
the important bearing which memory has upon health, and both
occasionally cross the memories of our component cells with slightly
new experiences, and be careful not to put them either suddenly or
for long together into conditions which they will not be able to
understand.  Nothing is so likely to make our cells forget
themselves, as neglect of one or other of these considerations.  They
will either fail to recognise themselves completely, in which case we
shall die; or they will go on strike, more or less seriously as the
case may be, or perhaps, rather, they will try and remember their
usual course, and fail; they will therefore try some other, and will
probably make a mess of it, as people generally do when they try to
do things which they do not understand, unless indeed they have very
exceptional capacity.

It also follows that when we are ill, our cells being in such or such
a state of mind, and inclined to hold a corresponding opinion with
more or less unreasoning violence, should not be puzzled more than
they are puzzled already, by being contradicted too suddenly; for
they will not be in a frame of mind which can understand the position
of an open opponent:  they should therefore either be let alone, if
possible, without notice other than dignified silence, till their
spleen is over, and till they have remembered themselves; or they
should be reasoned with as by one who agrees with them, and who is
anxious to see things as far as possible from their own point of
view.  And this is how experience teaches that we must deal with
monomaniacs, whom we simply infuriate by contradiction, but whose
delusion we can sometimes persuade to hang itself if we but give it
sufficient rope.  All which has its bearing upon politics, too, at
much sacrifice, it may be, of political principles, but a politician
who cannot see principles where principle-mongers fail to see them,
is a dangerous person.

I may say, in passing, that the reason why a small wound heals, and
leaves no scar, while a larger one leaves a mark which is more or
less permanent, may be looked for in the fact that when the wound is
only small, the damaged cells are snubbed, so to speak, by the vast
majority of the unhurt cells in their own neighbourhood.  When the
wound is more serious they can stick to it, and bear each other out
that they were hurt.

III.  We should expect to find a predominance of sexual over asexual
generation, in the arrangements of nature for continuing her various
species, inasmuch as two heads are better than one, and a locus
poenitentiae is thus given to the embryo--an opportunity of
correcting the experience of one parent by that of the other.  And
this is what the more intelligent embryos may be supposed to do; for
there would seem little reason to doubt that there are clever embryos
and stupid embryos, with better or worse memories, as the case may
be, of how they dealt with their protoplasm before, and better or
worse able to see how they can do better now; and that embryos differ
as widely in intellectual and moral capacity, and in a general sense
of the fitness of things, and of what will look well into the
bargain, as those larger embryos--to wit, children--do.  Indeed it
would seem probable that all our mental powers must go through a
quasi-embryological condition, much as the power of keeping, and
wisely spending, money must do so, and that all the qualities of
human thought and character are to be found in the embryo.

Those who have observed at what an early age differences of intellect
and temper show themselves in the young, for example, of cats and
dogs, will find it difficult to doubt that from the very moment of
impregnation, and onward, there has been a corresponding difference
in the embryo--and that of six unborn puppies, one, we will say, has
been throughout the whole process of development more sensible and
better looking--a nicer embryo, in fact--than the others.

IV.  We should expect to find that all species, whether of plants or
animals, are occasionally benefited by a cross; but we should also
expect that a cross should have a tendency to introduce a disturbing
element, if it be too wide, inasmuch as the offspring would be pulled
hither and thither by two conflicting memories or advices, much as
though a number of people speaking at once were without previous
warning to advise an unhappy performer to vary his ordinary
performance--one set of people telling him he has always hitherto
done thus, and the other saying no less loudly that he did it thus;--
and he were suddenly to become convinced that they each spoke the
truth.  In such a case he will either completely break down, if the
advice be too conflicting, or if it be less conflicting, he may yet
be so exhausted by the one supreme effort of fusing these experiences
that he will never be able to perform again; or if the conflict of
experience be not great enough to produce such a permanent effect as
this, it will yet, if it be at all serious, probably damage his
performances on their next several occasions, through his inability
to fuse the experiences into a harmonious whole, or, in other words,
to understand the ideas which are prescribed to him; for to fuse is
only to understand.

And this is absolutely what we find in fact.  Mr. Darwin writes
concerning hybrids and first crosses:- "The male element may reach
the female element, but be incapable of causing an embryo to be
developed, as seems to have been the case with some of Thuret's
experiments on Fuci.  No explanation can be given of these facts any
more than why certain trees cannot be grafted on others."

I submit that what I have written above supplies a very fair prima
facie explanation.

Mr. Darwin continues:-

"Lastly, an embryo may be developed, and then perish at an early
period.  This latter alternative has not been sufficiently attended
to; but I believe, from observations communicated to me by Mr.
Hewitt, who has had great experience in hybridising pheasants and
fowls, that the early death of the embryo is a very frequent cause of
sterility in first crosses.  Mr. Salter has recently given the
results of an examination of about five hundred eggs produced from
various crosses between three species of Gallus and their hybrids;
the majority of these eggs had been fertilised; and in the majority
of the fertilised eggs, the embryos had either been partially
developed, and had then perished, or had become nearly mature, but
the young chickens had been unable to break through the shell.  Of
the chickens which were born more than four-fifths died within the
first few days, or at latest weeks, 'without any obvious cause,
apparently from mere inability to live,' so that from the five
hundred eggs only twelve chickens were reared" ("Origin of Species,"
249, ed. 1876).

No wonder the poor creatures died, distracted as they were by the
internal tumult of conflicting memories.  But they must have suffered
greatly; and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals may
perhaps think it worth while to keep an eye even on the embryos of
hybrids and first crosses.  Five hundred creatures puzzled to death
is not a pleasant subject for contemplation.  Ten or a dozen should,
I think, be sufficient for the future.

As regards plants, we read:-

"Hybridised embryos probably often perish in like manner . . . of
which fact Max Wichura has given some striking cases with hybrid
willows . . . It may be here worth noticing, that in some cases of
parthenogenesis, the embryos within the eggs of silk moths, which
have not been fertilised, pass through their early stages of
development, and then perish like the embryos produced by a cross
between distinct species" (Ibid).

This last fact would at first sight seem to make against me, but we
must consider that the presence of a double memory, provided it be
not too conflicting, would be a part of the experience of the silk
moth's egg, which might be then as fatally puzzled by the monotony of
a single memory as it would be by two memories which were not
sufficiently like each other.  So that failure here must be referred
to the utter absence of that little internal stimulant of slightly
conflicting memory which the creature has always hitherto
experienced, and without which it fails to recognise itself.  In
either case, then, whether with hybrids or in cases of
parthenogenesis, the early death of the embryo is due to inability to
recollect, owing to a fault in the chain of associated ideas.  All
the facts here given are an excellent illustration of the principle,
elsewhere insisted upon by Mr. Darwin, that ANY great and sudden
change of surroundings has a tendency to induce sterility; on which
head he writes ("Plants and Animals under Domestication," vol. ii. p.
143, ed. 1875):-

"It would appear that any change in the habits of life, whatever
their habits may be, if great enough, tends to affect in an
inexplicable manner the powers of reproduction."

And again on the next page:-

"Finally, we must conclude, limited though the conclusion is, that
changed conditions of life have an especial power of acting
injuriously on the reproductive system.  The whole case is quite
peculiar, for these organs, though not diseased, are thus rendered
incapable of performing their proper functions, or perform them
imperfectly."

One is inclined to doubt whether the blame may not rest with the
inability on the part of the creature reproduced to recognise the new
surroundings, and hence with its failing to know itself.  And this
seems to be in some measure supported--but not in such a manner as I
can hold to be quite satisfactory--by the continuation of the passage
in the "Origin of Species," from which I have just been quoting--for
Mr. Darwin goes on to say:-

"Hybrids, however, are differently circumstanced before and after
birth.  When born, and living in a country where their parents live,
they are generally placed under suitable conditions of life.  But a
hybrid partakes of only half of the nature and condition of its
mother; it may therefore before birth, as long as it is nourished
within its mother's womb, or within the egg or seed produced by its
mother, be exposed to conditions in some degree unsuitable, and
consequently be liable to perish at an early period . . . "  After
which, however, the conclusion arrived at is, that, "after all, the
cause more probably lies in some imperfection in the original act of
impregnation, causing the embryo to be imperfectly developed rather
than in the conditions to which it is subsequently exposed."  A
conclusion which I am not prepared to accept.

Returning to my second alternative, that is to say, to the case of
hybrids which are born well developed and healthy, but nevertheless
perfectly sterile, it is less obvious why, having succeeded in
understanding the conflicting memories of their parents, they should
fail to produce offspring; but I do not think the reader will feel
surprised that this should be the case.  The following anecdote, true
or false, may not be out of place here:-

"Plutarch tells us of a magpie, belonging to a barber at Rome, which
could imitate to a nicety almost every word it heard.  Some trumpets
happened one day to be sounded before the shop, and for a day or two
afterwards the magpie was quite mute, and seemed pensive and
melancholy.  All who knew it were greatly surprised at its silence;
and it was supposed that the sound of the trumpets had so stunned it
as to deprive it at once of both voice and hearing.  It soon
appeared, however, that this was far from being the case; for, says
Plutarch, the bird had been all the time occupied in profound
meditation, studying how to imitate the sound of the trumpets; and
when at last master of it, the magpie, to the astonishment of all its
friends, suddenly broke its long silence by a perfect imitation of
the flourish of trumpets it had heard, observing with the greatest
exactness all the repetitions, stops, and changes.  THE ACQUISITION
OF THIS LESSON HAD, HOWEVER, EXHAUSTED THE WHOLE OF THE MAGPIE'S
STOCK OF INTELLECT, FOR IT MADE IT FORGET EVERYTHING IT HAD LEARNED
BEFORE" ("Percy Anecdotes," Instinct, p. 166).

Or, perhaps, more seriously, the memory of every impregnate ovum from
which every ancestor of a mule, for example, has sprung, has reverted
to a very long period of time during which its forefathers have been
creatures like that which it is itself now going to become:  thus,
the impregnate ovum from which the mule's father was developed
remembered nothing but horse memories; but it felt its faith in these
supported by the recollection of a VAST NUMBER of previous
generations, in which it was, to all intents and purposes, what it
now is.  In like manner, the impregnate ovum from which the mule's
mother was developed would be backed by the assurance that it had
done what it is going to do now a hundred thousand times already.
All would thus be plain sailing.  A horse and a donkey would result.
These two are brought together; an impregnate ovum is produced which
finds an unusual conflict of memory between the two lines of its
ancestors, nevertheless, being accustomed to SOME conflict, it
manages to get over the difficulty, AS ON EITHER SIDE IT FINDS ITSELF
BACKED BY A VERY LONG SERIES OF SUFFICIENTLY STEADY MEMORY.  A mule
results--a creature so distinctly different from either horse or
donkey, that reproduction is baffled, owing to the creature's having
nothing but its own knowledge of itself to fall back upon, behind
which there comes an immediate dislocation, or fault of memory, which
is sufficient to bar identity, and hence reproduction, by rendering
too severe an appeal to reason necessary--for no creature can
reproduce itself on the shallow foundation which reason can alone
give.  Ordinarily, therefore, the hybrid, or the spermatozoon or
ovum, which it may throw off (as the case may be), finds one single
experience too small to give it the necessary faith, on the strength
of which even to try to reproduce itself.  In other cases the hybrid
itself has failed to be developed; in others the hybrid, or first
cross, is almost fertile; in others it is fertile, but produces
depraved issue.  The result will vary with the capacities of the
creatures crossed, and the amount of conflict between their several
experiences.

The above view would remove all difficulties out of the way of
evolution, in so far as the sterility of hybrids is concerned.  For
it would thus appear that this sterility has nothing to do with any
supposed immutable or fixed limits of species, but results simply
from the same principle which prevents old friends, no matter how
intimate in youth, from returning to their old intimacy after a lapse
of years, during which they have been subjected to widely different
influences, inasmuch as they will each have contracted new habits,
and have got into new ways, which they do not like now to alter.

We should expect that our domesticated plants and animals should vary
most, inasmuch as these have been subjected to changed conditions
which would disturb the memory, and, breaking the chain of
recollection, through failure of some one or other of the associated
ideas, would thus directly and most markedly affect the reproductive
system.  Every reader of Mr. Darwin will know that this is what
actually happens, and also that when once a plant or animal begins to
vary, it will probably vary a good deal further; which, again, is
what we should expect--the disturbance of the memory introducing a
fresh factor of disturbance, which has to be dealt with by the
offspring as it best may.  Mr. Darwin writes:  "All our domesticated
productions, with the rarest exceptions, vary far more than natural
species" ("Plants and Animals," &c., vol ii. p. 241, ed. 1875).

On my third supposition, i.e., when the difference between parents
has not been great enough to baffle reproduction on the part of the
first cross, but when the histories of the father and mother have
been, nevertheless, widely different--as in the case of Europeans and
Indians--we should expect to have a race of offspring who should seem
to be quite clear only about those points, on which their progenitors
on both sides were in accord before the manifold divergencies in
their experiences commenced; that is to say, the offspring should
show a tendency to revert to an early savage condition.

That this indeed occurs may be seen from Mr. Darwin's "Plants and
Animals under Domestication" (vol ii. p. 21, ed. 1875), where we find
that travellers in all parts of the world have frequently remarked
"ON THE DEGRADED STATE AND SAVAGE CONDITION OF CROSSED RACES OF MAN."
A few lines lower down Mr. Darwin tells us that he was himself
"struck with the fact that, in South America, men of complicated
descent between Negroes, Indians, and Spaniards seldom had, whatever
the cause might be, a good expression."  "Livingstone" (continues Mr.
Darwin) "remarks, 'It is unaccountable why half-castes are so much
more cruel than the Portuguese, but such is undoubtedly the case.'
An inhabitant remarked to Livingstone, 'God made white men, and God
made black men, but the devil made half-castes.'"  A little further
on Mr. Darwin says that we may "perhaps infer that the degraded state
of so many half-castes IS IN PART DUE TO REVERSION TO A PRIMITIVE AND
SAVAGE CONDITION, INDUCED BY THE ACT OF CROSSING, even if mainly due
to the unfavourable moral conditions under which they are generally
reared."  Why the crossing should produce this particular tendency
would seem to be intelligible enough, if the fashion and instincts of
offspring are, in any case, nothing but the memories of its past
existences; but it would hardly seem to be so upon any of the
theories now generally accepted; as, indeed, is very readily admitted
by Mr. Darwin himself, who even, as regards purely-bred animals and
plants, remarks that "we are quite unable to assign any proximate
cause" for their tendency to at times reassume long lost characters.

If the reader will follow for himself the remaining phenomena of
reversion, he will, I believe, find them all explicable on the theory
that they are due to memory of past experiences fused, and modified--
at times specifically and definitely--by changed conditions.  There
is, however, one apparently very important phenomenon which I do not
at this moment see how to connect with memory, namely, the tendency
on the part of offspring to revert to an earlier impregnation.  Mr.
Darwin's "Provisional Theory of Pangenesis" seemed to afford a
satisfactory explanation of this; but the connection with memory was
not immediately apparent.  I think it likely, however, that this
difficulty will vanish on further consideration, so I will not do
more than call attention to it here.

The instincts of certain neuter insects hardly bear upon reversion,
but will be dealt with at some length in Chapter XII.

V.  We should expect to find, as was insisted on in the preceding
section in reference to the sterility of hybrids, that it required
many, or at any rate several, generations of changed habits before a
sufficiently deep impression could be made upon the living being (who
must be regarded always as one person in his whole line of ascent or
descent) for it to be unconsciously remembered by him, when making
himself anew in any succeeding generation, and thus to make him
modify his method of procedure during his next embryological
development.  Nevertheless, we should expect to find that sometimes a
very deep single impression made upon a living organism, should be
remembered by it, even when it is next in an embryonic condition.

That this is so, we find from Mr. Darwin, who writes ("Plants and
Animals under Domestication," vol. ii. p. 57, ed. 1875)--"There is
ample evidence that the effect of mutilations and of accidents,
especially, or perhaps exclusively, when followed by disease" (which
would certainly intensify the impression made), "are occasionally
inherited.  There can be no doubt that the evil effects of the long
continued exposure of the parent to injurious conditions are
sometimes transmitted to the offspring."  As regards impressions of a
less striking character, it is so universally admitted that they are
not observed to be repeated in what is called the offspring, until
they have been confirmed in what is called the parent, for several
generations, but that after several generations, more or fewer as the
case may be, they often are transmitted--that it seems unnecessary to
say more upon the matter.  Perhaps, however, the following passage
from Mr. Darwin may be admitted as conclusive:-

"That they" (acquired actions) "are inherited, we see with horses in
certain transmitted paces, such as cantering and ambling, which are
not natural to them--in the pointing of young pointers, and the
setting of young setters--in the peculiar manner of flight of certain
breeds of the pigeon, &c.  We have analogous cases with mankind in
the inheritance of tricks or unusual gestures." . . . ("Expression of
the Emotions," p. 29).

In another place Mr. Darwin writes:-

"How again can we explain THE INHERITED EFFECTS of the use or disuse
of particular organs?  The domesticated duck flies less and walks
more than the wild duck, and its limb bones have become diminished
and increased in a corresponding manner in comparison with those of
the wild duck.  A horse is trained to certain paces, and the colt
inherits similar consensual movements.  The domesticated rabbit
becomes tame from close confinement; the dog intelligent from
associating with man; the retriever is taught to fetch and carry; and
these mental endowments and bodily powers are all inherited" ("Plants
and Animals," &c., vol. ii. p. 367, ed. 1875).

"Nothing," he continues, "in the whole circuit of physiology is more
wonderful.  How can the use or disuse of a particular limb, or of the
brain, affect a small aggregate of reproductive cells, seated in a
distant part of the body in such a manner that the being developed
from these cells inherits the character of one or both parents?  Even
an imperfect answer to this question would be satisfactory" ("Plants
and Animals," &c. vol. ii. p. 367, ed. 1875).

With such an imperfect answer will I attempt to satisfy the reader,
as to say that there appears to be that kind of continuity of
existence and sameness of personality, between parents and offspring,
which would lead us to expect that the impressions made upon the
parent should be epitomised in the offspring, when they have been or
have become important enough, through repetition in the history of
several so-called existences to have earned a place in that smaller
edition, which is issued from generation to generation; or, in other
words, when they have been made so deeply, either at one blow or
through many, that the offspring can remember them.  In practice we
observe this to be the case--so that the answer lies in the assertion
that offspring and parent, being in one sense but the same
individual, there is no great wonder that, in one sense, the first
should remember what had happened to the latter; and that too, much
in the same way as the individual remembers the events in the earlier
history of what he calls his own lifetime, but condensed, and pruned
of detail, and remembered as by one who has had a host of other
matters to attend to in the interim.

It is thus easy to understand why such a rite as circumcision, though
practised during many ages, should have produced little, if any,
modification tending to make circumcision unnecessary.  On the view
here supported such modification would be more surprising than not,
for unless the impression made upon the parent was of a grave
character--and probably unless also aggravated by subsequent
confusion of memories in the cells surrounding the part originally
impressed--the parent himself would not be sufficiently impressed to
prevent him from reproducing himself, as he had already done upon an
infinite number of past occasions.  The child, therefore, in the womb
would do what the father in the womb had done before him, nor should
any trace of memory concerning circumcision be expected till the
eighth day after birth, when, but for the fact that the impression in
this case is forgotten almost as soon as made, some slight
presentiment of coming discomfort might, after a large number of
generations, perhaps be looked for as a general rule.  It would not,
however, be surprising, that the effect of circumcision should be
occasionally inherited, and it would appear as though this was
sometimes actually the case.

The question should turn upon whether the disuse of an organ has
arisen:-

1.  From an internal desire on the part of the creature disusing it,
to be quit of an organ which it finds troublesome.

2.  From changed conditions and habits which render the organ no
longer necessary, or which lead the creature to lay greater stress on
certain other organs or modifications.

3.  From the wish of others outside itself; the effect produced in
this case being perhaps neither very good nor very bad for the
individual, and resulting in no grave impression upon the organism as
a whole.

4.  From a single deep impression on a parent, affecting both himself
as a whole, and gravely confusing the memories of the cells to be
reproduced, or his memories in respect of those cells--according as
one adopts Pangenesis and supposes a memory to "run" each gemmule, or
as one supposes one memory to "run" the whole impregnate ovum--a
compromise between these two views being nevertheless perhaps
possible, inasmuch as the combined memories of all the cells may
possibly BE the memory which "runs" the impregnate ovum, just as we
ARE ourselves the combination of all our cells, each one of which is
both autonomous, and also takes its share in the central government.
But within the limits of this volume it is absolutely impossible for
me to go into this question.

In the first case--under which some instances which belong more
strictly to the fourth would sometimes, but rarely, come--the organ
should soon go, and sooner or later leave no rudiment, though still
perhaps to be found crossing the life of the embryo, and then
disappearing.

In the second it should go more slowly, and leave, it may be, a
rudimentary structure.

In the third it should show little or no sign of natural decrease for
a very long time.

In the fourth there may be absolute and total sterility, or sterility
in regard to the particular organ, or a scar which shall show that
the memory of the wound and of each step in the process of healing
has been remembered; or there may be simply such disturbance in the
reproduced organ as shall show a confused recollection of injury.
There may be infinite gradations between the first and last of these
possibilities.

I think that the facts, as given by Mr. Darwin ("Plants and Animals,"
&c., vol i. pp. 466-472, ed. 1875), will bear out the above to the
satisfaction of the reader.  I can, however, only quote the following
passage:-

" . . . Brown Sequard has bred during thirty years many thousand
guinea-pigs, . . . nor has he ever seen a guinea-pig born without
toes which was not the offspring of parents WHICH HAD GNAWED OFF
THEIR OWN TOES, owing to the sciatic nerve having been divided.  Of
this fact thirteen instances were carefully recorded, and a greater
number were seen; yet Brown Sequard speaks of such cases as among the
rarer forms of inheritance.  It is a still more interesting fact--
'that the sciatic nerve in the congenitally toeless animal has
inherited the power of passing through ALL THE DIFFERENT MORBID
STATES which have occurred in one of its parents FROM THE TIME OF
DIVISION till after its reunion with the peripheric end.  It is not
therefore the power of simply performing an action which is
inherited, but the power of performing a whole series of actions in a
certain order.'"

I feel inclined to say it is not merely the original wound that is
remembered, but the whole process of cure which is now accordingly
repeated.  Brown Sequard concludes, as Mr. Darwin tells us, "that
what is transmitted is the morbid state of the nervous system," due
to the operation performed on the parents.

A little lower down Mr. Darwin writes that Professor Rolleston has
given him two cases--"namely, of two men, one of whom had his knee,
and the other his cheek, severely cut, and both had children born
with exactly the same spot marked or scarred."

VI.  When, however, an impression has once reached transmission
point--whether it be of the nature of a sudden striking thought,
which makes its mark deeply then and there, or whether it be the
result of smaller impressions repeated until the nail, so to speak,
has been driven home--we should expect that it should be remembered
by the offspring as something which he has done all his life, and
which he has therefore no longer any occasion to learn; he will act,
therefore, as people say, INSTINCTIVELY.  No matter how complex and
difficult the process, if the parents have done it sufficiently often
(that is to say, for a sufficient number of generations), the
offspring will remember the fact when association wakens the memory;
it will need no instruction, and--unless when it has been taught to
look for it during many generations--will expect none.  This may be
seen in the case of the humming-bird sphinx moth, which, as Mr.
Darwin writes, "shortly after its emergence from the cocoon, as shown
by the bloom on its unruffled scales, may be seen poised stationary
in the air with its long hair-like proboscis uncurled, and inserted
into the minute orifices of flowers; AND NO ONE I BELIEVE HAS EVER
SEEN this moth learning to perform its difficult task, which requires
such unerring aim" ("Expression of the Emotions," p. 30).

And, indeed, when we consider that after a time the most complex and
difficult actions come to be performed by man without the least
effort or consciousness--that offspring cannot be considered as
anything but a continuation of the parent life, whose past habits and
experiences it epitomises when they have been sufficiently often
repeated to produce a lasting impression--that consciousness of
memory vanishes on the memory's becoming intense, as completely as
the consciousness of complex and difficult movements vanishes as soon
as they have been sufficiently practised--and finally, that the real
presence of memory is testified rather by performance of the repeated
action on recurrence of like surroundings, than by consciousness of
recollecting on the part of the individual--so that not only should
there be no reasonable bar to our attributing the whole range of the
more complex instinctive actions, from first to last, to memory pure
and simple, no matter how marvellous they may be, but rather that
there is so much to compel us to do so, that we find it difficult to
conceive how any other view can have been ever taken--when, I say, we
consider all these facts, we should rather feel surprise that the
hawk and sparrow still teach their offspring to fly, than that the
humming-bird sphinx moth should need no teacher.

The phenomena, then, which we observe are exactly those which we
should expect to find.

VII.  We should also expect that the memory of animals, as regards
their earlier existences, was solely stimulated by association.  For
we find, from Prof. Bain, that "actions, sensations, and states of
feeling occurring together, or in close succession, tend to grow
together or cohere in such a way that when any one of them is
afterwards presented to the mind, the others are apt to be brought up
in idea" ("The Senses and the Intellect," 2d ed. 1864, p. 332).  And
Prof. Huxley says ("Elementary Lessons in Physiology," 5th ed. 1872,
p. 306), "It may be laid down as a rule that if any two mental states
be called up together, or in succession, with due frequency and
vividness, the subsequent production of the one of them will suffice
to call up the other, AND THAT WHETHER WE DESIRE IT OR NOT."  I would
go one step further, and would say not only whether we desire it or
not, but WHETHER WE ARE AWARE THAT THE IDEA HAS EVER BEFORE BEEN
CALLED UP IN OUR MINDS OR NOT.  I should say that I have quoted both
the above passages from Mr. Darwin's "Expression of the Emotions" (p.
30, ed. 1872).

We should, therefore, expect that when the offspring found itself in
the presence of objects which had called up such and such ideas for a
sufficient number of generations, that is to say, "with due frequency
and vividness"--it being of the same age as its parents were, and
generally in like case as when the ideas were called up in the minds
of the parents--the same ideas should also be called up in the minds
of the offspring "WHETHER THEY DESIRE IT OR NOT;" and, I would say
also, "whether they recognise the ideas as having ever before been
present to them or not."

I think we might also expect that no other force, save that of
association, should have power to kindle, so to speak, into the flame
of action the atomic spark of memory, which we can alone suppose to
be transmitted from one generation to another.

That both plants and animals do as we should expect of them in this
respect is plain, not only from the performance of the most intricate
and difficult actions--difficult both physically and intellectually--
at an age, and under circumstances which preclude all possibility of
what we call instruction, but from the fact that deviations from the
parental instinct, or rather the recurrence of a memory, unless in
connection with the accustomed train of associations, is of
comparatively rare occurrence; the result, commonly, of some one of
the many memories about which we know no more than we do of the
memory which enables a cat to find her way home after a hundred-mile
journey by train, and shut up in a hamper, or, perhaps even more
commonly, of abnormal treatment.

VIII.  If, then, memory depends on association, we should expect two
corresponding phenomena in the case of plants and animals--namely,
that they should show a tendency to resume feral habits on being
turned wild after several generations of domestication, and also that
peculiarities should tend to show themselves at a corresponding age
in the offspring and in the parents.  As regards the tendency to
resume feral habits, Mr. Darwin, though apparently of opinion that
the tendency to do this has been much exaggerated, yet does not doubt
that such a tendency exists, as shown by well authenticated
instances.  He writes:  "It has been repeatedly asserted in the most
positive manner by various authors that feral animals and plants
invariably return to their primitive specific type."

This shows, at any rate, that there is a considerable opinion to this
effect among observers generally.

He continues:  "It is curious on what little evidence this belief
rests.  Many of our domesticated animals could not subsist in a wild
state,"--so that there is no knowing whether they would or would not
revert.  "In several cases we do not know the aboriginal parent
species, and cannot tell whether or not there has been any close
degree of reversion."  So that here, too, there is at any rate no
evidence AGAINST the tendency; the conclusion, however, is that,
notwithstanding the deficiency of positive evidence to warrant the
general belief as to the force of the tendency, yet "the simple fact
of animals and plants becoming feral does cause some tendency to
revert to the primitive state," and he tells us that "when variously-
coloured tame rabbits are turned out in Europe, they generally re-
acquire the colouring of the wild animal;" there can be no doubt," he
says, "that this really does occur," though he seems inclined to
account for it by the fact that oddly-coloured and conspicuous
animals would suffer much from beasts of prey and from being easily
shot.  "The best known case of reversion:" he continues, "and that on
which the widely-spread belief in its universality apparently rests,
is that of pigs.  These animals have run wild in the West Indies,
South America, and the Falkland Islands, and have everywhere re-
acquired the dark colour, the thick bristles, and great tusks of the
wild boar; and the young have re-acquired longitudinal stripes."  And
on page 22 of "Plants and Animals under Domestication" (vol. ii. ed.
1875) we find that "the re-appearance of coloured, longitudinal
stripes on young feral pigs cannot be attributed to the direct action
of external conditions.  In this case, and in many others, we can
only say that any change in the habits of life apparently favours a
tendency, inherent or latent, in the species to return to the
primitive state."  On which one cannot but remark that though any
change may favour such tendency, yet the return to original habits
and surroundings appears to do so in a way so marked as not to be
readily referable to any other cause than that of association and
memory--the creature, in fact, having got into its old groove,
remembers it, and takes to all its old ways.

As regards the tendency to inherit changes (whether embryonic, or
during post-natal development as ordinarily observed in any species),
or peculiarities of habit or form which do not partake of the nature
of disease, it must be sufficient to refer the reader to Mr. Darwin's
remarks upon this subject ("Plants and Animals Under Domestication,"
vol. ii. pp. 51-57, ed. 1875).  The existence of the tendency is not
likely to be denied.  The instances given by Mr. Darwin are strictly
to the point as regards all ordinary developmental and metamorphic
changes, and even as regards transmitted acquired actions, and tricks
acquired before the time when the offspring has issued from the body
of the parent, or on an average of many generations does so; but it
cannot for a moment be supposed that the offspring knows by
inheritance anything about what happens to the parent subsequently to
the offspring's being born.  Hence the appearance of diseases in the
offspring, at comparatively late periods in life, but at the same age
as, or earlier, than in the parents, must be regarded as due to the
fact that in each case the machine having been made after the same
pattern (which IS due to memory), is liable to have the same weak
points, and to break down after a similar amount of wear and tear;
but after less wear and tear in the case of the offspring than in
that of the parent, because a diseased organism is commonly a
deteriorating organism, and if repeated at all closely, and without
repentance and amendment of life, will be repeated for the worse.  If
we do not improve, we grow worse.  This, at least, is what we observe
daily.

Nor again can we believe, as some have fancifully imagined, that the
remembrance of any occurrence of which the effect has been entirely,
or almost entirely mental, should be remembered by offspring with any
definiteness.  The intellect of the offspring might be affected, for
better or worse, by the general nature of the intellectual employment
of the parent; or a great shock to a parent might destroy or weaken
the intellect of the offspring; but unless a deep impression were
made upon the cells of the body, and deepened by subsequent disease,
we could not expect it to be remembered with any definiteness, or
precision.  We may talk as we will about mental pain, and mental
scars, but after all, the impressions they leave are incomparably
less durable than those made by an organic lesion.  It is probable,
therefore, that the feeling which so many have described, as though
they remembered this or that in some past existence, is purely
imaginary, and due rather to unconscious recognition of the fact that
we certainly have lived before, than to any actual occurrence
corresponding to the supposed recollection.

And lastly, we should look to find in the action of memory, as
between one generation and another, a reflection of the many
anomalies and exceptions to ordinary rules which we observe in
memory, so far as we can watch its action in what we call our own
single lives, and the single lives of others.  We should expect that
reversion should be frequently capricious--that is to say, give us
more trouble to account for than we are either able or willing to
take.  And assuredly we find it so in fact.  Mr. Darwin--from whom it
is impossible to quote too much or too fully, inasmuch as no one else
can furnish such a store of facts, so well arranged, and so above all
suspicion of either carelessness or want of candour--so that, however
we may differ from him, it is he himself who shows us how to do so,
and whose pupils we all are--Mr. Darwin writes:  "In every living
being we may rest assured that a host of long-lost characters lie
ready to be evolved under proper conditions" (does not one almost
long to substitute the word "memories" for the word "characters?")
"How can we make intelligible, and connect with other facts, this
wonderful and common capacity of reversion--this power of calling
back to life long-lost characters?"  ("Plants and Animals," &c., vol.
ii. p. 369, ed. 1875).  Surely the answer may be hazarded, that we
shall be able to do so when we can make intelligible the power of
calling back to life long-lost memories.  But I grant that this
answer holds out no immediate prospect of a clear understanding.

One word more.  Abundant facts are to be found which point
inevitably, as will appear more plainly in the following chapter, in
the direction of thinking that offspring inherits the memories of its
parents; but I know of no single fact which suggests that parents are
in the smallest degree affected (other than sympathetically) by the
memories of their offspring AFTER THAT OFFSPRING HAS BEEN BORN.
Whether the unborn offspring affects the memory of the mother in some
particulars, and whether we have here the explanation of occasional
reversion to a previous impregnation, is a matter on which I should
hardly like to express an opinion now.  Nor, again, can I find a
single fact which seems to indicate any memory of the parental life
on the part of offspring later than the average date of the
offspring's quitting the body of the parent.



CHAPTER XI--INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY



I have already alluded to M. Ribot's work on "Heredity," from which I
will now take the following passages.

M. Ribot writes:-

"Instinct is innate, i.e., ANTERIOR TO ALL INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE."
This I deny on grounds already abundantly apparent; but let it pass.
"Whereas intelligence is developed slowly by accumulated experience,
instinct is perfect from the first" ("Heredity," p. 14).

Obviously the memory of a habit or experience will not commonly be
transmitted to offspring in that perfection which is called
"instinct," till the habit or experience has been repeated in several
generations with more or less uniformity; for otherwise the
impression made will not be strong enough to endure through the busy
and difficult task of reproduction.  This of course involves that the
habit shall have attained, as it were equilibrium with the creature's
sense of its own needs, so that it shall have long seemed the best
course possible, leaving upon the whole and under ordinary
circumstances little further to be desired, and hence that it should
have been little varied during many generations.  We should expect
that it would be transmitted in a more or less partial, varying,
imperfect, and intelligent condition before equilibrium had been
attained; it would, however, continually tend towards equilibrium,
for reasons which will appear more fully later on.

When this stage has been reached, as regards any habit, the creature
will cease trying to improve; on which the repetition of the habit
will become stable, and hence become capable of more unerring
transmission--but at the same time improvement will cease; the habit
will become fixed, and be perhaps transmitted at an earlier and
earlier age, till it has reached that date of manifestation which
shall be found most agreeable to the other habits of the creature.
It will also be manifested, as a matter of course, without further
consciousness or reflection, for people cannot be always opening up
settled questions; if they thought a matter over yesterday they
cannot think it all over again to-day, but will adopt for better or
worse the conclusion then reached; and this, too, even in spite
sometimes of considerable misgiving, that if they were to think still
further they could find a still better course.  It is not, therefore,
to be expected that "instinct" should show signs of that hesitating
and tentative action which results from knowledge that is still so
imperfect as to be actively self-conscious; nor yet that it should
grow or vary, unless under such changed conditions as shall baffle
memory, and present the alternative of either invention--that is to
say, variation--or death.  But every instinct must have poised
through the laboriously intelligent stages through which human
civilisations AND MECHANICAL INVENTIONS are now passing; and he who
would study the origin of an instinct with its development, partial
transmission, further growth, further transmission, approach to more
unreflecting stability, and finally, its perfection as an unerring
and unerringly transmitted instinct, must look to laws, customs, AND
MACHINERY as his best instructors.  Customs and machines are
instincts AND ORGANS now in process of development; they will
assuredly one day reach the unconscious state of equilibrium which we
observe in the structures and instincts of bees and ants, and an
approach to which may be found among some savage nations.  We may
reflect, however, not without pleasure, that this condition--the true
millennium--is still distant.  Nevertheless the ants and bees seem
happy; perhaps more happy than when so many social questions were in
as hot discussion among them, as other, and not dissimilar ones, will
one day be amongst ourselves.

And this, as will be apparent, opens up the whole question of the
stability of species, which we cannot follow further here, than to
say, that according to the balance of testimony, many plants and
animals do appear to have reached a phase of being from which they
are hard to move--that is to say, they will die sooner than be at the
pains of altering their habits--true martyrs to their convictions.
Such races refuse to see changes in their surroundings as long as
they can, but when compelled to recognise them, they throw up the
game because they cannot and will not, or will not and cannot,
invent.  And this is perfectly intelligible, for a race is nothing
but a long-lived individual, and like any individual, or tribe of men
whom we have yet observed, will have its special capacities and its
special limitations, though, as in the case of the individual, so
also with the race, it is exceedingly hard to say what those
limitations are, and why, having been able to go so far, it should go
no further.  Every man and every race is capable of education up to a
certain point, but not to the extent of being made from a sow's ear
into a silk purse.  The proximate cause of the limitation seems to
lie in the absence of the wish to go further; the presence or absence
of the wish will depend upon the nature and surroundings of the
individual, which is simply a way of saying that one can get no
further, but that as the song (with a slight alteration) says:-


"Some breeds do, and some breeds don't,
Some breeds will, but this breed won't,
I tried very often to see if it would,
But it said it really couldn't, and I don't think it could."


It may perhaps be maintained, that with time and patience, one might
train a rather stupid plough-boy to understand the differential
calculus.  This might be done with the help of an inward desire on
the part of the boy to learn, but never otherwise.  If the boy wants
to learn or to improve generally, he will do so in spite of every
hindrance, till in time he becomes a very different being from what
he was originally.  If he does not want to learn, he will not do so
for any wish of another person.  If he feels that he has the power he
will wish; or if he wishes, he will begin to think he has the power,
and try to fulfil his wishes; one cannot say which comes first, for
the power and the desire go always hand in hand, or nearly so, and
the whole business is nothing but a most vicious circle from first to
last.  But it is plain that there is more to be said on behalf of
such circles than we have been in the habit of thinking.  Do what we
will, we must each one of us argue in a circle of our own, from
which, so long as we live at all, we can by no possibility escape.  I
am not sure whether the frank acceptation and recognition of this
fact is not the best corrective for dogmatism that we are likely to
find.

We can understand that a pigeon might in the course of ages grow to
be a peacock if there was a persistent desire on the part of the
pigeon through all these ages to do so.  We know very well that this
has not probably occurred in nature, inasmuch as no pigeon is at all
likely to wish to be very different from what it is now.  The idea of
being anything very different from what it now is, would be too wide
a cross with the pigeon's other ideas for it to entertain it
seriously.  If the pigeon had never seen a peacock, it would not be
able to conceive the idea, so as to be able to make towards it; if,
on the other hand, it had seen one, it would not probably either want
to become one, or think that it would be any use wanting seriously,
even though it were to feel a passing fancy to be so gorgeously
arrayed; it would therefore lack that faith without which no action,
and with which, every action, is possible.

That creatures have conceived the idea of making themselves like
other creatures or objects which it was to their advantage or
pleasure to resemble, will be believed by any one who turns to Mr.
Mivart's "Genesis of Species," where he will find (chapter ii.) an
account of some very showy South American butterflies, which give out
such a strong odour that nothing will eat them, and which are hence
mimicked both in appearance and flight by a very different kind of
butterfly; and, again, we see that certain birds, without any
particular desire of gain, no sooner hear any sound than they begin
to mimick it, merely for the pleasure of mimicking; so we all enjoy
to mimick, or to hear good mimicry, so also monkeys imitate the
actions which they observe, from pure force of sympathy.  To mimick,
or to wish to mimick, is doubtless often one of the first steps
towards varying in any given direction.  Not less, in all
probability, than a full twenty per cent. of all the courage and good
nature now existing in the world, derives its origin, at no very
distant date, from a desire to appear courageous and good-natured.
And this suggests a work whose title should be "On the Fine Arts as
bearing on the Reproductive System," of which the title must suffice
here.

Against faith, then, and desire, all the "natural selection" in the
world will not stop an amoeba from becoming an elephant, if a
reasonable time be granted; without the faith and the desire, neither
"natural selection" nor artificial breeding will be able to do much
in the way of modifying any structure.  When we have once thoroughly
grasped the conception that we are all one creature, and that each
one of us is many millions of years old, so that all the pigeons in
the one line of an infinite number of generations are still one
pigeon only--then we can understand that a bird, as different from a
peacock as a pigeon is now, could yet have wandered on and on, first
this way and then that, doing what it liked, and thought that it
could do, till it found itself at length a peacock; but we cannot
believe either that a bird like a pigeon should be able to apprehend
any ideal so different from itself as a peacock, and make towards it,
or that man, having wished to breed a bird anything like a peacock
from a bird anything like a pigeon, would be able to succeed in
accumulating accidental peacock-like variations till he had made the
bird he was in search of, no matter in what number of generations;
much less can we believe that the accumulation of small fortuitous
variations by "natural selection" could succeed better.  We can no
more believe the above, than we can believe that a wish outside a
plough-boy could turn him into a senior wrangler.  The boy would
prove to be too many for his teacher, and so would the pigeon for its
breeder.

I do not forget that artificial breeding has modified the original
type of the horse and the dog, till it has at length produced the
dray-horse and the greyhound; but in each case man has had to get use
and disuse--that is to say, the desires of the animal itself--to help
him.

We are led, then, to the conclusion that all races have what for
practical purposes may be considered as their limits, though there is
no saying what those limits are, nor indeed why, in theory, there
should be any limits at all, but only that there are limits in
practice.  Races which vary considerably must be considered as
clever, but it may be speculative, people who commonly have a genius
in some special direction, as perhaps for mimicry, perhaps for
beauty, perhaps for music, perhaps for the higher mathematics, but
seldom in more than one or two directions; while "inflexible
organisations," like that of the goose, may be considered as
belonging to people with one idea, and the greater tendency of plants
and animals to vary under domestication may be reasonably compared
with the effects of culture and education:  that is to say, may be
referred to increased range and variety of experience or perceptions,
which will either cause sterility, if they be too unfamiliar, so as
to be incapable of fusion with preceding ideas, and hence to bring
memory to a sudden fault, or will open the door for all manner of
further variation--the new ideas having suggested new trains of
thought, which a clever example of a clever race will be only too
eager to pursue.

Let us now return to M. Ribot.  He writes (p. 14):- "The duckling
hatched by the hen makes straight for water."  In what conceivable
way can we account for this, except on the supposition that the
duckling knows perfectly well what it can, and what it cannot do with
water, owing to its recollection of what it did when it was still one
individuality with its parents, and hence, when it was a duckling
before?

"The squirrel, before it knows anything of winter, lays up a store of
nuts.  A bird when hatched in a cage will, when given its freedom,
build for itself a nest like that of its parents, out of the same
materials, and of the same shape."

If this is not due to memory, even an imperfect explanation of what
else it can be due to, "would be satisfactory."

"Intelligence gropes about, tries this way and that, misses its
object, commits mistakes, and corrects them."

Yes.  Because intelligence is of consciousness, and consciousness is
of attention, and attention is of uncertainty, and uncertainty is of
ignorance or want of consciousness.  Intelligence is not yet
thoroughly up to its business.

"Instinct advances with a mechanical certainty."

Why mechanical?  Should not "with apparent certainty" suffice?

"Hence comes its unconscious character."

But for the word "mechanical" this is true, and is what we have been
all along insisting on.

"It knows nothing either of ends, or of the means of attaining them;
it implies no comparison, judgment, or choice."

This is assumption.  What is certain is that instinct does not betray
signs of self-consciousness as to its own knowledge.  It has
dismissed reference to first principles, and is no longer under the
law, but under the grace of a settled conviction.

"All seems directed by thought."

Yes; because all HAS BEEN in earlier existences directed by thought.

"Without ever arriving at thought."

Because it has GOT PAST THOUGHT, and though "directed by thought"
originally, is now travelling in exactly the opposite direction.  It
is not likely to reach thought again, till people get to know worse
and worse how to do things, the oftener they practise them.

"And if this phenomenon appear strange, it must be observed that
analogous states occur in ourselves.  ALL THAT WE DO FROM HABIT--
WALKING, WRITING, OR PRACTISING A MECHANICAL ACT, FOR INSTANCE--ALL
THESE AND MANY OTHER VERY COMPLEX ACTS ARE PERFORMED WITHOUT
CONSCIOUSNESS.

"Instinct appears stationary.  It does not, like intelligence, seem
to grow and decay, to gain and to lose.  It does not improve."

Naturally.  For improvement can only as a general rule be looked for
along the line of latest development, that is to say, in matters
concerning which the creature is being still consciously exercised.
Older questions are settled, and the solution must be accepted as
final, for the question of living at all would be reduced to an
absurdity, if everything decided upon one day was to be undecided
again the next; as with painting or music, so with life and politics,
let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, for decision with
wrong will be commonly a better policy than indecision--I had almost
added with right; and a firm purpose with risk will be better than an
infirm one with temporary exemption from disaster.  Every race has
made its great blunders, to which it has nevertheless adhered,
inasmuch as the corresponding modification of other structures and
instincts was found preferable to the revolution which would be
caused by a radical change of structure, with consequent havoc among
a legion of vested interests.  Rudimentary organs are, as has been
often said, the survivals of these interests--the signs of their
peaceful and gradual extinction as living faiths; they are also
instances of the difficulty of breaking through any cant or trick
which we have long practised, and which is not sufficiently
troublesome to make it a serious object with us to cure ourselves of
the habit.

"If it does not remain perfectly invariable, at least it only varies
within very narrow limits; and though this question has been warmly
debated in our day, and is yet unsettled, we may yet say that in
instinct immutability is the law, variation the exception."

This is quite as it should be.  Genius will occasionally rise a
little above convention, but with an old convention immutability will
be the rule.

"Such," continues M. Ribot, "are the admitted characters of
instinct."

Yes; but are they not also the admitted characters of actions that
are due to memory?

At the bottom of p. 15, M. Ribot quotes the following from Mr.
Darwin:-

"We have reason to believe that aboriginal habits are long retained
under domestication.  Thus with the common ass, we see signs of its
original desert-life in its strong dislike to cross the smallest
stream of water, and in its pleasure in rolling in the dust.  The
same strong dislike to cross a stream is common to the camel which
has been domesticated from a very early period.  Young pigs, though
so tame, sometimes squat when frightened, and then try to conceal
themselves, even in an open and bare place.  Young turkeys, and
occasionally even young fowls, when the hen gives the danger-cry, run
away and try to hide themselves, like young partridges or pheasants,
in order that their mother may take flight, of which she has lost the
power.  The musk duck in its native country often perches and roosts
on trees, and our domesticated musk ducks, though sluggish birds, are
fond of perching on the tops of barns, walls, &c. . . .  We know that
the dog, however well and regularly fed, often buries like the fox
any superfluous food; we see him turning round and round on a carpet
as if to trample down grass to form a bed. . . . In the delight with
which lambs and kids crowd together and frisk upon the smallest
hillock we see a vestige of their former alpine habits."

What does this delightful passage go to show, if not that the young
in all these cases must still have a latent memory of their past
existences, which is called into an active condition as soon as the
associated ideas present themselves?

Returning to M. Ribot's own observations, we find he tells us that it
usually requires three or four generations to fix the results of
training, and to prevent a return to the instincts of the wild state.
I think, however, it would not be presumptuous to suppose that if an
animal after only three or four generations of training be restored
to its original conditions of life, it will forget its intermediate
training and return to its old ways, almost as readily as a London
street Arab would forget the beneficial effects of a weeks training
in a reformatory school, if he were then turned loose again on the
streets.  So if we hatch wild ducks' eggs under a tame duck, the
ducklings "will have scarce left the egg-shell when they obey the
instincts of their race and take their flight."  So the colts from
wild horses, and mongrel young between wild and domesticated horses,
betray traces of their earlier memories.

On this M. Ribot says:  "Originally man had considerable trouble in
taming the animals which are now domesticated; and his work would
have been in vain had not heredity" (memory) "come to his aid.  It
may be said that after man has modified a wild animal to his will,
there goes on in its progeny a silent conflict between two
heredities" (memories), "the one tending to fix the acquired
modifications and the other to preserve the primitive instincts.  The
latter often get the mastery, and only after several generations is
training sure of victory.  But we may see that in either case
heredity" (memory) "always asserts its rights."

How marvellously is the above passage elucidated and made to fit in
with the results of our recognised experience, by the simple
substitution of the word "memory" for "heredity."

"Among the higher animals"--to continue quoting--"which are possessed
not only of instinct, but also of intelligence, nothing is more
common than to see mental dispositions, which have evidently been
acquired, so fixed by heredity, that they are confounded with
instinct, so spontaneous and automatic do they become.  Young
pointers have been known to point the first time they were taken out,
sometimes even better than dogs that had been for a long time in
training.  The habit of saving life is hereditary in breeds that have
been brought up to it, as is also the shepherd dog's habit of moving
around the flock and guarding it."

As soon as we have grasped the notion, that instinct is only the
epitome of past experience, revised, corrected, made perfect, and
learnt by rote, we no longer find any desire to separate "instinct"
from "mental dispositions, which have evidently been acquired and
fixed by heredity," for the simple reason that they are one and the
same thing.

A few more examples are all that my limits will allow--they abound on
every side, and the difficulty lies only in selecting--M. Ribot being
to hand, I will venture to lay him under still further contributions.

On page 19 we find:- "Knight has shown experimentally the truth of
the proverb, 'a good hound is bred so,' he took every care that when
the pups were first taken into the field, they should receive no
guidance from older dogs; yet the very first day, one of the pups
stood trembling with anxiety, having his eyes fixed and all his
muscles strained AT THE PARTRIDGES WHICH THEIR PARENTS HAD BEEN
TRAINED TO POINT.  A spaniel belonging to a breed which had been
trained to woodcock-shooting, knew perfectly well from the first how
to act like an old dog, avoiding places where the ground was frozen,
and where it was, therefore, useless to seek the game, as there was
no scent.  Finally, a young polecat terrier was thrown into a state
of great excitement the first time he ever saw one of these animals,
while a spaniel remained perfectly calm.

"In South America, according to Roulin, dogs belonging to a breed
that has long been trained to the dangerous chase of the peccary,
when taken for the first time into the woods, know the tactics to
adopt quite as well as the old dogs, and that without any
instruction.  Dogs of other races, and unacquainted with the tactics,
are killed at once, no matter how strong they may be.  The American
greyhound, instead of leaping at the stag, attacks him by the belly,
and throws him over, as his ancestors had been trained to do in
hunting the Indians.

"Thus, then, heredity transmits modification no less than natural
instincts."

Should not this rather be--"thus, then, we see that not only older
and remoter habits, but habits which have been practised for a
comparatively small number of generations, may be so deeply impressed
on the individual that they may dwell in his memory, surviving the
so-called change of personality which he undergoes in each successive
generation"?

"There is, however, an important difference to be noted:  the
heredity of instincts admits of no exceptions, while in that of
modifications there are many."

It may be well doubted how far the heredity of instincts admits of no
exceptions; on the contrary, it would seem probable that in many
races geniuses have from time to time arisen who remembered not only
their past experiences, as far as action and habit went, but have
been able to rise in some degree above habit where they felt that
improvement was possible, and who carried such improvement into
further practice, by slightly modifying their structure in the
desired direction on the next occasion that they had a chance of
dealing with protoplasm at all.  It is by these rare instances of
intellectual genius (and I would add of moral genius, if many of the
instincts and structures of plants and animals did not show that they
had got into a region as far above morals--other than enlightened
self-interest--as they are above articulate consciousness of their
own aims in many other respects)--it is by these instances of either
rare good luck or rare genius that many species have been, in all
probability, originated or modified.  Nevertheless inappreciable
modification of instinct is, and ought to be, the rule.

As to M. Ribot's assertion, that to the heredity of modifications
there are many exceptions, I readily agree with it, and can only say
that it is exactly what I should expect; the lesson long since learnt
by rote, and repeated in an infinite number of generations, would be
repeated unintelligently, and with little or no difference, save from
a rare accidental slip, the effect of which would be the culling out
of the bungler who was guilty of it, or from the still rarer
appearance of an individual of real genius; while the newer lesson
would be repeated both with more hesitation and uncertainty, and with
more intelligence; and this is well conveyed in M. Ribot's next
sentence, for he says--"It is only when variations have been firmly
rooted; when having become organic, they constitute a second nature,
which supplants the first; when, like instinct, they have assumed a
mechanical character, that they can be transmitted."

How nearly M. Ribot comes to the opinion which I myself venture to
propound will appear from the following further quotation.  After
dealing with somnambulism, and saying, that if somnambulism were
permanent and innate, it would be impossible to distinguish it from
instinct, he continues:-

"Hence it is less difficult than is generally supposed, to conceive
how intelligence may become instinct; we might even say that, leaving
out of consideration the character of innateness, to which we will
return, we have seen the metamorphosis take place.  THERE CAN THEN BE
NO GROUND FOR MAKING INSTINCT A FACULTY APART, sui generis, a
phenomenon so mysterious, so strange, that usually no other
explanation of it is offered but that of attributing it to the direct
act of the Deity.  This whole mistake is the result of a defective
psychology which makes no account of the unconscious activity of the
soul."

We are tempted to add--"and which also makes no account of the bona
fide character of the continued personality of successive
generations."

"But we are so accustomed," he continues, "to contrast the characters
of instinct with those of intelligence--to say that instinct is
innate, invariable, automatic, while intelligence is something
acquired, variable, spontaneous--that it looks at first paradoxical
to assert that instinct and intelligence are identical.

"It is said that instinct is innate.  But if, on the one hand, we
bear in mind that many instincts are acquired, and that, according to
a theory hereafter to be explained" (which theory, I frankly confess,
I never was able to get hold of), "ALL INSTINCTS ARE ONLY HEREDITARY
HABITS" (italics mine); "if, on the other hand, we observe that
intelligence is in some sense held to be innate by all modern schools
of philosophy, which agree to reject the theory of the tabula rasa"
(if there is no tabula rasa, there is continued psychological
personality, or words have lost their meaning), "and to accept either
latent ideas, or a priori forms of thought" (surely only a
periphrasis for continued personality and memory) "or pre-ordination
of the nervous system and of the organism; IT WILL BE SEEN THAT THIS
CHARACTER OF INNATENESS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ABSOLUTE DISTINCTION
BETWEEN INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE.

"It is true that intelligence is variable, but so also is instinct,
as we have seen.  In winter, the Rhine beaver plasters his wall to
windward; once he was a builder, now a burrower; once he lived in
society, now he is solitary.  Intelligence itself can scarcely be
more variable . . . instinct may be modified, lost, reawakened.

"Although intelligence is, as a rule, conscious, it may also become
unconscious and automatic, without losing its identity.  Neither is
instinct always so blind, so mechanical, as is supposed, for at times
it is at fault.  The wasp that has faultily trimmed a leaf of its
paper begins again.  The bee only gives the hexagonal form to its
cell after many attempts and alterations.  It is difficult to believe
that the loftier instincts" (and surely, then, the more recent
instincts) "of the higher animals are not accompanied BY AT LEAST A
CONFUSED CONSCIOUSNESS.  There is, therefore, no absolute distinction
between instinct and intelligence; there is not a single
characteristic which, seriously considered, remains the exclusive
property of either.  The contrast established between instinctive
acts and intellectual acts is, nevertheless, perfectly true, but only
when we compare the extremes.  AS INSTINCT RISES IT APPROACHES
INTELLIGENCE--AS INTELLIGENCE DESCENDS IT APPROACHES INSTINCT."

M. Ribot and myself (if I may venture to say so) are continually on
the verge of coming to an understanding, when, at the very moment
that we seem most likely to do so, we fly, as it were, to opposite
poles.  Surely the passage last quoted should be, "As instinct
falls," i.e., becomes less and less certain of its ground, "it
approaches intelligence; as intelligence rises," i.e., becomes more
and more convinced of the truth and expediency of its convictions--
"it approaches instinct."

Enough has been said to show that the opinions which I am advancing
are not new, but I have looked in vain for the conclusions which, it
appears to me, M. Ribot should draw from his facts; throughout his
interesting book I find the facts which it would seem should have
guided him to the conclusions, and sometimes almost the conclusions
themselves, but he never seems quite to have reached them, nor has he
arranged his facts so that others are likely to deduce them, unless
they had already arrived at them by another road.  I cannot, however,
sufficiently express my obligations to M. Ribot.

I cannot refrain from bringing forward a few more instances of what I
think must be considered by every reader as hereditary memory.
Sydney Smith writes:-

"Sir James Hall hatched some chickens in an oven.  Within a few
minutes after the shell was broken, a spider was turned loose before
this very youthful brood; the destroyer of flies had hardly proceeded
more than a few inches, before he was descried by one of these oven-
born chickens, and, at one peck of his bill, immediately devoured.
This certainly was not imitation.  A female goat very near delivery
died; Galen cut out the young kid, and placed before it a bundle of
hay, a bunch of fruit, and a pan of milk; the young kid smelt to them
all very attentively, and then began to lap the milk.  This was not
imitation.  And what is commonly and rightly called instinct, cannot
be explained away, under the notion of its being imitation" (Lecture
xvii. on Moral Philosophy).

It cannot, indeed, be explained away under the notion of its being
imitation, but I think it may well be so under that of its being
memory.

Again, a little further on in the same lecture, as that above quoted
from, we find:-

"Ants and beavers lay up magazines.  Where do they get their
knowledge that it will not be so easy to collect food in rainy
weather, as it is in summer?  Men and women know these things,
because their grandpapas and grandmammas have told them so.  Ants
hatched from the egg artificially, or birds hatched in this manner,
have all this knowledge by intuition, without the smallest
communication with any of their relations.  Now observe what the
solitary wasp does; she digs several holes in the sand, in each of
which she deposits an egg, though she certainly knows not (?) that an
animal is deposited in that egg, and still less that this animal must
be nourished with other animals.  She collects a few green flies,
rolls them up neatly in several parcels (like Bologna sausages), and
stuffs one parcel into each hole where an egg is deposited.  When the
wasp worm is hatched, it finds a store of provision ready made; and
what is most curious, the quantity allotted to each is exactly
sufficient to support it, till it attains the period of wasphood, and
can provide for itself.  This instinct of the parent wasp is the more
remarkable as it does not feed upon flesh itself.  Here the little
creature has never seen its parent; for by the time it is born, the
parent is always eaten by sparrows; and yet, without the slightest
education, or previous experience, it does everything that the parent
did before it.  Now the objectors to the doctrine of instinct may say
what they please, but young tailors have no intuitive method of
making pantaloons; a new-born mercer cannot measure diaper; nature
teaches a cook's daughter nothing about sippets.  All these things
require with us seven years' apprenticeship; but insects are like
Moliere's persons of quality--they know everything (as Moliere says),
without having learnt anything.  'Les gens de qualite savent tout,
sans avoir rien appris.'"

How completely all difficulty vanishes from the facts so pleasantly
told in this passage when we bear in mind the true nature of personal
identity, the ordinary working of memory, and the vanishing tendency
of consciousness concerning what we know exceedingly well.

My last instance I take from M. Ribot, who writes:- "Gratiolet, in
his Anatomie Comparee du Systeme Nerveux, states that an old piece of
wolf's skin, with the hair all worn away, when set before a little
dog, threw the animal into convulsions of fear by the slight scent
attaching to it.  The dog had never seen a wolf, and we can only
explain this alarm by the hereditary transmission of certain
sentiments, coupled with a certain perception of the sense of smell"
("Heredity," p. 43).

I should prefer to say "we can only explain the alarm by supposing
that the smell of the wolf's skin"--the sense of smell being, as we
all know, more powerful to recall the ideas that have been associated
with it than any other sense--"brought up the ideas with which it had
been associated in the dog's mind during many previous existences"--
he on smelling the wolf's skin remembering all about wolves perfectly
well.



CHAPTER XII--INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS



In this chapter I will consider, as briefly as possible, the
strongest argument that I have been able to discover against the
supposition that instinct is chiefly due to habit.  I have said "the
strongest argument;" I should have said, the only argument that
struck me as offering on the face of it serious difficulties.

Turning, then, to Mr. Darwin's chapter on instinct ("Natural
Selection," ed. 1876, p. 205), we find substantially much the same
views as those taken at a later date by M. Ribot, and referred to in
the preceding chapter.  Mr. Darwin writes:-

"An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to
perform, when performed by an animal, more especially a very young
one, without experience, and when performed by many animals in the
same way without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is
usually said to be instinctive."

The above should strictly be, "without their being conscious of their
own knowledge concerning the purpose for which they act as they do;"
and though some may say that the two phrases come to the same thing,
I think there is an important difference, as what I propose
distinguishes ignorance from over-familiarity, both which states are
alike unself-conscious, though with widely different results.

"But I could show," continues Mr. Darwin, "that none of these
characters are universal.  A little dose of judgement or reason, as
Pierre Huber expresses it, often comes into play even with animals
low in the scale of nature.

"Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have
compared instinct with habit."

I would go further and would say, that instinct, in the great
majority of cases, is habit pure and simple, contracted originally by
some one or more individuals; practised, probably, in a consciously
intelligent manner during many successive lives, until the habit has
acquired the highest perfection which the circumstances admitted;
and, finally, so deeply impressed upon the memory as to survive that
effacement of minor impressions which generally takes place in every
fresh life-wave or generation.

I would say, that unless the identity of offspring with their parents
be so far admitted that the children be allowed to remember the
deeper impressions engraved on the minds of those who begot them, it
is little less than trilling to talk, as so many writers do, about
inherited habit, or the experience of the race, or, indeed,
accumulated variations of instincts.

When an instinct is not habit, as resulting from memory pure and
simple, it is habit modified by some treatment, generally in the
youth or embryonic stages of the individual, which disturbs his
memory, and drives him on to some unusual course, inasmuch as he
cannot recognise and remember his usual one by reason of the change
now made in it.  Habits and instincts, again, may be modified by any
important change in the condition of the parents, which will then
both affect the parent's sense of his own identity, and also create
more or less fault, or dislocation of memory, in the offspring
immediately behind the memory of his last life.  Change of food may
at times be sufficient to create a specific modification--that is to
say, to affect all the individuals whose food is so changed, in one
and the same way--whether as regards structure or habit.  Thus we see
that certain changes in food (and domicile), from those with which
its ancestors have been familiar, will disturb the memory of a queen
bee's egg, and set it at such disadvantage as to make it make itself
into a neuter bee; but yet we find that the larva thus partly aborted
may have its memories restored to it, if not already too much
disturbed, and may thus return to its condition as a queen bee, if it
only again be restored to the food and domicile, which its past
memories can alone remember.

So we see that opium, tobacco, alcohol, hasheesh, and tea produce
certain effects upon our own structure and instincts.  But though
capable of modification, and of specific modification, which may in
time become inherited, and hence resolve itself into a true instinct
or settled question, yet I maintain that the main bulk of the
instinct (whether as affecting structure or habits of life) will be
derived from memory pure and simple; the individual growing up in the
shape he does, and liking to do this or that when he is grown up,
simply from recollection of what he did last time, and of what on the
whole suited him.

For it must be remembered that a drug which should destroy some one
part at an early embryonic stage, and thus prevent it from
development, would prevent the creature from recognising the
surroundings which affected that part when he was last alive and
unmutilated, as being the same as his present surroundings.  He would
be puzzled, for he would be viewing the position from a different
standpoint.  If any important item in a number of associated ideas
disappears, the plot fails; and a great internal change is an
exceedingly important item.  Life and things to a creature so treated
at an early embryonic stage would not be life and things as he last
remembered them; hence he would not be able to do the same now as he
did then; that is to say, he would vary both in structure and
instinct; but if the creature were tolerably uniform to start with,
and were treated in a tolerably uniform way, we might expect the
effect produced to be much the same in all ordinary cases.

We see, also, that any important change in treatment and
surroundings, if not sufficient to kill, would and does tend to
produce not only variability but sterility, as part of the same story
and for the same reason--namely, default of memory; this default will
be of every degree of intensity, from total failure, to a slight
disturbance of memory as affecting some one particular organ only;
that is to say, from total sterility, to a slight variation in an
unimportant part.  So that even THE SLIGHTEST CONCEIVABLE VARIATIONS
SHOULD BE REFERRED TO CHANGED CONDITIONS, EXTERNAL OR INTERNAL, AND
TO THEIR DISTURBING EFFECTS UPON THE MEMORY; and sterility, without
any apparent disease of the reproductive system, may be referred not
so much to special delicacy or susceptibility of the organs of
reproduction as to inability on the part of the creature to know
where it is, and to recognise itself as the same creature which it
has been accustomed to reproduce.

Mr. Darwin thinks that the comparison of habit with instinct gives
"an accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive
action is performed, but not," he thinks, "of its origin."

"How unconsciously," Mr. Darwin continues, "many habitual actions are
performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious
will!  Yet they may be modified by the will or by reason.  Habits
easily become associated with other habits, with certain periods of
time and states of body.  When once acquired, they often remain
constant throughout life.  Several other points of resemblance
between instincts and habits could be pointed out.  As in repeating a
well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a
sort of rhythm.  If a person be interrupted in a song or in repeating
anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the
habitual train of thought; so P. Huber found it was with a
caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock.  For if he took
a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth
stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to
the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth,
fifth, and sixth stages of construction.  If, however, a caterpillar
were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third
stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that
much of its work was already done for it, far from deriving any
benefit from this, it was much embarrassed, and in order to complete
its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it
had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work."

I see I must have unconsciously taken my first chapter from this
passage, but it is immaterial.  I owe Mr. Darwin much more than this.
I owe it to him that I believe in evolution at all.  I owe him for
almost all the facts which have led me to differ from him, and which
I feel absolutely safe in taking for granted, if he has advanced
them.  Nevertheless, I believe that the conclusion arrived at in the
passage which I will next quote is a mistaken one, and that not a
little only, but fundamentally.  I shall therefore venture to dispute
it.

The passage runs:-

"If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited--and it can be
shown that this does sometimes happen--then the resemblance between
what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not
to be distinguished. . . . BUT IT WOULD BE A SERIOUS ERROR TO SUPPOSE
THAT THE GREATER NUMBER OF INSTINCTS HAVE BEEN ACQUIRED BY HABIT IN
ONE GENERATION, AND THEN TRANSMITTED BY INHERITANCE TO SUCCEEDING
GENERATIONS.  IT CAN BE CLEARLY SHOWN THAT THE MOST WONDERFUL
INSTINCTS WITH WHICH WE ARE ACQUAINTED--NAMELY, THOSE OF THE HIVE-BEE
AND OF MANY ANTS, COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN ACQUIRED BY HABIT."
("Origin of Species," p. 206, ed. 1876.)  The italics in this passage
are mine.

No difficulty is opposed to my view (as I call it, for the sake of
brevity) by such an instinct as that of ants to milk aphids.  Such
instincts may be supposed to have been acquired in much the same way
as the instinct of a farmer to keep a cow.  Accidental discovery of
the fact that the excretion was good, with "a little dose of
judgement or reason" from time to time appearing in an exceptionally
clever ant, and by him communicated to his fellows, till the habit
was so confirmed as to be capable of transmission in full unself-
consciousness (if indeed the instinct be unself-conscious in this
case), would, I think, explain this as readily as the slow and
gradual accumulations of instincts which had never passed through the
intelligent and self-conscious stage, but had always prompted action
without any idea of a why or a wherefore on the part of the creature
itself.

For it must be remembered, as I am afraid I have already perhaps too
often said, that even when we have got a slight variation of
instinct, due to some cause which we know nothing about, but which I
will not even for a moment call "spontaneous"--a word that should be
cut out of every dictionary, or in some way branded as perhaps the
most misleading in the language--we cannot see how it comes to be
repeated in successive generations, so as to be capable of being
acted upon by "natural selection" and accumulated, unless it be also
capable of being remembered by the offspring of the varying creature.
It may be answered that we cannot know anything about this, but that
"like father like son" is an ultimate fact in nature.  I can only
answer that I never observe any "like father like son" without the
son's both having had every opportunity of remembering, and showing
every symptom of having remembered, in which case I decline to go
further than memory (whatever memory may be) as the cause of the
phenomenon.

But besides inheritance, teaching must be admitted as a means of at
any rate modifying an instinct.  We observe this in our own case; and
we know that animals have great powers of communicating their ideas
to one another, though their manner of doing this is as
incomprehensible by us as a plant's knowledge of chemistry, or the
manner in which an amoeba makes its test, or a spider its web,
without having gone through a long course of mathematics.  I think
most readers will allow that our early training and the theological
systems of the last eighteen hundred years are likely to have made us
involuntarily under-estimate the powers of animals low in the scale
of life, both as regards intelligence and the power of communicating
their ideas to one another; but even now we admit that ants have
great powers in this respect.

A habit, however, which is taught to the young or each successive
generation, by older members of the community who have themselves
received it by instruction, should surely rank as an inherited habit,
and be considered as due to memory, though personal teaching be
necessary to complete the inheritance.

An objection suggests itself that if such a habit as the flight of
birds, which seems to require a little personal supervision and
instruction before it is acquired perfectly, were really due to
memory, the need of instruction would after a time cease, inasmuch as
the creature would remember its past method of procedure, and would
thus come to need no more teaching.  The answer lies in the fact,
that if a creature gets to depend upon teaching and personal help for
any matter, its memory will make it look for such help on each
repetition of the action; so we see that no man's memory will exert
itself much until he is thrown upon memory as his only resource.  We
may read a page of a book a hundred times, but we do not remember it
by heart unless we have either cultivated our powers of learning to
repeat, or have taken pains to learn this particular page.

And whether we read from a book, or whether we repeat by heart, the
repetition is still due to memory; only in the one case the memory is
exerted to recall something which one saw only half a second ago, and
in the other, to recall something not seen for a much longer period.
So I imagine an instinct or habit may be called an inherited habit,
and assigned to memory, even though the memory dates, not from the
performance of the action by the learner when he was actually part of
the personality of the teacher, but rather from a performance
witnessed by, or explained by the teacher to, the pupil at a period
subsequent to birth.  In either case the habit is inherited in the
sense of being acquired in one generation, and transmitted with such
modifications as genius and experience may have suggested.

Mr. Darwin would probably admit this without hesitation; when,
therefore, he says that certain instincts could not possibly have
been acquired by habit, he must mean that they could not, under the
circumstances, have been remembered by the pupil in the person of the
teacher, and that it would be a serious error to suppose that the
greater number of instincts can be thus remembered.  To which I
assent readily so far as that it is difficult (though not impossible)
to see how some of the most wonderful instincts of neuter ants and
bees can be due to the fact that the neuter ant or bee was ever in
part, or in some respects, another neuter ant or bee in a previous
generation.  At the same time I maintain that this does not militate
against the supposition that both instinct and structure are in the
main due to memory.  For the power of receiving any communication,
and acting on it, is due to memory; and the neuter ant or bee may
have received its lesson from another neuter ant or bee, who had it
from another and modified it; and so back and back, till the
foundation of the habit is reached, and is found to present little
more than the faintest family likeness to its more complex
descendant.  Surely Mr. Darwin cannot mean that it can be shewn that
the wonderful instincts of neuter ants and bees cannot have been
acquired either, as above, by instruction, or by some not immediately
obvious form of inherited transmission, but that they must be due to
the fact that the ant or bee is, as it were, such and such a machine,
of which if you touch such and such a spring, you will get a
corresponding action.  If he does, he will find, so far as I can see,
no escape from a position very similar to the one which I put into
the mouth of the first of the two professors, who dealt with the
question of machinery in my earlier work, "Erewhon," and which I have
since found that my great namesake made fun of in the following
lines:-


. . . "They now begun
To spur their living engines on.
For as whipped tops and bandy'd balls,
The learned hold are animals:
So horses they affirm to be
Mere engines made by geometry,
And were invented first from engines
As Indian Britons were from Penguins."
--Hudibras, Canto ii. line 53, &c.


I can see, then, no difficulty in the development of the ordinary so-
called instincts, whether of ants or bees, or the cuckoo, or any
other animal, on the supposition that they were, for the most part,
intelligently acquired with more or less labour, as the case may be,
in much the same way as we see any art or science now in process of
acquisition among ourselves, but were ultimately remembered by
offspring, or communicated to it.  When the limits of the race's
capacity had been attained (and most races seem to have their limits,
unsatisfactory though the expression may very fairly be considered),
or when the creature had got into a condition, so to speak, of
equilibrium with its surroundings, there would be no new development
of instincts, and the old ones would cease to be improved, inasmuch
as there would be no more reasoning or difference of opinion
concerning them.  The race, therefore, or species would remain in
statu quo till either domesticated, and so brought into contact with
new ideas and placed in changed conditions, or put under such
pressure, in a wild state, as should force it to further invention,
or extinguish it if incapable of rising to the occasion.  That
instinct and structure may be acquired by practice in one or more
generations, and remembered in succeeding ones, is admitted by Mr.
Darwin, for he allows ("Origin of Species," p. 206) that habitual
action does sometimes become inherited, and, though he does not seem
to conceive of such action as due to memory, yet it is inconceivable
how it is inherited, if not as the result of memory.

It must be admitted, however, that when we come to consider the
structures as well as the instincts of some of the neuter insects,
our difficulties seem greatly increased.  The neuter hive-bees have a
cavity in their thighs in which to keep the wax, which it is their
business to collect; but the drones and queen, which alone bear
offspring, collect no wax, and therefore neither want, nor have, any
such cavity.  The neuter bees are also, if I understand rightly,
furnished with a proboscis or trunk for extracting honey from
flowers, whereas the fertile bees, who gather no honey, have no such
proboscis.  Imagine, if the reader will, that the neuter bees differ
still more widely from the fertile ones; how, then, can they in any
sense be said to derive organs from their parents, which not one of
their parents for millions of generations has ever had?  How, again,
can it be supposed that they transmit these organs to the future
neuter members of the community when they are perfectly sterile?

One can understand that the young neuter bee might be taught to make
a hexagonal cell (though I have not found that any one has seen the
lesson being given) inasmuch as it does not make the cell till after
birth, and till after it has seen other neuter bees who might tell it
much in, qua us, a very little time; but we can hardly understand its
growing a proboscis before it could possibly want it, or preparing a
cavity in its thigh, to have it ready to put wax into, when none of
its predecessors had ever done so, by supposing oral communication,
during the larvahood.  Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that
bees seem to know secrets about reproduction, which utterly baffle
ourselves; for example, the queen bee appears to know how to deposit
male or female, eggs at will; and this is a matter of almost
inconceivable sociological importance, denoting a corresponding
amount of sociological and physiological knowledge generally.  It
should not, then, surprise us if the race should possess other
secrets, whose working we are unable to follow, or even detect at
all.

Sydney Smith, indeed, writes:-

"The warmest admirers of honey, and the greatest friends to bees,
will never, I presume, contend that the young swarm, who begin making
honey three or four months after they are born, and immediately
construct these mathematical cells, should have gained their
geometrical knowledge as we gain ours, and in three months' time
outstrip Mr. Maclaurin in mathematics as much as they did in making
honey.  It would take a senior wrangler at Cambridge ten hours a day
for three years together to know enough mathematics for the
calculation of these problems, with which not only every queen bee,
but every undergraduate grub, is acquainted the moment it is born."
This last statement may be a little too strong, but it will at once
occur to the reader, that as we know the bees DO surpass Mr.
Maclaurin in the power of making honey, they may also surpass him in
capacity for those branches of mathematics with which it has been
their business to be conversant during many millions of years, and
also in knowledge of physiology and psychology in so far as the
knowledge bears upon the interests of their own community.

We know that the larva which develops into a neuter bee, and that
again which in time becomes a queen bee, are the same kind of larva
to start with; and that if you give one of these larvae the food and
treatment which all its foremothers have been accustomed to, it will
turn out with all the structure and instincts of its foremothers--and
that it only fails to do this because it has been fed, and otherwise
treated, in such a manner as not one of its foremothers was ever yet
fed or treated.  So far, this is exactly what we should expect, on
the view that structure and instinct are alike mainly due to memory,
or to medicined memory.  Give the larva a fair chance of knowing
where it is, and it shows that it remembers by doing exactly what it
did before.  Give it a different kind of food and house, and it
cannot be expected to be anything else than puzzled.  It remembers a
great deal.  It comes out a bee, and nothing but a bee; but it is an
aborted bee; it is, in fact, mutilated before birth instead of after-
-with instinct, as well as growth, correlated to its abortion, as we
see happens frequently in the case of animals a good deal higher than
bees that have been mutilated at a stage much later than that at
which the abortion of neuter bees commences.

The larvae being similar to start with, and being similarly
mutilated--i.e., by change of food and dwelling, will naturally
exhibit much similarity of instinct and structure on arriving at
maturity.  When driven from their usual course, they must take SOME
new course or die.  There is nothing strange in the fact that similar
beings puzzled similarly should take a similar line of action.  I
grant, however, that it is hard to see how change of food and
treatment can puzzle an insect into such "complex growth" as that it
should make a cavity in its thigh, grow an invaluable proboscis, and
betray a practical knowledge of difficult mathematical problems.

But it must be remembered that the memory of having been queen bees
and drones--which is all that according to my supposition the larvae
can remember, (on a first view of the case), in their own proper
persons--would nevertheless carry with it a potential recollection of
all the social arrangements of the hive.  They would thus potentially
remember that the mass of the bees were always neuter bees; they
would remember potentially the habits of these bees, so far as drones
and queens know anything about them; and this may be supposed to be a
very thorough acquaintance; in like manner, and with the same
limitation, they would know from the very moment that they left the
queen's body that neuter bees had a proboscis to gather honey with,
and cavities in their thighs to put wax into, and that cells were to
be made with certain angles--for surely it is not crediting the queen
with more knowledge than she is likely to possess, if we suppose her
to have a fair acquaintance with the phenomena of wax and cells
generally, even though she does not make any; they would know (while
still larvae--and earlier) the kind of cells into which neuter bees
were commonly put, and the kind of treatment they commonly received--
they might therefore, as eggs--immediately on finding their
recollection driven from its usual course, so that they must either
find some other course, or die--know that they were being treated as
neuter bees are treated, and that they were expected to develop into
neuter bees accordingly; they might know all this, and a great deal
more into the bargain, inasmuch as even before being actually
deposited as eggs they would know and remember potentially, but
unconsciously, all that their parents knew and remembered intensely.
Is it, then, astonishing that they should adapt themselves so readily
to the position which they know it is for the social welfare of the
community, and hence of themselves, that they should occupy, and that
they should know that they will want a cavity in their thighs and a
proboscis, and hence make such implements out of their protoplasm as
readily as they make their wings?

I admit that, under normal treatment, none of the above-mentioned
potential memories would be kindled into such a state of activity
that action would follow upon them, until the creature had attained a
more or less similar condition to that in which its parent was when
these memories were active within its mind:  but the essence of the
matter is, that these larvae have been treated ABNORMALLY, so that if
they do not die, there is nothing for it but that they must vary.
One cannot argue from the normal to the abnormal.  It would not,
then, be strange if the potential memories should (owing to the
margin for premature or tardy development which association admits)
serve to give the puzzled larvae a hint as to the course which they
had better take, or that, at any rate, it should greatly supplement
the instruction of the "nurse" bees themselves by rendering the
larvae so, as it were, inflammable on this point, that a spark should
set them in a blaze.  Abortion is generally premature.  Thus the
scars referred to in the last chapter as having appeared on the
children of men who had been correspondingly wounded, should not,
under normal circumstances, have appeared in the offspring till the
children had got fairly near the same condition generally as that in
which their fathers were when they were wounded, and even then,
normally, there should have been an instrument to wound them, much as
their fathers had been wounded.  Association, however, does not
always stick to the letter of its bond.

The line, again, might certainly be taken that the difference in
structure and instincts between neuter and fertile bees is due to the
specific effects of certain food and treatment; yet, though one would
be sorry to set limits to the convertibility of food and genius, it
seems hard to believe that there can be any untutored food which
should teach a bee to make a hexagonal cell as soon as it was born,
or which, before it was born, should teach it to prepare such
structures as it would require in after life.  If, then, food be
considered as a direct agent in causing the structures and instinct,
and not an indirect agent, merely indicating to the larva itself that
it is to make itself after the fashion of neuter bees, then we should
bear in mind that, at any rate, it has been leavened and prepared in
the stomachs of those neuter bees into which the larva is now
expected to develop itself, and may thus have in it more true
germinative matter--gemmules, in fact--than is commonly supposed.
Food, when sufficiently assimilated (the whole question turning upon
what IS "sufficiently"), becomes stored with all the experience and
memories of the assimilating creature; corn becomes hen, and knows
nothing but hen, when hen has eaten it.  We know also that the neuter
working-bees inject matter into the cell after the larva has been
produced; nor would it seem harsh to suppose that though devoid of a
reproductive system like that of their parents, they may yet be
practically not so neuter as is commonly believed.  One cannot say
what gemmules of thigh and proboscis may not have got into the
neutral bees' stomachs, if they assimilate their food sufficiently,
and thus into the larva.

Mr. Darwin will be the first to admit that though a creature have no
reproductive system, in any ordinary sense of the word, yet every
unit or cell of its body may throw off gemmules which may be free to
move over every part of the whole organism, and which "natural
selection" might in time cause to stray into food which had been
sufficiently prepared in the stomachs of the neuter bees.

I cannot say, then, precisely in what way, but I can see no reason
for doubting that in some of the ways suggested above, or in some
combination of them, the phenomena of the instincts of neuter ants
and bees can be brought into the same category as the instincts and
structure of fertile animals.  At any rate, I see the great fact that
when treated as they have been accustomed to be treated, these
neuters act as though they remembered, and accordingly become queen
bees; and that they only depart from their ancestral course on being
treated in such fashion as their ancestors can never have remembered;
also, that when they have been thrown off their accustomed line of
thought and action, they only take that of their nurses, who have
been about them from the moment of their being deposited as eggs by
the queen bee, who have fed them from their own bodies, and between
whom and them there may have been all manner of physical and mental
communication, of which we know no more than we do of the power which
enables a bee to find its way home after infinite shifting and
turning among flowers, which no human powers could systematise so as
to avoid confusion.

Or take it thus:  We know that mutilation at an early age produces an
effect upon the structure and instincts of cattle, sheep, and horses;
and it might be presumed that if feasible at an earlier age, it would
produce a still more marked effect.  We observe that the effect
produced is uniform, or nearly so.  Suppose mutilation to produce a
little more effect than it does, as we might easily do, if cattle,
sheep, and horses had been for ages accustomed to a mutilated class
living among them, which class had been always a caste apart, and had
fed the young neuters from their own bodies, from an early embryonic
stage onwards; would any one in this case dream of advancing the
structure and instincts of this mutilated class against the doctrine
that instinct is inherited habit?  Or, if inclined to do this, would
he not at once refrain, on remembering that the process of mutilation
might be arrested, and the embryo be developed into an entire animal
by simply treating it in the way to which all its ancestors had been
accustomed?  Surely he would not allow the difficulty (which I must
admit in some measure to remain) to outweigh the evidence derivable
from these very neuter insects themselves, as well as from such a
vast number of other sources--all pointing in the direction of
instinct as inherited habit. {5}

Lastly, it must be remembered that the instinct to make cells and
honey is one which has no very great hold upon its possessors.  Bees
CAN make cells and honey, nor do they seem to have any very violent
objection to doing so; but it is quite clear that there is nothing in
their structure and instincts which urges them on to do these things
for the mere love of doing them, as a hen is urged to sit upon a
chalk stone, concerning which she probably is at heart utterly
sceptical, rather than not sit at all.  There is no honey and cell-
making instinct so strong as the instinct to eat, if they are hungry,
or to grow wings, and make themselves into bees at all.  Like
ourselves, so long as they can get plenty to eat and drink, they will
do no work.  Under these circumstances, not one drop of honey nor one
particle of wax will they collect, except, I presume, to make cells
for the rearing of their young.

Sydney Smith writes:-

"The most curious instance of a change of instinct is recorded by
Darwin.  The bees carried over to Barbadoes and the Western Isles
ceased to lay up any honey after the first year, as they found it not
useful to them.  They found the weather so fine, and materials for
making honey so plentiful, that they quitted their grave, prudent,
and mercantile character, became exceedingly profligate and
debauched, ate up their capital, resolved to work no more, and amused
themselves by flying about the sugar-houses and stinging the blacks"
(Lecture XVII. on Moral Philosophy).  The ease, then, with which the
honey-gathering and cell-making habits are relinquished, would seem
to point strongly in the direction of their acquisition at a
comparatively late period of development.

I have dealt with bees only, and not with ants, which would perhaps
seem to present greater difficulty, inasmuch as in some families of
these there are two, or even three, castes of neuters with well-
marked and wide differences of structure and instinct; but I think
the reader will agree with me that the ants are sufficiently covered
by the bees, and that enough, therefore, has been said already.  Mr.
Darwin supposes that these modifications of structure and instinct
have been effected by the accumulation of numerous slight,
profitable, spontaneous variations on the part of the fertile
parents, which has caused them (so, at least, I understand him) to
lay this or that particular kind of egg, which should develop into a
kind of bee or ant, with this or that particular instinct, which
instinct is merely a co-ordination with structure, and in no way
attributable to use or habit in preceding generations.

Even so, one cannot see that the habit of laying this particular kind
of egg might not be due to use and memory in previous generations on
the part of the fertile parents, "for the numerous slight spontaneous
variations," on which "natural selection" is to work, must have had
some cause than which none more reasonable than sense of need and
experience presents itself; and there seems hardly any limit to what
long-continued faith and desire, aided by intelligence, may be able
to effect.  But if sense of need and experience are denied, I see no
escape from the view that machines are new species of life.

Mr. Darwin concludes:  "I am surprised that no one has hitherto
advanced this demonstrative case of neuter insects against the well-
known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck" ("Natural
Selection," p. 233, ed. 1876).

After reading this, one feels as though there was no more to be said.
The well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck,
has indeed been long since so thoroughly exploded, that it is not
worth while to go into an explanation of what it was, or to refute it
in detail.  Here, however, is an argument against it, which is so
much better than anything advanced yet, that one is surprised it has
never been made use of; so we will just advance it, as it were, to
slay the slain, and pass on.  Such, at least, is the effect which the
paragraph above quoted produced upon myself, and would, I think,
produce on the great majority of readers.  When driven by the
exigencies of my own position to examine the value of the
demonstration more closely, I conclude, either that I have utterly
failed to grasp Mr. Darwin's meaning, or that I have no less
completely mistaken the value and bearing of the facts I have myself
advanced in these few last pages.  Failing this, my surprise is, not
that "no one has hitherto advanced" the instincts of neuter insects
as a demonstrative case against the doctrine of inherited habit, but
rather that Mr. Darwin should have thought the case demonstrative; or
again, when I remember that the neuter working bee is only an aborted
queen, and may be turned back again into a queen, by giving it such
treatment as it can alone be expected to remember--then I am
surprised that the structure and instincts of neuter bees has never
(if never) been brought forward in support of the doctrine of
inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck, and against any theory which
would rob such instincts of their foundation in intelligence, and of
their connection with experience and memory.

As for the instinct to mutilate, that is as easily accounted for as
any other inherited habit, whether of man to mutilate cattle, or of
ants to make slaves, or of birds to make their nests.  I can see no
way of accounting for the existence of any one of these instincts,
except on the supposition that they have arisen gradually, through
perceptions of power and need on the part of the animal which
exhibits them--these two perceptions advancing hand in hand from
generation to generation, and being accumulated in time and in the
common course of nature.

I have already sufficiently guarded against being supposed to
maintain that very long before an instinct or structure was
developed, the creature descried it in the far future, and made
towards it.  We do not observe this to be the manner of human
progress.  Our mechanical inventions, which, as I ventured to say in
"Erewhon," through the mouth of the second professor, are really
nothing but extra-corporaneous limbs--a wooden leg being nothing but
a bad kind of flesh leg, and a flesh leg being only a much better
kind of wooden leg than any creature could be expected to manufacture
introspectively and consciously--our mechanical inventions have
almost invariably grown up from small beginnings, and without any
very distant foresight on the part of the inventors.  When Watt
perfected the steam engine, he did not, it seems, foresee the
locomotive, much less would any one expect a savage to invent a steam
engine.  A child breathes automatically, because it has learnt to
breathe little by little, and has now breathed for an incalculable
length of time; but it cannot open oysters at all, nor even conceive
the idea of opening oysters for two or three years after it is born,
for the simple reason that this lesson is one which it is only
beginning to learn.  All I maintain is, that, give a child as many
generations of practice in opening oysters as it has had in breathing
or sucking, and it would on being born, turn to the oyster-knife no
less naturally than to the breast.  We observe that among certain
families of men there has been a tendency to vary in the direction of
the use and development of machinery; and that in a certain still
smaller number of families, there seems to be an almost infinitely
great capacity for varying and inventing still further, whether
socially or mechanically; while other families, and perhaps the
greater number, reach a certain point and stop; but we also observe
that not even the most inventive races ever see very far ahead.  I
suppose the progress of plants and animals to be exactly analogous to
this.

Mr. Darwin has always maintained that the effects of use and disuse
are highly important in the development of structure, and if, as he
has said, habits are sometimes inherited--then they should sometimes
be important also in the development of instinct, or habit.  But what
does the development of an instinct or structure, or, indeed, any
effect upon the organism produced by "use and disuse," imply?  It
implies an effect produced by a desire to do something for which the
organism was not originally well adapted or sufficient, but for which
it has come to be sufficient in consequence of the desire.  The wish
has been father to the power; but this again opens up the whole
theory of Lamarck, that the development of organs has been due to the
wants or desires of the animal in which the organ appears.  So far as
I can see, I am insisting on little more than this.

Once grant that a blacksmith's arm grows thicker through hammering
iron, and you have an organ modified in accordance with a need or
wish.  Let the desire and the practice be remembered, and go on for
long enough, and the slight alterations of the organ will be
accumulated, until they are checked either by the creature's having
got all that he cares about making serious further effort to obtain,
or until his wants prove inconvenient to other creatures that are
stronger than he, and he is hence brought to a standstill.  Use and
disuse, then, with me, and, as I gather also, with Lamarck, are the
keys to the position, coupled, of course, with continued personality
and memory.  No sudden and striking changes would be effected, except
that occasionally a blunder might prove a happy accident, as happens
not unfrequently with painters, musicians, chemists, and inventors at
the present day; or sometimes a creature, with exceptional powers of
memory or reflection, would make his appearance in this race or in
that.  We all profit by our accidents as well as by our more cunning
contrivances, so that analogy would point in the direction of
thinking that many of the most happy thoughts in the animal and
vegetable kingdom were originated much as certain discoveries that
have been made by accident among ourselves.  These would be
originally blind variations, though even so, probably less blind than
we think, if we could know the whole truth.  When originated, they
would be eagerly taken advantage of and improved upon by the animal
in whom they appeared; but it cannot be supposed that they would be
very far in advance of the last step gained, more than are those
"flukes" which sometimes enable us to go so far beyond our own
ordinary powers.  For if they were, the animal would despair of
repeating them.  No creature hopes, or even wishes, for very much
more than he has been accustomed to all his life, he and his family,
and the others whom he can understand, around him.  It has been well
said that "enough" is always "a little more than one has."  We do not
try for things which we believe to be beyond our reach, hence one
would expect that the fortunes, as it were, of animals should have
been built up gradually.  Our own riches grow with our desires and
the pains we take in pursuit of them, and our desires vary and
increase with our means of gratifying them; but unless with men of
exceptional business aptitude, wealth grows gradually by the adding
field to field and farm to farm; so with the limbs and instincts of
animals; these are but the things they have made or bought with their
money, or with money that has been left them by their forefathers,
which, though it is neither silver nor gold, but faith and protoplasm
only, is good money and capital notwithstanding.

I have already admitted that instinct may be modified by food or
drugs, which may affect a structure or habit as powerfully as we see
certain poisons affect the structure of plants by producing, as Mr.
Darwin tells us, very complex galls upon their leaves.  I do not,
therefore, for a moment insist on habit as the sole cause of
instinct.  Every habit must have had its originating cause, and the
causes which have started one habit will from time to time start or
modify others; nor can I explain why some individuals of a race
should be cleverer than others, any more than I can explain why they
should exist at all; nevertheless, I observe it to be a fact that
differences in intelligence and power of growth are universal in the
individuals of all those races which we can best watch.  I also most
readily admit that the common course of nature would both cause many
variations to arise independently of any desire on the part of the
animal (much as we have lately seen that the moons of Mars were on
the point of being discovered three hundred years ago, merely through
Galileo sending to Kepler a Latin anagram which Kepler could not
understand, and arranged into the line--"Salve umbistineum geminatum
Martia prolem," and interpreted to mean that Mars had two moons,
whereas Galileo had meant to say "Altissimum planetam tergeminum
observavi," meaning that he had seen Saturn's ring), and would also
preserve and accumulate such variations when they had arisen; but I
can no more believe that the wonderful adaptation of structures to
needs, which we see around us in such an infinite number of plants
and animals, can have arisen without a perception of those needs on
the part of the creature in whom the structure appears, than I can
believe that the form of the dray-horse or greyhound--so well adapted
both to the needs of the animal in his daily service to man, and to
the desires of man, that the creature should do him this daily
service--can have arisen without any desire on man's part to produce
this particular structure, or without the inherited habit of
performing the corresponding actions for man, on the part of the
greyhound and dray-horse.

And I believe that this will be felt as reasonable by the great
majority of my readers.  I believe that nine fairly intelligent and
observant men out of ten, if they were asked which they thought most
likely to have been the main cause of the development of the various
phases either of structure or instinct which we see around us,
namely--sense of need, or even whim, and hence occasional discovery,
helped by an occasional piece of good luck, communicated, it may be,
and generally adopted, long practised, remembered by offspring,
modified by changed surroundings, and accumulated in the course of
time--or, the accumulation of small divergent, indefinite, and
perfectly unintelligent variations, preserved through the survival of
their possessor in the struggle for existence, and hence in time
leading to wide differences from the original type--would answer in
favour of the former alternative; and if for no other cause yet for
this--that in the human race, which we are best able to watch, and
between which and the lower animals no difference in kind will, I
think, be supposed, but only in degree, we observe that progress must
have an internal current setting in a definite direction, but whither
we know not for very long beforehand; and that without such internal
current there is stagnation.  Our own progress--or variation--is due
not to small, fortuitous inventions or modifications which have
enabled their fortunate possessors to survive in times of difficulty,
not, in fact, to strokes of luck (though these, of course, have had
some effect--but not more, probably, than strokes of ill luck have
counteracted) but to strokes of cunning--to a sense of need, and to
study of the past and present which have given shrewd people a key
with which to unlock the chambers of the future.

Further, Mr. Darwin himself says ("Plants and Animals under
Domestication," ii. p. 237, ed. 1875):-

"But I think we must take a broader view and conclude that organic
beings when subjected during several generations to any change
whatever in their conditions tend to vary:  THE KIND OF VARIATION
WHICH ENSUES DEPENDING IN MOST CASES IN A FAR HIGHER DEGREE ON THE
NATURE OR CONSTITUTION OF THE BEING, THAN ON THE NATURE OF THE
CHANGED CONDITIONS."  And this we observe in man.  The history of a
man prior to his birth is more important as far as his success or
failure goes than his surroundings after birth, important though
these may indeed be.  The able man rises in spite of a thousand
hindrances, the fool fails in spite of every advantage.  "Natural
selection," however, does not make either the able man or the fool.
It only deals with him after other causes have made him, and would
seem in the end to amount to little more than to a statement of the
fact that when variations have arisen they will accumulate.  One
cannot look, as has already been said, for the origin of species in
that part of the course of nature which settles the preservation or
extinction of variations which have already arisen from some unknown
cause, but one must look for it in the causes that have led to
variation at all.  These causes must get, as it were, behind the back
of "natural selection," which is rather a shield and hindrance to our
perception of our own ignorance than an explanation of what these
causes are.

The remarks made above will apply equally to plants such as the
misletoe and red clover.  For the sake of brevity I will deal only
with the misletoe, which seems to be the more striking case.  Mr.
Darwin writes:-

"Naturalists continually refer to external conditions, such as
climate, food, &c., as the only possible cause of variation.  In one
limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is
preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure,
for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and
tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of
trees.  In the case of the misletoe, which draws its nourishment from
certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain
birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring
the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to
another, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of
this parasite with its relations to several distinct organic beings,
by the effect of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition
of the plant itself" ("Natural Selection," p. 3, ed. 1876).

I cannot see this.  To me it seems still more preposterous to account
for it by the action of "natural selection" operating upon indefinite
variations.  It would be preposterous to suppose that a bird very
different from a woodpecker should have had a conception of a
woodpecker, and so by volition gradually grown towards it.  So in
like manner with the misletoe.  Neither plant nor bird knew how far
they were going, or saw more than a very little ahead as to the means
of remedying this or that with which they were dissatisfied, or of
getting this or that which they desired; but given perceptions at
all, and thus a sense of needs and of the gratification of those
needs, and thus hope and fear, and a sense of content and discontent-
-given also the lowest power of gratifying those needs--given also
that some individuals have these powers in a higher degree than
others--given also continued personality and memory over a vast
extent of time--and the whole phenomena of species and genera resolve
themselves into an illustration of the old proverb, that what is one
man's meat is another man's poison.  Life in its lowest form under
the above conditions--and we cannot conceive of life at all without
them--would be bound to vary, and to result after not so very many
millions of years in the infinite forms and instincts which we see
around us.



CHAPTER XIII--LAMARCK AND MR. DARWIN



It will have been seen that in the preceding pages the theory of
evolution, as originally propounded by Lamarck, has been more than
once supported, as against the later theory concerning it put forward
by Mr. Darwin, and now generally accepted.

It is not possible for me, within the limits at my command, to do
anything like justice to the arguments that may be brought forward in
favour of either of these two theories.  Mr. Darwin's books are at
the command of every one; and so much has been discovered since
Lamarck's day, that if he were living now, he would probably state
his case very differently; I shall therefore content myself with a
few brief remarks, which will hardly, however, aspire to the dignity
of argument.

According to Mr. Darwin, differentiations of structure and instinct
have mainly come about through the accumulation of small, fortuitous
variations without intelligence or desire upon the part of the
creature varying; modification, however, through desire and sense of
need, is not denied entirely, inasmuch as considerable effect is
ascribed by Mr. Darwin to use and disuse, which involves, as has been
already said, the modification of a structure in accordance with the
wishes of its possessor.

According to Lamarck, genera and species have been evolved, in the
main, by exactly the same process as that by which human inventions
and civilisations are now progressing; and this involves that
intelligence, ingenuity, heroism, and all the elements of romance,
should have had the main share in the development of every herb and
living creature around us.

I take the following brief outline of the most important part of
Lamarck's theory from vol. xxxvi. of the Naturalist's Library
(Edinburgh, 1843):-

"The more simple bodies," says the editor, giving Lamarck's opinion
without endorsing it, "are easily formed, and this being the case, it
is easy to conceive how in the lapse of time animals of a more
complex structure should be produced, FOR IT MUST BE ADMITTED AS A
FUNDAMENTAL LAW, THAT THE PRODUCTION OF A NEW ORGAN IN AN ANIMAL BODY
RESULTS FROM ANY NEW WANT OR DESIRE IT MAY EXPERIENCE.  The first
effort of a being just beginning to develop itself must be to procure
subsistence, and hence in time there comes to be produced a stomach
or alimentary cavity."  (Thus we saw that the amoeba is in the habit
of "extemporising" a stomach when it wants one.)  "Other wants
occasioned by circumstances will lead to other efforts, which in
their turn will generate new organs."

Lamarck's wonderful conception was hampered by an unnecessary
adjunct, namely, a belief in an inherent tendency towards progressive
development in every low organism.  He was thus driven to account for
the presence of many very low and very ancient organisms at the
present day, and fell back upon the theory, which is not yet
supported by evidence, that such low forms are still continually
coming into existence from inorganic matter.  But there seems no
necessity to suppose that all low forms should possess an inherent
tendency towards progression.  It would be enough that there should
occasionally arise somewhat more gifted specimens of one or more
original forms.  These would vary, and the ball would be thus set
rolling, while the less gifted would remain in statu quo, provided
they were sufficiently gifted to escape extinction.

Nor do I gather that Lamarck insisted on continued personality and
memory so as to account for heredity at all, and so as to see life as
a single, or as at any rate, only a few, vast compound animals, but
without the connecting organism between each component item in the
whole creature, which is found in animals that are strictly called
compound.  Until continued personality and memory are connected with
the idea of heredity, heredity of any kind is little more than a term
for something which one does not understand.  But there seems little
a priori difficulty as regards Lamarck's main idea, now that Mr.
Darwin has familiarised us with evolution, and made us feel what a
vast array of facts can be brought forward in support of it.

Mr. Darwin tells us, in the preface to his last edition of the
"Origin of Species," that Lamarck was partly led to his conclusions
by the analogy of domestic productions.  It is rather hard to say
what these words imply; they may mean anything from a baby to an
apple dumpling, but if they imply that Lamarck drew inspirations from
the gradual development of the mechanical inventions of man, and from
the progress of man's ideas, I would say that of all sources this
would seem to be the safest and most fertile from which to draw.

Plants and animals under domestication are indeed a suggestive field
for study, but machines are the manner in which man is varying at
this moment.  We know how our own minds work, and how our mechanical
organisations--for, in all sober seriousness, this is what it comes
to--have progressed hand in hand with our desires; sometimes the
power a little ahead, and sometimes the desire; sometimes both
combining to form an organ with almost infinite capacity for
variation, and sometimes comparatively early reaching the limit of
utmost development in respect of any new conception, and accordingly
coming to a full stop; sometimes making leaps and bounds, and
sometimes advancing sluggishly.  Here we are behind the scenes, and
can see how the whole thing works.  We have man, the very animal
which we can best understand, caught in the very act of variation,
through his own needs, and not through the needs of others; the whole
process is a natural one; the varying of a creature as much in a wild
state as the ants and butterflies are wild.  There is less occasion
here for the continual "might be" and "may be," which we are
compelled to put up with when dealing with plants and animals, of the
workings of whose minds we can only obscurely judge.  Also, there is
more prospect of pecuniary profit attaching to the careful study of
machinery than can be generally hoped for from the study of the lower
animals; and though I admit that this consideration should not be
carried too far, a great deal of very unnecessary suffering will be
spared to the lower animals; for much that passes for natural history
is little better than prying into other people's business, from no
other motive than curiosity.  I would, therefore, strongly advise the
reader to use man, and the present races of man, and the growing
inventions and conceptions of man, as his guide, if he would seek to
form an independent judgement on the development of organic life.
For all growth is only somebody making something.

Lamarck's theories fell into disrepute, partly because they were too
startling to be capable of ready fusion with existing ideas; they
were, in fact, too wide a cross for fertility; partly because they
fell upon evil times, during the reaction that followed the French
Revolution; partly because, unless I am mistaken, he did not
sufficiently link on the experience of the race to that of the
individual, nor perceive the importance of the principle that
consciousness, memory, volition, intelligence, &c., vanish, or become
latent, on becoming intense.  He also appears to have mixed up matter
with his system, which was either plainly wrong, or so incapable of
proof as to enable people to laugh at him, and pooh-pooh him; but I
believe it will come to be perceived, that he has received somewhat
scant justice at the hands of his successors, and that his "crude
theories," as they have been somewhat cheaply called, are far from
having had their last say.

Returning to Mr. Darwin, we find, as we have already seen, that it is
hard to say exactly how much Mr. Darwin differs from Lamarck, and how
much he agrees with him.  Mr. Darwin has always maintained that use
and disuse are highly important, and this implies that the effect
produced on the parent should be remembered by the offspring, in the
same way as the memory of a wound is transmitted by one set of cells
to succeeding ones, who long repeat the scar, though it may fade
finally away.  Also, after dealing with the manner in which one eye
of a young flat-fish travels round the head till both eyes are on the
same side of the fish, he gives ("Natural Selection," p. 188, ed.
1875) an instance of a structure "which apparently owes its origin
exclusively to use or habit."  He refers to the tail of some American
monkeys "which has been converted into a wonderfully perfect
prehensile organ, and serves as a fifth hand.  A reviewer," he
continues, . . .  "remarks on this structure--'It is impossible to
believe that in any number of ages the first slight incipient
tendency to grasp, could preserve the lives of the individuals
possessing it, or favour their chance of having and of rearing
offspring.'  But there is no necessity for any such belief.  Habit,
and this almost implies that some benefit, great or small, is thus
derived, would in all probability suffice for the work."  If, then,
habit can do this--and it is no small thing to develop a wonderfully
perfect prehensile organ which can serve as a fifth hand--how much
more may not habit do, even though unaided, as Mr. Darwin supposes to
have been the case in this instance, by "natural selection"?  After
attributing many of the structural and instinctive differences of
plants and animals to the effects of use--as we may plainly do with
Mr. Darwin's own consent--after attributing a good deal more to
unknown causes, and a good deal to changed conditions, which are
bound, if at all important, to result either in sterility or
variation--how much of the work of originating species is left for
natural selection?--which, as Mr. Darwin admits ("Natural Selection,"
p. 63, ed. 1876), does not INDUCE VARIABILITY, but "implies only the
preservation of SUCH VARIATIONS AS ARISE, and are beneficial to the
being under its conditions of life?"  An important part assuredly,
and one which we can never sufficiently thank Mr. Darwin for having
put so forcibly before us, but an indirect part only, like the part
played by time and space, and not, I think, the one which Mr. Darwin
would assign to it.

Mr. Darwin himself has admitted that in the earlier editions of his
"Origin of Species" he "underrated, as it now seems probable, the
frequency and importance of modifications due to spontaneous
variability."  And this involves the having over-rated the action of
"natural selection" as an agent in the evolution of species.  But one
gathers that he still believes the accumulation of small and
fortuitous variations through the agency of "natural selection" to be
the main cause of the present divergencies of structure and instinct.
I do not, however, think that Mr. Darwin is clear about his own
meaning.  I think the prominence given to "natural selection" in
connection with the "origin of species" has led him, in spite of
himself, and in spite of his being on his guard (as is clearly shown
by the paragraph on page 63 "Natural Selection," above referred to),
to regard "natural selection" as in some way accounting for
variation, just as the use of the dangerous word "spontaneous,"--
though he is so often on his guard against it, and so frequently
prefaces it with the words "so-called,"--would seem to have led him
into very serious confusion of thought in the passage quoted at the
beginning of this paragraph.

For after saying that he had underrated "the frequency and importance
of modifications due to spontaneous variability," he continues, "but
it is impossible to attribute to this cause the innumerable
structures which are so well adapted to the habits of life of each
species."  That is to say, it is impossible to attribute these
innumerable structures to spontaneous variability.

What IS spontaneous variability?

Clearly, from his preceding paragraph, Mr. Darwin means only "so-
called spontaneous variations," such as "the appearance of a moss-
rose on a common rose, or of a nectarine on a peach-tree," which he
gives as good examples of so-called spontaneous variation.

And these variations are, after all, due to causes, but to unknown
causes; spontaneous variation being, in fact, but another name for
variation due to causes which we know nothing about, but in no
possible sense a CAUSE OF VARIATION.  So that when we come to put
clearly before our minds exactly what the sentence we are considering
amounts to, it comes to this:  that it is impossible to attribute the
innumerable structures which are so well adapted to the habits of
life of each species to UNKNOWN CAUSES.

"I can no more believe in THIS," continues Mr. Darwin, "than that the
well-adapted form of a race-horse or greyhound, which, before the
principle of selection by man was well understood, excited so much
surprise in the minds of the older naturalists, can THUS be
explained" ("Natural Selection," p. 171, ed. 1876).

Or, in other words, "I can no more believe that the well-adapted
structures of species are due to unknown causes, than I can believe
that the well-adapted form of a race-horse can be explained by being
attributed to unknown causes.

I have puzzled over this paragraph for several hours with the
sincerest desire to get at the precise idea which underlies it, but
the more I have studied it the more convinced I am that it does not
contain, or at any rate convey, any clear or definite idea at all.
If I thought it was a mere slip, I should not call attention to it;
this book will probably have slips enough of its own without
introducing those of a great man unnecessarily; but I submit that it
is necessary to call attention to it here, inasmuch as it is
impossible to believe that after years of reflection upon his
subject, Mr. Darwin should have written as above, especially in such
a place, if his mind was really clear about his own position.
Immediately after the admission of a certain amount of
miscalculation, there comes a more or less exculpatory sentence which
sounds so right that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would walk
through it, unless led by some exigency of their own position to
examine it closely but which yet upon examination proves to be as
nearly meaningless as a sentence can be.

The weak point in Mr. Darwin's theory would seem to be a deficiency,
so to speak, of motive power to originate and direct the variations
which time is to accumulate.  It deals admirably with the
accumulation of variations in creatures already varying, but it does
not provide a sufficient number of sufficiently important variations
to be accumulated.  Given the motive power which Lamarck suggested,
and Mr. Darwin's mechanism would appear (with the help of memory, as
bearing upon reproduction, of continued personality, and hence of
inherited habit, and of the vanishing tendency of consciousness) to
work with perfect ease.  Mr. Darwin has made us all feel that in some
way or other variations ARE ACCUMULATED, and that evolution is the
true solution of the present widely different structures around us,
whereas, before he wrote, hardly any one believed this.  However we
may differ from him in detail, the present general acceptance of
evolution must remain as his work, and a more valuable work can
hardly be imagined.  Nevertheless, I cannot think that "natural
selection," working upon small, fortuitous, indefinite, unintelligent
variations, would produce the results we see around us.  One wants
something that will give a more definite aim to variations, and
hence, at times, cause bolder leaps in advance.  One cannot but doubt
whether so many plants and animals would be being so continually
saved "by the skin of their teeth," as must be so saved if the
variations from which genera ultimately arise are as small in their
commencement and at each successive stage as Mr. Darwin seems to
believe.  God--to use the language of the Bible--is not extreme to
mark what is done amiss, whether with plant or beast or man; on the
other hand, when towers of Siloam fall, they fall on the just as well
as the unjust.

One feels, on considering Mr. Darwin's position, that if it be
admitted that there is in the lowest creature a power to vary, no
matter how small, one has got in this power as near the "origin of
species" as one can ever hope to get.  For no one professes to
account for the origin of life; but if a creature with a power to
vary reproduces itself at all, it must reproduce another creature
WHICH SHALL ALSO HAVE THE POWER TO VARY; so that, given time and
space enough, there is no knowing where such a creature could or
would stop.

If the primordial cell had been only capable of reproducing itself
once, there would have followed a single line of descendants, the
chain of which might at any moment have been broken by casualty.
Doubtless the millionth repetition would have differed very
materially from the original--as widely, perhaps, as we differ from
the primordial cell; but it would only have differed by addition, and
could no more in any generation resume its latest development without
having passed through the initial stage of being what its first
forefather was, and doing what its first forefather did, and without
going through all or a sufficient number of the steps whereby it had
reached its latest differentiation, than water can rise above its own
level.

The very idea, then, of reproduction involves, unless I am mistaken,
that, no matter how much the creature reproducing itself may gain in
power and versatility, it must still always begin WITH ITSELF AGAIN
in each generation.  The primordial cell being capable of reproducing
itself not only once, but many times over, each of the creatures
which it produces must be similarly gifted; hence the geometrical
ratio of increase and the existing divergence of type.  In each
generation it will pass rapidly and unconsciously through all the
earlier stages of which there has been infinite experience, and for
which the conditions are reproduced with sufficient similarity to
cause no failure of memory or hesitation; but in each generation,
when it comes to the part in which the course is not so clear, it
will become conscious; still, however, where the course is plain, as
in breathing, digesting, &c., retaining unconsciousness.  Thus organs
which present all the appearance of being designed--as, for example,
the tip for its beak prepared by the embryo chicken--would be
prepared in the end, as it were, by rote, and without sense of
design, though none the less owing their origin to design.

The question is not concerning evolution, but as to the main cause
which has led to evolution in such and such shapes.  To me it seems
that the "Origin of Variation," whatever it is, is the only true
"Origin of Species," and that this must, as Lamarck insisted, be
looked for in the needs and experiences of the creatures varying.
Unless we can explain the origin of variations, we are met by the
unexplained AT EVERY STEP in the progress of a creature from its
original homogeneous condition to its differentiation, we will say,
as an elephant; so that to say that an elephant has become an
elephant through the accumulation of a vast number of small,
fortuitous, but unexplained, variations in some lower creatures, is
really to say that it has become an elephant owing to a series of
causes about which we know nothing whatever, or, in other words, that
one does not know how it came to be an elephant.  But to say that an
elephant has become an elephant owing to a series of variations,
nine-tenths of which were caused by the wishes of the creature or
creatures from which the elephant is descended--this is to offer a
reason, and definitely put the insoluble one step further back.  The
question will then turn upon the sufficiency of the reason--that is
to say, whether the hypothesis is borne out by facts.

The effects of competition would, of course, have an extremely
important effect upon any creature, in the same way as any other
condition of nature under which it lived, must affect its sense of
need and its opinions generally.  The results of competition would
be, as it were, the decisions of an arbiter settling the question
whether such and such variation was really to the animal's advantage
or not--a matter on which the animal will, on the whole, have formed
a pretty fair judgement for itself.  UNDOUBTEDLY THE PAST DECISIONS
OF SUCH AN ARBITER WOULD AFFECT THE CONDUCT OF THE CREATURE, which
would have doubtless had its shortcomings and blunders, and would
amend them.  The creature would shape its course according to its
experience of the common course of events, but it would be
continually trying and often successfully, to evade the law by all
manner of sharp practice.  New precedents would thus arise, so that
the law would shift with time and circumstances; but the law would
not otherwise direct the channels into which life would flow, than as
laws, whether natural or artificial, have affected the development of
the widely differing trades and professions among mankind.  These
have had their origin rather in the needs and experiences of mankind
than in any laws.

To put much the same as the above in different words.  Assume that
small favourable variations are preserved more commonly, in
proportion to their numbers, than is perhaps the case, and assume
that considerable variations occur more rarely than they probably do
occur, how account for any variation at all?  "Natural selection"
cannot CREATE the smallest variation unless it acts through
perception of its mode of operation, recognised inarticulately, but
none the less clearly, by the creature varying.  "Natural selection"
operates on what it finds, and not on what it has made.  Animals that
have been wise and lucky live longer and breed more than others less
wise and lucky.  Assuredly.  The wise and lucky animals transmit
their wisdom and luck.  Assuredly.  They add to their powers, and
diverge into widely different directions.  Assuredly.  What is the
cause of this?  Surely the fact that they were capable of feeling
needs, and that they differed in their needs and manner of gratifying
them, and that they continued to live in successive generations,
rather than the fact that when lucky and wise they thrived and bred
more descendants.  This last is an accessory hardly less important
for the DEVELOPMENT of species than the fact of the continuation of
life at all; but it is an accessory of much the same kind as this,
for if animals continue to live at all, they must live IN SOME WAY,
and will find that there are good ways and bad ways of living.  An
animal which discovers the good way will gradually develop further
powers, and so species will get further and further apart; but the
origin of this is to be looked for, not in the power which decides
whether this or that way was good, but in the cause which determines
the creature, consciously or unconsciously, to try this or that way.

But Mr. Darwin might say that this is not a fair way of stating the
issue.  He might say, "You beg the question; you assume that there is
an inherent tendency in animals towards progressive development,
whereas I say that there is no good evidence of any such tendency.  I
maintain that the differences that have from time to time arisen have
come about mainly from causes so far beyond our ken, that we can only
call them spontaneous; and if so, natural selection which you must
allow to have at any rate played an important part in the
ACCUMULATION of variations, must also be allowed to be the nearest
thing to the cause of Specific differences, which we are able to
arrive at."

Thus he writes ("Natural Selection," p. 176, ed. 1876):  "Although we
have no good evidence of the existence in organic beings of a
tendency towards progressive development, yet this necessarily
follows, as I have attempted to show in the fourth chapter, through
the continued action of natural selection."  Mr. Darwin does not say
that organic beings have no tendency to vary at all, but only that
there is no good evidence that they have a tendency to progressive
development, which, I take it, means, to see an ideal a long way off,
and very different to their present selves, which ideal they think
will suit them, and towards which they accordingly make.  I would
admit this as contrary to all experience.  I doubt whether plants and
animals have any INNATE TENDENCY TO VARY at all, being led to
question this by gathering from "Plants and Animals under
Domestication" that this is Mr. Darwin's own opinion.  I am inclined
rather to think that they have only an innate POWER TO VARY slightly,
in accordance with changed conditions, and an innate capability of
being affected both in structure and instinct, by causes similar to
those which we observe to affect ourselves.  But however this may be,
they do vary somewhat, and unless they did, they would not in time
have come to be so widely different from each other as they now are.
The question is as to the origin and character of these variations.

We say they mainly originate in a creature through a sense of its
needs, and vary through the varying surroundings which will cause
those needs to vary, and through the opening up of new desires in
many creatures, as the consequence of the gratification of old ones;
they depend greatly on differences of individual capacity and
temperament; they are communicated, and in the course of time
transmitted, as what we call hereditary habits or structures, though
these are only, in truth, intense and epitomised memories of how
certain creatures liked to deal with protoplasm.  The question
whether this or that is really good or ill, is settled, as the proof
of the pudding by the eating thereof, i.e., by the rigorous
competitive examinations through which most living organisms must
pass.  Mr. Darwin says that there is no good evidence in support of
any great principle, or tendency on the part of the creature itself,
which would steer variation, as it were, and keep its head straight,
but that the most marvellous adaptations of structures to needs are
simply the result of small and blind variations, accumulated by the
operation of "natural selection," which is thus the main cause of the
origin of species.

Enough has perhaps already been said to make the reader feel that the
question wants reopening; I shall, therefore, here only remark that
we may assume no fundamental difference as regards intelligence,
memory, and sense of needs to exist between man and the lowest
animals, and that in man we do distinctly see a tendency towards
progressive development, operating through his power of profiting by
and transmitting his experience, but operating in directions which
man cannot foresee for any long distance.  We also see this in many
of the higher animals under domestication, as with horses which have
learnt to canter and dogs which point; more especially we observe it
along the line of latest development, where equilibrium of settled
convictions has not yet been fully attained.  One neither finds nor
expects much a priori knowledge, whether in man or beast; but one
does find some little in the beginnings of, and throughout the
development of, every habit, at the commencement of which, and on
every successive improvement in which, deductive and inductive
methods are, as it were, fused.  Thus the effect, where we can best
watch its causes, seems mainly produced by a desire for a definite
object--in some cases a serious and sensible desire, in others an
idle one, in others, again, a mistaken one; and sometimes by a
blunder which, in the hands of an otherwise able creature, has turned
up trumps.  In wild animals and plants the divergences have been
accumulated, if they answered to the prolonged desires of the
creature itself, and if these desires were to its true ultimate good;
with plants or animals under domestication they have been accumulated
if they answered a little to the original wishes of the creature, and
much, to the wishes of man.  As long as man continued to like them,
they would be advantageous to the creature; when he tired of them,
they would be disadvantageous to it, and would accumulate no longer.
Surely the results produced in the adaptation of structure to need
among many plants and insects are better accounted for on this, which
I suppose to be Lamarck's view, namely, by supposing that what goes
on amongst ourselves has gone on amongst all creatures, than by
supposing that these adaptations are the results of perfectly blind
and unintelligent variations.

Let me give two examples of such adaptations, taken from Mr. St.
George Mivart's "Genesis of Species," to which work I would wish
particularly to call the reader's attention.  He should also read Mr.
Darwin's answers to Mr. Mivart (p. 176, "Natural Selection," ed.
1876, and onwards).

Mr. Mivart writes:-

"Some insects which imitate leaves extend the imitation even to the
very injuries on those leaves made by the attacks of insects or
fungi.  Thus speaking of the walking-stick insects, Mr. Wallace says,
'One of these creatures obtained by myself in Borneo (ceroxylus
laceratus) was covered over with foliaceous excrescences of a clear
olive green colour, so as exactly to resemble a stick grown over by a
creeping moss or jungermannia.  The Dyak who brought it me assured me
it was grown over with moss, though alive, and it was only after a
most minute examination that I could convince myself it was not so.'
Again, as to the leaf butterfly, he says, 'We come to a still more
extraordinary part of the imitation, for we find representations of
leaves in every stage of decay, variously blotched, and mildewed, and
pierced with holes, and in many cases irregularly covered with
powdery black dots, gathered into patches and spots so closely
resembling the various kinds of minute fungi that grow on dead
leaves, that it is impossible to avoid thinking at first sight that
the butterflies themselves have been attacked by real fungi.'"

I can no more believe that these artificial fungi in which the moth
arrays itself are due to the accumulation of minute, perfectly blind,
and unintelligent variations, than I can believe that the artificial
flowers which a woman wears in her hat can have got there without
design; or that a detective puts on plain clothes without the
slightest intention of making his victim think that he is not a
policeman.

Again Mr. Mivart writes:-

"In the work just referred to ('The Fertilisation of Orchids'), Mr.
Darwin gives a series of the most wonderful and minute contrivances,
by which the visits of insects are utilised for the fertilisation of
orchids--structures so wonderful that nothing could well be more so,
except the attribution of their origin to minute, fortuitous, and
indefinite variations.

"The instances are too numerous and too long to quote, but in his
'Origin of Species' he describes two which must not be passed over.
In one (coryanthes) the orchid has its lower lip enlarged into a
bucket, above which stand two water-secreting horns.  These latter
replenish the bucket, from which, when half-filled, the water
overflows by a spout on one side.  Bees visiting the flower fall into
the bucket and crawl out at the spout.  By the peculiar arrangement
of the parts of the flower, the first bee which does so, carries away
the pollen mass glued to his back, and then when he has his next
involuntary bath in another flower, as he crawls out, the pollen
attached to him comes in contact with the stigma of that second
flower and fertilises it.  In the other example (catasetum), when a
bee gnaws a certain part of the flower, he inevitably touches a long
delicate projection which Mr. Darwin calls the 'antenna.'  'This
antenna transmits a vibration to a membrane which is instantly
ruptured; this sets free a spring by which the pollen mass is shot
forth like an arrow in the right direction, and adheres by its viscid
extremity to the back of the bee'" ("Genesis of Species," p. 63).

No one can tell a story so charmingly as Mr. Darwin, but I can no
more believe that all this has come about without design on the part
of the orchid, and a gradual perception of the advantages it is able
to take over the bee, and a righteous determination to enjoy them,
than I can believe that a mousetrap or a steam-engine is the result
of the accumulation of blind minute fortuitous variations in a
creature called man, which creature has never wanted either
mousetraps or steam-engines, but has had a sort of promiscuous
tendency to make them, and was benefited by making them, so that
those of the race who had a tendency to make them survived and left
issue, which issue would thus naturally tend to make more mousetraps
and more steam-engines.

Pursuing this idea still further, can we for a moment believe that
these additions to our limbs--for this is what they are--have mainly
come about through the occasional birth of individuals, who, without
design on their own parts, nevertheless made them better or worse,
and who, accordingly, either survived and transmitted their
improvement, or perished, they and their incapacity together?

When I can believe in this, then--and not till then--can I believe in
an origin of species which does not resolve itself mainly into sense
of need, faith, intelligence, and memory.  Then, and not till then,
can I believe that such organs as the eye and ear can have arisen in
any other way than as the result of that kind of mental ingenuity,
and of moral as well as physical capacity, without which, till then,
I should have considered such an invention as the steam-engine to be
impossible.



CHAPTER XIV--MR. MIVART AND MR. DARWIN



"A distinguished zoologist, Mr. St. George Mivart," writes Mr.
Darwin, "has recently collected all the objections which have ever
been advanced by myself and others against the theory of natural
selection, as propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself, and has
illustrated them with admirable art and force ("Natural Selection,"
p. 176, ed. 1876).  I have already referred the reader to Mr.
Mivart's work, but quote the above passage as showing that Mr. Mivart
will not, probably, be found to have left much unsaid that would
appear to make against Mr. Darwin's theory.  It is incumbent upon me
both to see how far Mr. Mivart's objections are weighty as against
Mr. Darwin, and also whether or not they tell with equal force
against the view which I am myself advocating.  I will therefore
touch briefly upon the most important of them, with the purpose of
showing that they are serious as against the doctrine that small
fortuitous variations are the origin of species, but that they have
no force against evolution as guided by intelligence and memory.

But before doing this, I would demur to the words used by Mr. Darwin,
and just quoted above, namely, "the theory of natural selection."  I
imagine that I see in them the fallacy which I believe to run through
almost all Mr. Darwin's work, namely, that "natural selection" is a
theory (if, indeed, it can be a theory at all), in some way
accounting for the origin of variation, and so of species--"natural
selection," as we have already seen, being unable to "induce
variability," and being only able to accumulate what--on the occasion
of each successive variation, and so during the whole process--must
have been originated by something else.

Again, Mr. Darwin writes--"In considering the origin of species it is
quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual
affinities of organic beings, or their embryological relations, their
geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such
facts, might come to the conclusion that species had not been
independently created, but had descended, like varieties from other
species.  Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded,
would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable
species inhabiting this world had been modified, so as to acquire
that perfection of structure and co-adaptation which justly excites
our admiration" ("Origin of Species," p. 2, ed. 1876).

After reading the above we feel that nothing more satisfactory could
be desired.  We are sure that we are in the hands of one who can
indeed tell us "how the innumerable species inhabiting this world
have been modified," and we are no less sure that though others may
have written upon the subject before, there has been, as yet, no
satisfactory explanation put forward of the grand principle upon
which modification has proceeded.  Then follows a delightful volume,
with facts upon facts concerning animals, all showing that species is
due to successive small modifications accumulated in the course of
nature.  But one cannot suppose that Lamarck ever doubted this; for
he can never have meant to say, that a low form of life made itself
into an elephant at one or two great bounds; and if he did not mean
this, he must have meant that it made itself into an elephant through
the accumulation of small successive modifications; these, he must
have seen, were capable of accumulation in the scheme of nature,
though he may not have dwelt on the manner in which this is
accomplished, inasmuch as it is obviously a matter of secondary
importance in comparison with the origin of the variations
themselves.  We believe, however, throughout Mr. Darwin's book, that
we are being told what we expected to be told; and so convinced are
we, by the facts adduced, that in some way or other evolution must be
true, and so grateful are we for being allowed to think this, that we
put down the volume without perceiving that, whereas Lamarck DID
adduce a great and general cause of variation, the insufficiency of
which, in spite of errors of detail, has yet to be shown, Mr.
Darwin's main cause of variation resolves itself into a confession of
ignorance.

This, however, should detract but little from our admiration for Mr.
Darwin's achievement.  Any one can make people see a thing if he puts
it in the right way, but Mr. Darwin made us see evolution, in spite
of his having put it, in what seems to not a few, an exceedingly
mistaken way.  Yet his triumph is complete, for no matter how much
any one now moves the foundation, he cannot shake the superstructure,
which has become so currently accepted as to be above the need of any
support from reason, and to be as difficult to destroy as it was
originally difficult of construction.  Less than twenty years ago, we
never met with, or heard of, any one who accepted evolution; we did
not even know that such a doctrine had been ever broached; unless it
was that some one now and again said that there was a very dreadful
book going about like a rampant lion, called "Vestiges of Creation,"
whereon we said that we would on no account read it, lest it should
shake our faith; then we would shake our heads and talk of the
preposterous folly and wickedness of such shallow speculations.  Had
not the book of Genesis been written for our learning?  Yet, now, who
seriously disputes the main principles of evolution?  I cannot
believe that there is a bishop on the bench at this moment who does
not accept them; even the "holy priests" themselves bless evolution
as their predecessors blessed Cleopatra--when they ought not.  It is
not he who first conceives an idea, nor he who sets it on its legs
and makes it go on all fours, but he who makes other people accept
the main conclusion, whether on right grounds or on wrong ones, who
has done the greatest work as regards the promulgation of an opinion.
And this is what Mr. Darwin has done for evolution.  He has made us
think that we know the origin of species, and so of genera, in spite
of his utmost efforts to assure us that we know nothing of the causes
from which the vast majority of modifications have arisen--that is to
say, he has made us think we know the whole road, though he has
almost ostentatiously blindfolded us at every step of the journey.
But to the end of time, if the question be asked, "Who taught people
to believe in evolution?" there can only be one answer--that it was
Mr. Darwin.

Mr. Mivart urges with much force the difficulty of STARTING any
modification on which "natural selection" is to work, and of getting
a creature to vary in any definite direction.  Thus, after quoting
from Mr. Wallace some of the wonderful cases of "mimicry" which are
to be found among insects, he writes:-

"Now, let us suppose that the ancestors of these various animals were
all destitute of the very special protection they at present possess,
as on the Darwinian hypothesis we must do.  Let it be also conceded
that small deviations from the antecedent colouring or form would
tend to make some of their ancestors escape destruction, by causing
them more or less frequently to be passed over or mistaken by their
persecutors.  Yet the deviation must, as the event has shown, in each
case, be in some definite direction, whether it be towards some other
animal or plant, or towards some dead or inorganic matter.  But as,
according to Mr. Darwin's theory, there is a constant tendency to
indefinite variation, and as the minute incipient variations will be
IN ALL DIRECTIONS, they must tend to neutralise each other, and at
first to form such unstable modifications, that it is difficult, if
not impossible, to see how such indefinite modifications of
insignificant beginnings can ever build up a sufficiently appreciable
resemblance to a leaf, bamboo, or other object for "natural
selection," to seize upon and perpetuate.  This difficulty is
augmented when we consider--a point to be dwelt upon hereafter--how
necessary it is that many individuals should be similarly modified
simultaneously.  This has been insisted on in an able article in the
'North British Review' for June 1867, p. 286, and the consideration
of the article has occasioned Mr. Darwin" ("Origin of Species," 5th
ed., p. 104) "to make an important modification in his views
("Genesis of Species," p. 38).

To this Mr. Darwin rejoins:-

"But in all the foregoing cases the insects in their original state,
no doubt, presented some rude and accidental resemblance to an object
commonly found in the stations frequented by them.  Nor is this
improbable, considering the almost infinite number of surrounding
objects, and the diversity of form and colour of the host of insects
that exist" ("Natural Selection," p. 182, ed. 1876).

Mr. Mivart has just said:  "It is difficult to see how such
indefinite modifications of insignificant beginnings CAN EVER BUILD
UP A SUFFICIENTLY APPRECIABLE RESEMBLANCE TO A LEAF, BAMBOO, OR OTHER
OBJECT, FOR 'NATURAL SELECTION' TO WORK UPON."

The answer is, that "natural selection" did not begin to work UNTIL,
FROM UNKNOWN CAUSES, AN APPRECIABLE RESEMBLANCE HAD NEVERTHELESS BEEN
PRESENTED.  I think the reader will agree with me that the
development of the lowest life into a creature which bears even "a
rude resemblance" to the objects commonly found in the station in
which it is moving in its present differentiation, requires more
explanation than is given by the word "accidental."

Mr. Darwin continues:  "As some rude resemblance is necessary for the
first start," &c.; and a little lower he writes:  "Assuming that an
insect originally happened to resemble in some degree a dead twig or
a decayed leaf, and that it varied slightly in many ways, then all
the variations which rendered the insect at all more like any such
object, and thus favoured its escape, would be preserved, while other
variations would be neglected, and ultimately lost, or if they
rendered the insect at all less like the imitated object, they would
be eliminated."

But here, again, we are required to begin with Natural Selection when
the work is already in great part done, owing to causes about which
we are left completely in the dark; we may, I think, fairly demur to
the insects ORIGINALLY happening to resemble in some degree a dead
twig or a decayed leaf.  And when we bear in mind that the
variations, being supposed by Mr. Darwin to be indefinite, or devoid
of aim, will appear in every direction, we cannot forget what Mr.
Mivart insists upon, namely, that the chances of many favourable
variations being counteracted by other unfavourable ones in the same
creature are not inconsiderable.  Nor, again, is it likely that the
favourable variation would make its mark upon the race, and escape
being absorbed in the course of a few generations, unless--as Mr.
Mivart elsewhere points out, in a passage to which I shall call the
reader's attention presently--a larger number of similarly varying
creatures made their appearance at the same time than there seems
sufficient reason to anticipate, if the variations can be called
fortuitous.

"There would," continues Mr. Darwin, "indeed be force in Mr. Mivart's
objection if we were to attempt to account for the above
resemblances, independently of 'natural selection,' through mere
fluctuating variability; but as the case stands, there is none."

This comes to saying that, if there was no power in nature which
operates so that of all the many fluctuating variations, those only
are preserved which tend to the resemblance which is beneficial to
the creature, then indeed there would be difficulty in understanding
how the resemblance could have come about; but that as there is a
beneficial resemblance to start with, and as there is a power in
nature which would preserve and accumulate further beneficial
resemblance, should it arise from this cause or that, the difficulty
is removed.  But Mr. Mivart does not, I take it, deny the existence
of such a power in nature, as Mr. Darwin supposes, though, if I
understand him rightly, he does not see that its operation UPON SMALL
FORTUITOUS VARIATIONS is at all the simple and obvious process, which
on a superficial view of the case it would appear to be.  He thinks--
and I believe the reader will agree with him--that this process is
too slow and too risky.  What he wants to know is, how the insect
came even rudely to resemble the object, and how, if its variations
are indefinite, we are ever to get into such a condition as to be
able to report progress, owing to the constant liability of the
creature which has varied favourably, to play the part of Penelope
and undo its work, by varying in some one of the infinite number of
other directions which are open to it--all of which, except this one,
tend to destroy the resemblance, and yet may be in some other respect
even more advantageous to the creature, and so tend to its
preservation.  Moreover, here, too, I think (though I cannot be
sure), we have a recurrence of the original fallacy in the words--"If
we were to account for the above resemblances, independently of
'natural selection,' through mere fluctuating variability."  Surely
Mr. Darwin does, after all, "account for the resemblances through
mere fluctuating variability," for "natural selection" does not
account for one single variation in the whole list of them from first
to last, other than indirectly, as shewn in the preceding chapter.

It is impossible for me to continue this subject further; but I would
beg the reader to refer to other paragraphs in the neighbourhood of
the one just quoted, in which he may--though I do not think he will--
see reason to think that I should have given Mr. Darwin's answer more
fully.  I do not quote Mr. Darwin's next paragraph, inasmuch as I see
no great difficulty about "the last touches of perfection in
mimicry," provided Mr. Darwin's theory will account for any mimicry
at all.  If it could do this, it might as well do more; but a strong
impression is left on my mind, that without the help of something
over and above the power to vary, which should give a definite aim to
variations, all the "natural selection" in the world would not have
prevented stagnation and self-stultification, owing to the indefinite
tendency of the variations, which thus could not have developed
either a preyer or a preyee, but would have gone round and round and
round the primordial cell till they were weary of it.

As against Mr. Darwin, therefore, I think that the objection just
given from Mr. Mivart is fatal.  I believe, also, that the reader
will feel the force of it much more strongly if he will turn to Mr.
Mivart's own pages.  Against the view which I am myself supporting,
the objection breaks down entirely, for grant "a little dose of
judgement and reason" on the part of the creature itself--grant also
continued personality and memory--and a definite tendency is at once
given to the variations.  The process is thus started, and is kept
straight, and helped forward through every stage by "the little dose
of reason," &c., which enabled it to take its first step.  We are, in
fact, no longer without a helm, but can steer each creature that is
so discontented with its condition, as to make a serious effort to
better itself, into SOME--and into a very distant--harbour.


It has been objected against Mr. Darwin's theory that if all species
and genera have come to differ through the accumulation of minute
but--as a general rule--fortuitous variations, there has not been
time enough, so far as we are able to gather, for the evolution of
all existing forms by so slow a process.  On this subject I would
again refer the reader to Mr. Mivart's book, from which I take the
following:-

"Sir William Thompson has lately advanced arguments from three
distinct lines of inquiry agreeing in one approximate result.  The
three lines of inquiry are--(1) the action of the tides upon the
earth's rotation; (2) the probable length of time during which the
sun has illuminated this planet; and (3) the temperature of the
interior of the earth.  The result arrived at by these investigations
is a conclusion that the existing state of things on the earth, life
on the earth, all geological history showing continuity of life, must
be limited within some such period of past time as one hundred
million years.  The first question which suggests itself, supposing
Sir W. Thompson's views to be correct, is:  Has this period been
anything like enough for the evolution of all organic forms by
'natural selection'?  The second is:  Has the period been anything
like enough for the deposition of the strata which must have been
deposited if all organic forms have been evolved by minute steps,
according to the Darwinian theory?"  ("Genesis of Species," p. 154).

Mr. Mivart then quotes from Mr. Murphy--whose work I have not seen--
the following passage:-

"Darwin justly mentions the greyhound as being equal to any natural
species in the perfect co-ordination of its parts, 'all adapted for
extreme fleetness and for running down weak prey.'  Yet it is an
artificial species (and not physiologically a species at all) formed
by a long-continued selection under domestication; and there is no
reason to suppose that any of the variations which have been selected
to form it have been other than gradual and almost imperceptible.
Suppose that it has taken five hundred years to form the greyhound
out of his wolf-like ancestor.  This is a mere guess, but it gives
the order of magnitude.  Now, if so, how long would it take to obtain
an elephant from a protozoon or even from a tadpole-like fish?  Ought
it not to take much more than a million times as long?"  ("Genesis of
Species," p. 155).

I should be very sorry to pronounce any opinion upon the foregoing
data; but a general impression is left upon my mind, that if the
differences between an elephant and a tadpole-like fish have arisen
from the accumulation of small variations that have had no direction
given them by intelligence and sense of needs, then no time
conceivable by man would suffice for their development.  But grant "a
little dose of reason and judgement," even to animals low down in the
scale of nature, and grant this, not only during their later life,
but during their embryological existence, and see with what
infinitely greater precision of aim and with what increased speed the
variations would arise.  Evolution entirely unaided by inherent
intelligence must be a very slow, if not quite inconceivable,
process.  Evolution helped by intelligence would still be slow, but
not so desperately slow.  One can conceive that there has been
sufficient time for the second, but one cannot conceive it for the
first.


I find from Mr. Mivart that objection has been taken to Mr. Darwin's
views, on account of the great odds that exist against the appearance
of any given variation at one and the same time, in a sufficient
number of individuals, to prevent its being obliterated almost as
soon as produced by the admixture of unvaried blood which would so
greatly preponderate around it; and indeed the necessity for a nearly
simultaneous and similar variation, or readiness so to vary on the
part of many individuals, seems almost a postulate for evolution at
all.  On this subject Mr. Mivart writes:-

"The 'North British Review' (speaking of the supposition that species
is changed by the survival of a few individuals in a century through
a similar and favourable variation) says -

"'It is very difficult to see how this can be accomplished, even when
the variation is eminently favourable indeed; and still more, when
the advantage gained is very slight, as must generally be the case.
The advantage, whatever it may be, is utterly outbalanced by
numerical inferiority.  A million creatures are born; ten thousand
survive to produce offspring.  One of the million has twice as good a
chance as any other of surviving, but the chances are fifty to one
against the gifted individuals being one of the hundred survivors.
No doubt the chances are twice as great against any other individual,
but this does not prevent their being enormously in favour of SOME
average individual.  However slight the advantage may be, if it is
shared by half the individuals produced, it will probably be present
in at least fifty-one of the survivors, and in a larger proportion of
their offspring; but the chances are against the preservation of any
one "sport" (i.e., sudden marked variation) in a numerous tribe.  The
vague use of an imperfectly-understood doctrine of chance, has led
Darwinian supporters, first, to confuse the two cases above
distinguished, and secondly, to imagine that a very slight balance in
favour of some individual sport must lead to its perpetuation.  All
that can be said is that in the above example the favoured sport
would be preserved once in fifty times.  Let us consider what will be
its influence on the main stock when preserved.  It will breed and
have a progeny of say 100; now this progeny will, on the whole, be
intermediate between the average individual and the sport.  The odds
in favour of one of this generation of the new breed will be, say one
and a half to one, as compared with the average individual; the odds
in their favour will, therefore, be less than that of their parents;
but owing to their greater number the chances are that about one and
a half of them would survive.  Unless these breed together--a most
improbable event--their progeny would again approach the average
individual; there would be 150 of them, and their superiority would
be, say in the ratio of one and a quarter to one; the probability
would now be that nearly two of them would survive, and have 200
children with an eighth superiority.  Rather more than two of these
would survive; but the superiority would again dwindle; until after a
few generations it would no longer be observed, and would count for
no more in the struggle for life than any of the hundred trifling
advantages which occur in the ordinary organs.

"'An illustration will bring this conception home.  Suppose a white
man to have been wrecked on an island inhabited by negroes, and to
have established himself in friendly relations with a powerful tribe,
whose customs he has learnt.  Suppose him to possess the physical
strength, energy, and ability of a dominant white race, and let the
food of the island suit his constitution; grant him every advantage
which we can conceive a white to possess over the native; concede
that in the struggle for existence, his chance of a long life will be
much superior to that of the native chiefs; yet from all these
admissions there does not follow the conclusion, that after a limited
or unlimited number of generations, the inhabitants of the island
will be white.  Our shipwrecked hero would probably become king; he
would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence; he
would have a great many wives and children . . . In the first
generation there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes,
much superior in average intelligence to the negroes.  We might
expect the throne for some generations to be occupied by a more or
less yellow king; but can any one believe that the whole island will
gradually acquire a white, or even a yellow population? . . . Darwin
says, that in the struggle for life a grain may turn the balance in
favour of a given structure, which will then be preserved.  But one
of the weights in the scale of nature is due to the number of a given
tribe.  Let there be 7000 A's and 7000 B's representing two varieties
of a given animal, and let all the B's, in virtue of a slight
difference of structure, have the better chance by one-thousandth
part.  We must allow that there is a slight probability that the
descendants of B will supplant the descendants of A; but let there be
7001 A's against 7000 B's at first, and the chances are once more
equal, while if there be 7002 A's to start, the odds would be laid on
the A's.  Thus they stand a greater chance of being killed; but,
then, they can better afford to be killed.  The grain will only turn
the scales when these are very nicely balanced, and an advantage in
numbers counts for weight, even as an advantage in structure.  As the
numbers of the favoured variety diminish, so must its relative
advantages increase, if the chance of its existence is to surpass the
chance of its extinction, until hardly any conceivable advantage
would enable the descendants of a single pair to exterminate the
descendants of many thousands, if they and their descendants are
supposed to breed freely with the inferior variety, and so gradually
lose their ascendancy,'" ("North British Review," June 1867, p. 286
"Genesis of Species," p. 64, and onwards).

Against this it should be remembered that there is always an
antecedent probability that several specimens of a given variation
would appear at one time and place.  This would probably be the case
even on Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, that the variations are fortuitous;
if they are mainly guided by sense of need and intelligence, it would
almost certainly be so, for all would have much the same idea as to
their well-being, and the same cause which would lead one to vary in
this direction would lead not a few others to do so at the same time,
or to follow suit.  Thus we see that many human ideas and inventions
have been conceived independently but simultaneously.  The chances,
moreover, of specimens that have varied successfully, intermarrying,
are, I think, greater than the reviewer above quoted from would
admit.  I believe that on the hypothesis that the variations are
fortuitous, and certainly on the supposition that they are
intelligent, they might be looked for in members of the same family,
who would hence have a better chance of finding each other out.
Serious as is the difficulty advanced by the reviewer as against Mr.
Darwin's theory, it may be in great measure parried without departing
from Mr. Darwin's own position, but the "little dose of judgement and
reason" removes it, absolutely and entirely.  As for the reviewer's
shipwrecked hero, surely the reviewer must know that Mr. Darwin would
no more expect an island of black men to be turned white, or even
perceptibly whitened after a few generations, than the reviewer
himself would do so.  But if we turn from what "might" or what
"would" happen to what "does" happen, we find that a few white
families have nearly driven the Indian from the United States, the
Australian natives from Australia, and the Maories from New Zealand.
True, these few families have been helped by immigration; but it will
be admitted that this has only accelerated a result which would
otherwise, none the less surely, have been effected.

There is all the difference between a sudden sport, or even a variety
introduced from a foreign source, and the gradual, intelligent, and,
in the main, steady, growth of a race towards ends always a little,
but not much, in advance of what it can at present compass, until it
has reached equilibrium with its surroundings.  So far as Mr.
Darwin's variations are of the nature of "sport," i.e., rare, and
owing to nothing that we can in the least assign to any known cause,
the reviewer's objections carry much weight.  Against the view here
advocated, they are powerless.

I cannot here go into the difficulties of the geologic record, but
they too will, I believe, be felt to be almost infinitely simplified
by supposing the development of structure and instinct to be guided
by intelligence and memory, which, even under unstable conditions,
would be able to meet in some measure the demands made upon them.

When Mr. Mivart deals with evolution and ethics, I am afraid that I
differ from him even more widely than I have done from Mr. Darwin.
He writes ("Genesis of Species," p. 234):  "That 'natural selection'
could not have produced from the sensations of pleasure and pain
experienced by brutes a higher degree of morality than was useful;
therefore it could have produced any amount of 'beneficial habits,'
but not abhorrence of certain acts as impure and sinful."

Possibly "natural selection" may not be able to do much in the way of
accumulating variations that do not arise; but that, according to the
views supported in this volume, all that is highest and most
beautiful in the soul, as well as in the body, could be, and has
been, developed from beings lower than man, I do not greatly doubt.
Mr. Mivart and myself should probably differ as to what is and what
is not beautiful.  Thus he writes of "the noble virtue of a Marcus
Aurelius" (p. 235), than whom, for my own part, I know few
respectable figures in history to whom I am less attracted.  I cannot
but think that Mr. Mivart has taken his estimate of this emperor at
second-hand, and without reference to the writings which happily
enable us to form a fair estimate of his real character.

Take the opening paragraphs of the "Thoughts" of Marcus Aurelius, as
translated by Mr. Long:-

"From the reputation and remembrance of my father [I learned] modesty
and a manly character; from my mother, piety and beneficence,
abstinence not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts. . .
.  From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools,
and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such
things a man should spend liberally . . . From Diognetus . . . [I
learned] to have become intimate with philosophy, . . . and to have
written dialogues in my youth, and to have desired a plank bed and
skin, and whatever else of the kind belongs to the Greek discipline.
. . .  From Rusticus I received the impression that my character
required improvement and discipline;" and so on to the end of the
chapter, near which, however, it is right to say that there appears a
redeeming touch, in so far as that he thanks the gods that he could
not write poetry, and that he had never occupied himself about the
appearance of things in the heavens.

Or, again, opening Mr. Long's translation at random I find (p. 37):-

"As physicians have always their instruments and knives ready for
cases which suddenly require their skill, so do thou have principles
ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing
everything, even the smallest, with a recollection of the bond that
unites the divine and human to one another.  For neither wilt thou do
anything well which pertains to man without at the same time having a
reference to things divine; nor the contrary."

Unhappy one!  No wonder the Roman empire went to pieces soon after
him.  If I remember rightly, he established and subsidised
professorships in all parts of his dominions.  Whereon the same
befell the arts and literature of Rome as befell Italian painting
after the Academic system had taken root at Bologna under the
Caracci.  Mr. Martin Tupper, again, is an amiable and well-meaning
man, but we should hardly like to see him in Lord Beaconsfield's
place.  The Athenians poisoned Socrates; and Aristophanes--than whom
few more profoundly religious men have ever been born--did not, so
far as we can gather, think the worse of his countrymen on that
account.  It is not improbable that if they had poisoned Plato too,
Aristophanes would have been well enough pleased; but I think he
would have preferred either of these two men to Marcus Aurelius.

I know nothing about the loving but manly devotion of a St. Lewis,
but I strongly suspect that Mr. Mivart has taken him, too, upon
hearsay.

On the other hand, among dogs we find examples of every heroic
quality, and of all that is most perfectly charming to us in man.

As for the possible development of the more brutal human natures from
the more brutal instincts of the lower animals, those who read a
horrible story told in a note, pp. 233, 234 of Mr. Mivart's "Genesis
of Species," will feel no difficulty on that score.  I must admit,
however, that the telling of that story seems to me to be a mistake
in a philosophical work, which should not, I think, unless under
compulsion, deal either with the horrors of the French Revolution--or
of the Spanish or Italian Inquisition.

For the rest of Mr. Mivart's objections, I must refer the reader to
his own work.  I have been unable to find a single one, which I do
not believe to be easily met by the Lamarckian view, with the
additions (if indeed they are additions, for I must own to no very
profound knowledge of what Lamarck did or did not say), which I have
in this volume proposed to make to it.  At the same time I admit,
that as against the Darwinian view, many of them seem quite
unanswerable.



CHAPTER XV--CONCLUDING REMARKS



Here, then, I leave my case, though well aware that I have crossed
the threshold only of my subject.  My work is of a tentative
character, put before the public as a sketch or design for a,
possibly, further endeavour, in which I hope to derive assistance
from the criticisms which this present volume may elicit.  Such as it
is, however, for the present I must leave it.

We have seen that we cannot do anything thoroughly till we can do it
unconsciously, and that we cannot do anything unconsciously till we
can do it thoroughly; this at first seems illogical; but logic and
consistency are luxuries for the gods, and the lower animals, only.
Thus a boy cannot really know how to swim till he can swim, but he
cannot swim till he knows how to swim.  Conscious effort is but the
process of rubbing off the rough corners from these two contradictory
statements, till they eventually fit into one another so closely that
it is impossible to disjoin them.

Whenever, therefore, we see any creature able to go through any
complicated and difficult process with little or no effort--whether
it be a bird building her nest, or a hen's egg making itself into a
chicken, or an ovum turning itself into a baby--we may conclude that
the creature has done the same thing on a very great number of past
occasions.

We found the phenomena exhibited by heredity to be so like those of
memory, and to be so utterly inexplicable on any other supposition,
that it was easier to suppose them due to memory in spite of the fact
that we cannot remember having recollected, than to believe that
because we cannot so remember, therefore the phenomena cannot be due
to memory.

We were thus led to consider "personal identity," in order to see
whether there was sufficient reason for denying that the experience,
which we must have clearly gained somewhere, was gained by us when we
were in the persons of our forefathers; we found, not without
surprise, that unless we admitted that it might be so gained, in so
far as that we once ACTUALLY WERE our remotest ancestor, we must
change our ideas concerning personality altogether.

We therefore assumed that the phenomena of heredity, whether as
regards instinct or structure were mainly due to memory of past
experiences, accumulated and fused till they had become automatic, or
quasi automatic, much in the same way as after a long life -


. .  "Old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain."


After dealing with certain phenomena of memory, but more especially
with its abeyance and revival, we inquired what the principal
corresponding phenomena of life and species should be, on the
hypothesis that they were mainly due to memory.

I think I may say that we found the hypothesis fit in with actual
facts in a sufficiently satisfactory manner.  We found not a few
matters, as, for example, the sterility of hybrids, the phenomena of
old age, and puberty as generally near the end of development,
explain themselves with more completeness than I have yet heard of
their being explained on any other hypothesis.

We considered the most important difficulty in the way of instinct as
hereditary habit, namely, the structure and instincts of neuter
insects; these are very unlike those of their parents, and cannot
apparently be transmitted to offspring by individuals of the previous
generation, in whom such structure and instincts appeared, inasmuch
as these creatures are sterile.  I do not say that the difficulty is
wholly removed, inasmuch as some obscurity must be admitted to remain
as to the manner in which the structure of the larva is aborted; this
obscurity is likely to remain till we know more of the early history
of civilisation among bees than I can find that we know at present;
but I believe the difficulty was reduced to such proportions as to
make it little likely to be felt in comparison with that of
attributing instinct to any other cause than inherited habit, or
inherited habit modified by changed conditions.

We then inquired what was the great principle underlying variation,
and answered, with Lamarck, that it must be "sense of need;" and
though not without being haunted by suspicion of a vicious circle,
and also well aware that we were not much nearer the origin of life
than when we started, we still concluded that here was the truest
origin of species, and hence of genera; and that the accumulation of
variations, which in time amounted to specific and generic
differences, was due to intelligence and memory on the part of the
creature varying, rather than to the operation of what Mr. Darwin has
called "natural selection."  At the same time we admitted that the
course of nature is very much as Mr. Darwin has represented it, in
this respect, in so far as that there is a struggle for existence,
and that the weaker must go to the wall.  But we denied that this
part of the course of nature would lead to much, if any, accumulation
of variation, unless the variation was directed mainly by intelligent
sense of need, with continued personality and memory.

We conclude, therefore, that the small, structureless, impregnate
ovum from which we have each one of us sprung, has a potential
recollection of all that has happened to each one of its ancestors
prior to the period at which any such ancestor has issued from the
bodies of its progenitors--provided, that is to say, a sufficiently
deep, or sufficiently often-repeated, impression has been made to
admit of its being remembered at all.

Each step of normal development will lead the impregnate ovum up to,
and remind it of, its next ordinary course of action, in the same way
as we, when we recite a well-known passage, are led up to each
successive sentence by the sentence which has immediately preceded
it.

And for this reason, namely, that as it takes two people "to tell" a
thing--a speaker and a comprehending listener, without which last,
though much may have been said, there has been nothing told--so also
it takes two people, as it were, to "remember" a thing--the creature
remembering, and the surroundings of the creature at the time it last
remembered.  Hence, though the ovum immediately after impregnation is
instinct with all the memories of both parents, not one of these
memories can normally become active till both the ovum itself, and
its surroundings, are sufficiently like what they respectively were,
when the occurrence now to be remembered last took place.  The memory
will then immediately return, and the creature will do as it did on
the last occasion that it was in like case as now.  This ensures that
similarity of order shall be preserved in all the stages of
development, in successive generations.

Life, then, is faith founded upon experience, which experience is in
its turn founded upon faith--or more simply, it is memory.  Plants
and animals only differ from one another because they remember
different things; plants and animals only grow up in the shapes they
assume because this shape is their memory, their idea concerning
their own past history.

Hence the term "Natural History," as applied to the different plants
and animals around us.  For surely the study of natural history means
only the study of plants and animals themselves, which, at the moment
of using the words "Natural History," we assume to be the most
important part of nature.

A living creature well supported by a mass of healthy ancestral
memory is a young and growing creature, free from ache or pain, and
thoroughly acquainted with its business so far, but with much yet to
be reminded of.  A creature which finds itself and its surroundings
not so unlike those of its parents about the time of their begetting
it, as to be compelled to recognise that it never yet was in any such
position, is a creature in the heyday of life.  A creature which
begins to be aware of itself is one which is beginning to recognise
that the situation is a new one.

It is the young and fair, then, who are the truly old and the truly
experienced; it is they who alone have a trustworthy memory to guide
them; they alone know things as they are, and it is from them that,
as we grow older, we must study if we would still cling to truth.
The whole charm of youth lies in its advantage over age in respect of
experience, and where this has for some reason failed, or been
misapplied, the charm is broken.  When we say that we are getting
old, we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are
suffering from inexperience, which drives us into doing things which
we do not understand, and lands us, eventually, in the utter
impotence of death.  The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of little
children.

A living creature bereft of all memory dies.  If bereft of a great
part of memory, it swoons or sleeps; and when its memory returns, we
say it has returned to life.

Life and death, then, should be memory and forgetfulness, for we are
dead to all that we have forgotten.

Life is that property of matter whereby it can remember.  Matter
which can remember is living; matter which cannot remember is dead.

LIFE, THEN, IS MEMORY.  The life of a creature is the memory of a
creature.  We are all the same stuff to start with, but we remember
different things, and if we did not remember different things we
should be absolutely like each other.  As for the stuff itself of
which we are made, we know nothing
save only that it is "such as dreams are made of."

I am aware that there are many expressions throughout this book,
which are not scientifically accurate.  Thus I imply that we tend
towards the centre of the earth, when, I believe, I should say we
tend towards to the centre of gravity of the earth.  I speak of "the
primordial cell," when I mean only the earliest form of life, and I
thus not only assume a single origin of life when there is no
necessity for doing so, and perhaps no evidence to this effect, but I
do so in spite of the fact that the amoeba, which seems to be "the
simplest form of life," does not appear to be a cell at all.  I have
used the word "beget," of what, I am told, is asexual generation,
whereas the word should be confined to sexual generation only.  Many
more such errors have been pointed out to me, and I doubt not that a
larger number remain of which I know nothing now, but of which I may
perhaps be told presently.

I did not, however, think that in a work of this description the
additional words which would have been required for scientific
accuracy were worth the paper and ink and loss of breadth which their
introduction would entail.  Besides, I know nothing about science,
and it is as well that there should be no mistake on this head; I
neither know, nor want to know, more detail than is necessary to
enable me to give a fairly broad and comprehensive view of my
subject.  When for the purpose of giving this, a matter importunately
insisted on being made out, I endeavoured to make it out as well as I
could; otherwise--that is to say, if it did not insist on being
looked into, in spite of a good deal of snubbing, I held that, as it
was blurred and indistinct in nature, I had better so render it in my
work.

Nevertheless, if one has gone for some time through a wood full of
burrs, some of them are bound to stick.  I am afraid that I have left
more such burrs in one part and another of my book, than the kind of
reader whom I alone wish to please will perhaps put up with.
Fortunately, this kind of reader is the best-natured critic in the
world, and is long suffering of a good deal that the more consciously
scientific will not tolerate; I wish, however, that I had not used
such expressions as "centres of thought and action" quite so often.

As for the kind of inaccuracy already alluded to, my reader will not,
I take it, as a general rule, know, or wish to know, much more about
science than I do, sometimes perhaps even less; so that he and I
shall commonly be wrong in the same places, and our two wrongs will
make a sufficiently satisfactory right for practical purposes.

Of course, if I were a specialist writing a treatise or primer on
such and such a point of detail, I admit that scientific accuracy
would be de rigueur; but I have been trying to paint a picture rather
than to make a diagram, and I claim the painter's license "quidlibet
audendi."  I have done my utmost to give the spirit of my subject,
but if the letter interfered with the spirit, I have sacrificed it
without remorse.

May not what is commonly called a scientific subject have artistic
value which it is a pity to neglect?  But if a subject is to be
treated artistically--that is to say, with a desire to consider not
only the facts, but the way in which the reader will feel concerning
those facts, and the way in which he will wish to see them rendered,
thus making his mind a factor of the intention, over and above the
subject itself--then the writer must not be denied a painter's
license.  If one is painting a hillside at a sufficient distance, and
cannot see whether it is covered with chestnut-trees or walnuts, one
is not bound to go across the valley to see.  If one is painting a
city, it is not necessary that one should know the names of the
streets.  If a house or tree stands inconveniently for one's purpose,
it must go without more ado; if two important features, neither of
which can be left out, want a little bringing together or separating
before the spirit of the place can be well given, they must be
brought together, or separated.  Which is a more truthful view, of
Shrewsbury, for example, from a spot where St. Alkmund's spire is in
parallax with St. Mary's--a view which should give only the one spire
which can be seen, or one which should give them both, although the
one is hidden?  There would be, I take it, more representation in the
misrepresentation than in the representation--"the half would be
greater than the whole," unless, that is to say, one expressly told
the spectator that St. Alkmund's spire was hidden behind St. Mary's--
a sort of explanation which seldom adds to the poetical value of any
work of art.  Do what one may, and no matter how scientific one may
be, one cannot attain absolute truth.  The question is rather, how do
people like to have their error? than, will they go without any error
at all?  All truth and no error cannot be given by the scientist more
than by the artist; each has to sacrifice truth in one way or
another; and even if perfect truth could be given, it is doubtful
whether it would not resolve itself into unconsciousness pure and
simple, consciousness being, as it were, the clash of small
conflicting perceptions, without which there is neither intelligence
nor recollection possible.  It is not, then, what a man has said, nor
what he has put down with actual paint upon his canvass, which speaks
to us with living language--IT IS WHAT HE HAS THOUGHT TO US (as is so
well put in the letter quoted on page 83), by which our opinion
should be guided;--what has he made us feel that he had it in him,
and wished to do?  If he has said or painted enough to make us feel
that he meant and felt as we should wish him to have done, he has
done the utmost that man can hope to do.

I feel sure that no additional amount of technical accuracy would
make me more likely to succeed, in this respect, if I have otherwise
failed; and as this is the only success about which I greatly care, I
have left my scientific inaccuracies uncorrected, even when aware of
them.  At the same time, I should say that I have taken all possible
pains as regards anything which I thought could materially affect the
argument one way or another.

It may be said that I have fallen between two stools, and that the
subject is one which, in my hands, has shown neither artistic nor
scientific value.  This would be serious.  To fall between two
stools, and to be hanged for a lamb, are the two crimes which -


"Nor gods, nor men, nor any schools allow."


Of the latter, I go in but little danger; about the former, I shall
know better when the public have enlightened me.

The practical value of the views here advanced (if they be admitted
as true at all) would appear to be not inconsiderable, alike as
regards politics or the well-being of the community, and medicine
which deals with that of the individual.  In the first case we see
the rationale of compromise, and the equal folly of making
experiments upon too large a scale, and of not making them at all.
We see that new ideas cannot be fused with old, save gradually and by
patiently leading up to them in such a way as to admit of a sense of
continued identity between the old and the new.  This should teach us
moderation.  For even though nature wishes to travel in a certain
direction, she insists on being allowed to take her own time; she
will not be hurried, and will cull a creature out even more surely
for forestalling her wishes too readily, than for lagging a little
behind them.  So the greatest musicians, painters, and poets owe
their greatness rather to their fusion and assimilation of all the
good that has been done up to, and especially near about, their own
time, than to any very startling steps they have taken in advance.
Such men will be sure to take some, and important, steps forward; for
unless they have this power, they will not be able to assimilate well
what has been done already, and if they have it, their study of older
work will almost indefinitely assist it; but, on the whole, they owe
their greatness to their completer fusion and assimilation of older
ideas; for nature is distinctly a fairly liberal conservative rather
than a conservative liberal.  All which is well said in the old
couplet -


"Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to throw the old aside."


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 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.

Friends have complained to me that they can never tell whether I am
in jest or earnest.  I think, however, it should be sufficiently
apparent that I am in very serious earnest, perhaps too much so, from
the first page of my book to the last.  I am not aware of a single
argument put forward which is not a bona fide argument, although,
perhaps, sometimes admitting of a humorous side.  If a grain of corn
looks like a piece of chaff, I confess I prefer it occasionally to
something which looks like a grain, but which turns out to be a piece
of chaff only.  There is no lack of matter of this description going
about in some very decorous volumes; I have, therefore, endeavoured,
for a third time, to furnish the public with a book whose fault
should lie rather in the direction of seeming less serious than it
is, than of being less so than it seems.

At the same time, I admit that when I began to write upon my subject
I did not seriously believe in it.  I saw, as it were, a pebble upon
the ground, with a sheen that pleased me; taking it up, I turned it
over and over for my amusement, and found it always grow brighter and
brighter the more I examined it.  At length I became fascinated, and
gave loose rein to self-illusion.  The aspect of the world seemed
changed; the trifle which I had picked up idly had proved to be a
talisman of inestimable value, and had opened a door through which I
caught glimpses of a strange and interesting transformation.  Then
came one who told me that the stone was not mine, but that it had
been dropped by Lamarck, to whom it belonged rightfully, but who had
lost it; whereon I said I cared not who was the owner, if only I
might use it and enjoy it.  Now, therefore, having polished it with
what art and care one who is no jeweller could bestow upon it, I
return it, as best I may, to its possessor.

What am I to think or say?  That I tried to deceive others till I
have fallen a victim to my own falsehood?  Surely this is the most
reasonable conclusion to arrive at.  Or that I have really found
Lamarck's talisman, which had been for some time lost sight of?

Will the reader bid me wake with him to a world of chance and
blindness?  Or can I persuade him to dream with me of a more living
faith than either he or I had as yet conceived as possible?  As I
have said, reason points remorselessly to an awakening, but faith and
hope still beckon to the dream.



APPENDIX--AUTHOR'S ADDENDA



{2}  But I may say in passing that though articulate speech and the
power to maintain the upright position come much about the same time,
yet the power of making gestures of more or less significance is
prior to that of walking uprightly, and therefore to that of speech.
Not only is gesticulation the earlier faculty in the individual, but
it was so also in the history of our race.  Our semi-simious
ancestors could gesticulate long before they could talk articulately.
It is significant of this that gesture is still found easier than
speech even by adults, as may be observed on our river steamers,
where the captain moves his hand but does not speak, a boy
interpreting his gesture into language.  To develop this here would
complicate the argument; let us be content to note it and pass on.

{3}  Nevertheless, the smallness of the effort touches upon the
deepest mystery of organic life--the power to originate, to err, to
sport, the power which differentiates the living organism from the
machine, however complicated.  The action and working of this power
is found to be like the action of any other mental and, therefore,
physical power (for all physical action of living beings is but the
expression of a mental action), but I can throw no light upon its
origin any more than upon the origin of life.  This, too, must be
noted and passed over.

{4}  How different from the above uncertain sound is the full clear
note of one who truly believes:-

"The Church of England is commonly called a Lutheran church, but
whoever compares it with the Lutheran churches on the Continent will
have reason to congratulate himself on its superiority.  It is in
fact a church sui generis, yielding in point of dignity, purity and
decency of its doctrines, establishment and ceremonies, to no
congregation of christians in the world; modelled to a certain and
considerable extent, but not entirely, by our great and wise pious
reformers on the doctrines of Luther, so far as they are in
conformity with the sure and solid foundation on which it rests, and
we trust for ever will rest--the authority of the Holy Scriptures,
Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone."  ("Sketch of
Modern and Ancient Geography," by Dr. Samuel Butler, of Shrewsbury.
Ed. 1813.)

This is the language of faith, compelled by the exigencies of the
occasion to be for a short time conscious of its own existence, but
surely very little likely to become so to the extent of feeling the
need of any assistance from reason.  It is the language of one whose
convictions are securely founded upon the current opinion of those
among whom he has been born and bred; and of all merely post-natal
faiths a faith so founded is the strongest.  It is pleasing to see
that the only alterations in the edition of 1838 consist in spelling
Christians with a capital C and the omission of the epithet "wise" as
applied to the reformers, an omission more probably suggested by a
desire for euphony than by any nascent doubts concerning the
applicability of the epithet itself.

{5}  Or take, again, the constitution of the Church of England.  The
bishops are the spiritual queens, the clergy are the neuter workers.
They differ widely in structure (for dress must be considered as a
part of structure), in the delicacy of the food they eat and the kind
of house they inhabit, and also in many of their instincts, from the
bishops, who are their spiritual parents.  Not only this, but there
are two distinct kinds of neuter workers--priests and deacons; and of
the former there are deans, archdeacons, prebends, canons, rural
deans, vicars, rectors, curates, yet all spiritually sterile.  In
spite of this sterility, however, is there anyone who will maintain
that the widely differing structures and instincts of these castes
are not due to inherited spiritual habit?  Still less will he be
inclined to do so when he reflects that by such slight modification
of treatment as consecration and endowment any one of them can be
rendered spiritually fertile.



Footnotes:

{1}  Although the original edition of "Life and Habit" is dated 1878,
the book was actually published in December, 1877.





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 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


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