Books: Luck or Cunning?

S >> Samuel Butler >> Luck or Cunning?

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"Of old," he exclaims, "hast Thou laid the foundation of the earth;
and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but
Thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as
a vesture shalt Thou change them and they shall be changed; but Thou
art the same, and Thy years shall have no end." {135a}

I know not what theologians may think of this passage, but from a
scientific point of view it is unassailable. So again, "O Lord," he
exclaims, "Thou hast searched me out, and known me: Thou knowest my
down-sitting and mine up-rising; Thou understandest my thoughts long
before. Thou art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out
all my ways. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue but Thou, O
Lord, knowest it altogether . . . Whither shall I go, then, from Thy
Spirit? Or whither shall I go, then, from Thy presence? If I climb
up into heaven Thou art there: if I go down to hell, Thou art there
also. If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the
uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall Thy hand lead me
and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Peradventure the
darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned to day. Yea,
the darkness is no darkness with Thee, but . . . the darkness and
light to Thee are both alike." {136a}

What convention or short cut can symbolise for us the results of
laboured and complicated chains of reasoning or bring them more
aptly and concisely home to us than the one supplied long since by
the word God? What can approach more nearly to a rendering of that
which cannot be rendered--the idea of an essence omnipresent in all
things at all times everywhere in sky and earth and sea; ever
changing, yet the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; the
ineffable contradiction in terms whose presence none can either ever
enter, or ever escape? Or rather, what convention would have been
more apt if it had not been lost sight of as a convention and come
to be regarded as an idea in actual correspondence with a more or
less knowable reality? A convention was converted into a fetish,
and now that its worthlessness as a fetish is being generally felt,
its great value as a hieroglyph or convention is in danger of being
lost sight of. No doubt the psalmist was seeking for Sir William
Grove's conception, if haply he might feel after it and find it, and
assuredly it is not far from every one of us. But the course of
true philosophy never did run smooth; no sooner have we fairly
grasped the conception of a single eternal and for ever unknowable
underlying substance, then we are faced by mind and matter. Long-
standing ideas and current language alike lead us to see these as
distinct things--mind being still commonly regarded as something
that acts on body from without as the wind blows upon a leaf, and as
no less an actual entity than the body. Neither body nor mind seems
less essential to our existence than the other; not only do we feel
this as regards our own existence, but we feel it also as pervading
the whole world of life; everywhere we see body and mind working
together towards results that must be ascribed equally to both; but
they are two, not one; if, then, we are to have our monistic
conception, it would seem as though one of these must yield to the
other; which, therefore, is it to be?

This is a very old question. Some, from time immemorial, have tried
to get rid of matter by reducing it to a mere concept of the mind,
and their followers have arrived at conclusions that may be
logically irrefragable, but are as far removed from common sense as
they are in accord with logic; at any rate they have failed to
satisfy, and matter is no nearer being got rid of now than it was
when the discussion first began. Others, again, have tried
materialism, have declared the causative action of both thought and
feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying fixed laws of
which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants, but with
which they have no causal connection. The same thing has happened
to these men as to their opponents; they made out an excellent case
on paper, but thought and feeling still remain the mainsprings of
action that they have been always held to be. We still say, "I gave
him 5 pounds because I felt pleased with him, and thought he would
like it;" or, "I knocked him down because I felt angry, and thought
I would teach him better manners." Omnipresent life and mind with
appearances of brute non-livingness--which appearances are
deceptive; this is one view. Omnipresent non-livingness or
mechanism with appearances as though the mechanism were guided and
controlled by thought--which appearances are deceptive; this is the
other. Between these two views the slaves of logic have oscillated
for centuries, and to all appearance will continue to oscillate for
centuries more.

People who think--as against those who feel and act--want hard and
fast lines--without which, indeed, they cannot think at all; these
lines are as it were steps cut on a slope of ice without which there
would be no descending it. When we have begun to travel the
downward path of thought, we ask ourselves questions about life and
death, ego and non ego, object and subject, necessity and free will,
and other kindred subjects. We want to know where we are, and in
the hope of simplifying matters, strip, as it were, each subject to
the skin, and finding that even this has not freed it from all
extraneous matter, flay it alive in the hope that if we grub down
deep enough we shall come upon it in its pure unalloyed state free
from all inconvenient complication through intermixture with
anything alien to itself. Then, indeed, we can docket it, and
pigeon-hole it for what it is; but what can we do with it till we
have got it pure? We want to account for things, which means that
we want to know to which of the various accounts opened in our
mental ledger we ought to carry them--and how can we do this if we
admit a phenomenon to be neither one thing nor the other, but to
belong to half-a-dozen different accounts in proportions which often
cannot even approximately be determined? If we are to keep accounts
we must keep them in reasonable compass; and if keeping them within
reasonable compass involves something of a Procrustean arrangement,
we may regret it, but cannot help it; having set up as thinkers we
have got to think, and must adhere to the only conditions under
which thought is possible; life, therefore, must be life, all life,
and nothing but life, and so with death, free will, necessity,
design, and everything else. This, at least, is how philosophers
must think concerning them in theory; in practice, however, not even
John Stuart Mill himself could eliminate all taint of its opposite
from any one of these things, any more than Lady Macbeth could clear
her hand of blood; indeed, the more nearly we think we have
succeeded the more certain are we to find ourselves ere long mocked
and baffled; and this, I take it, is what our biologists began in
the autumn of 1879 to discover had happened to themselves.

For some years they had been trying to get rid of feeling,
consciousness, and mind generally, from active participation in the
evolution of the universe. They admitted, indeed, that feeling and
consciousness attend the working of the world's gear, as noise
attends the working of a steam-engine, but they would not allow that
consciousness produced more effect in the working of the world than
noise on that of the steam-engine. Feeling and noise were alike
accidental unessential adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it
may seem to those who are happy enough not to know that this attempt
is an old one, they were trying to reduce the world to the level of
a piece of unerring though sentient mechanism. Men and animals must
be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded,
but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it
has no effect upon the result; it does not matter as far as this is
concerned whether they feel and think or not; everything would go on
exactly as it does and always has done, though neither man nor beast
knew nor felt anything at all. It is only by maintaining things
like this that people will get pensions out of the British public.

Some such position as this is a sine qua non for the Neo-Darwinistic
doctrine of natural selection, which, as Von Hartmann justly
observes, involves an essentially mechanical mindless conception of
the universe; to natural selection's door, therefore, the blame of
the whole movement in favour of mechanism must be justly laid. It
was natural that those who had been foremost in preaching mindless
designless luck as the main means of organic modification, should
lend themselves with alacrity to the task of getting rid of thought
and feeling from all share in the direction and governance of the
world. Professor Huxley, as usual, was among the foremost in this
good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr.
Spalding, or even by the machine chapters in "Erewhon" which were
still recent, I do not know, led off with his article "On the
hypothesis that animals are automata" (which it may be observed is
the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are animated) in
the Fortnightly Review for November 1874. Professor Huxley did not
say outright that men and women were just as living and just as dead
as their own watches, but this was what his article came to in
substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals were
automata; true, they were probably sentient, still they were
automata pure and simple, mere sentient pieces of exceedingly
elaborate clockwork, and nothing more.

"Professor Huxley," says Mr. Romanes, in his Rede Lecture for 1885,
{140a} "argues by way of perfectly logical deduction from this
statement, that thought and feeling have nothing to do with
determining action; they are merely the bye-products of cerebration,
or, as he expresses it, the indices of changes which are going on in
the brain. Under this view we are all what he terms conscious
automata, or machines which happen, as it were by chance, to be
conscious of some of their own movements. But the consciousness is
altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual relation to
the activity of the brain as a steam whistle bears to the activity
of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping
adjustments of the clockwork. Here, again, we meet with an echo of
Hobbes, who opens his work on the commonwealth with these words:-

"'Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by
the ART of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that
it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion
of limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why
may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by
springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For
what is the HEART but a spring, and the NERVES but so many STRINGS;
and the JOINTS but so many WHEELS giving motion to the whole body,
such as was intended by the artificer?'

"Now this theory of conscious automatism is not merely a legitimate
outcome of the theory that nervous changes are the causes of mental
changes, but it is logically the only possible outcome. Nor do I
see any way in which this theory can be fought on grounds of
physiology."

In passing, I may say the theory that living beings are conscious
machines, can be fought just as much and just as little as the
theory that machines are unconscious living beings; everything that
goes to prove either of these propositions goes just as well to
prove the other also. But I have perhaps already said as much as is
necessary on this head; the main point with which I am concerned is
the fact that Professor Huxley was trying to expel consciousness and
sentience from any causative action in the working of the universe.
In the following month appeared the late Professor Clifford's hardly
less outspoken article, "Body and Mind," to the same effect, also in
the Fortnightly Review, then edited by Mr. John Morley. Perhaps
this view attained its frankest expression in an article by the late
Mr. Spalding, which appeared in Nature, August 2, 1877; the
following extracts will show that Mr. Spalding must be credited with
not playing fast and loose with his own conclusions, and knew both
how to think a thing out to its extreme consequences, and how to put
those consequences clearly before his readers. Mr. Spalding said:-

"Against Mr. Lewes's proposition that the movements of living beings
are prompted and guided by feeling, I urged that the amount and
direction of every nervous discharge must depend solely on physical
conditions. And I contended that to see this clearly is to see that
when we speak of movement being guided by feeling, we use the
language of a less advanced stage of enlightenment. This view has
since occupied a good deal of attention. Under the name of
automatism it has been advocated by Professor Huxley, and with
firmer logic by Professor Clifford. In the minds of our savage
ancestors feeling was the source of all movement . . . Using the
word feeling in its ordinary sense . . . WE ASSERT NOT ONLY THAT NO
EVIDENCE CAN BE GIVEN THAT FEELING EVER DOES GUIDE OR PROMPT ACTION,
BUT THAT THE PROCESS OF ITS DOING SO IS INCONCEIVABLE. (Italics
mine.) How can we picture to ourselves a state of consciousness
putting in motion any particle of matter, large or small? Puss,
while dozing before the fire, hears a light rustle in the corner,
and darts towards the spot. What has happened? Certain sound-waves
have reached the ear, a series of physical changes have taken place
within the organism, special groups of muscles have been called into
play, and the body of the cat has changed its position on the floor.
Is it asserted that this chain of physical changes is not at all
points complete and sufficient in itself?"

I have been led to turn to this article of Mr. Spalding's by Mr.
Stewart Duncan, who, in his "Conscious Matter," {142a} quotes the
latter part of the foregoing extract. Mr. Duncan goes on to quote
passages from Professor Tyndall's utterances of about the same date
which show that he too took much the same line--namely, that there
is no causative connection between mental and physical processes;
from this it is obvious he must have supposed that physical
processes would go on just as well if there were no accompaniment of
feeling and consciousness at all.

I have said enough to show that in the decade, roughly, between 1870
and 1880 the set of opinion among our leading biologists was
strongly against mind, as having in any way influenced the
development of animal and vegetable life, and it is not likely to be
denied that the prominence which the mindless theory of natural
selection had assumed in men's thoughts since 1860 was one of the
chief reasons, if not the chief, for the turn opinion was taking.
Our leading biologists had staked so heavily upon natural selection
from among fortuitous variations that they would have been more than
human if they had not caught at everything that seemed to give it
colour and support. It was while this mechanical fit was upon them,
and in the closest connection with it, that the protoplasm boom
developed. It was doubtless felt that if the public could be got to
dislodge life, consciousness, and mind from any considerable part of
the body, it would be no hard matter to dislodge it, presently, from
the remainder; on this the deceptiveness of mind as a causative
agent, and the sufficiency of a purely automatic conception of the
universe, as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into
the box, would be proved to demonstration. It would be proved from
the side of mind by considerations derivable from automatic and
unconscious action where mind ex hypothesi was not, but where action
went on as well or better without it than with it; it would be
proved from the side of body by what they would doubtless call the
"most careful and exhaustive" examination of the body itself by the
aid of appliances more ample than had ever before been within the
reach of man.

This was all very well, but for its success one thing was a sine qua
non--I mean the dislodgment must be thorough; the key must be got
clean of even the smallest trace of blood, for unless this could be
done all the argument went to the profit not of the mechanism, with
which, for some reason or other, they were so much enamoured, but of
the soul and design, the ideas which of all others were most
distasteful to them. They shut their eyes to this for a long time,
but in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of an
absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along which they
were travelling would never lead them to it. They were driving life
up into a corner, but they were not eliminating it, and, moreover,
at the very moment of their thinking they had hedged it in and could
throw their salt upon it, it flew mockingly over their heads and
perched upon the place of all others where they were most
scandalised to see it--I mean upon machines in use. So they retired
sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed.

Some months subsequent to the completion of the foregoing chapter,
and indeed just as this book is on the point of leaving my hands,
there appears in Nature {144a} a letter from the Duke of Argyll,
which shows that he too is impressed with the conviction expressed
above--I mean that the real object our men of science have lately
had in view has been the getting rid of mind from among the causes
of evolution. The Duke says:-

"The violence with which false interpretations were put upon this
theory (natural selection) and a function was assigned to it which
it could never fulfil, will some day be recognised as one of the
least creditable episodes in the history of science. With a curious
perversity it was the weakest elements in the theory which were
seized upon as the most valuable, particularly the part assigned to
blind chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued not
for its scientific truth,--for it could pretend to none,--but
because of its assumed bearing upon another field of thought and the
weapon it afforded for expelling mind from the causes of evolution."

The Duke, speaking of Mr. Herbert Spencer's two articles in the
Nineteenth Century for April and May, 1886, to which I have already
called attention, continues:-

"In these two articles we have for the first time an avowed and
definite declaration against some of the leading ideas on which the
mechanical philosophy depends; and yet the caution, and almost
timidity, with which a man so eminent approaches the announcement of
conclusions of the most self-evident truth is a most curious proof
of the reign of terror which has come to be established."

Against this I must protest; the Duke cannot seriously maintain that
the main scope and purpose of Mr. Herbert Spencer's articles is new.
Their substance has been before us in Mr. Spencer's own writings for
some two-and-twenty years, in the course of which Mr. Spencer has
been followed by Professor Mivart, the Rev. J. J. Murphy, the Duke
of Argyll himself, and many other writers of less note. When the
Duke talks about the establishment of a scientific reign of terror,
I confess I regard such an exaggeration with something like
impatience. Any one who has known his own mind and has had the
courage of his opinions has been able to say whatever he wanted to
say with as little let or hindrance during the last twenty years, as
during any other period in the history of literature. Of course, if
a man will keep blurting out unpopular truths without considering
whose toes he may or may not be treading on, he will make enemies
some of whom will doubtless be able to give effect to their
displeasure; but that is part of the game. It is hardly possible
for any one to oppose the fallacy involved in the Charles-Darwinian
theory of natural selection more persistently and unsparingly than I
have done myself from the year 1877 onwards; naturally I have at
times been very angrily attacked in consequence, and as a matter of
business have made myself as unpleasant as I could in my rejoinders,
but I cannot remember anything having been ever attempted against me
which could cause fear in any ordinarily constituted person. If,
then, the Duke of Argyll is right in saying that Mr. Spencer has
shown a caution almost amounting to timidity in attacking Mr.
Darwin's theory, either Mr. Spencer must be a singularly timid
person, or there must be some cause for his timidity which is not
immediately obvious. If terror reigns anywhere among scientific
men, I should say it reigned among those who have staked imprudently
on Mr. Darwin's reputation as a philosopher. I may add that the
discovery of the Duke's impression that there exists a scientific
reign of terror, explains a good deal in his writings which it has
not been easy to understand hitherto.

As regards the theory of natural selection, the Duke says:-

"From the first discussions which arose on this subject, I have
ventured to maintain that . . . the phrase 'natural-selection'
represented no true physical cause, still less the complete set of
causes requisite to account for the orderly procession of organic
forms in Nature; that in so far as it assumed variations to arise by
accident it was not only essentially faulty and incomplete, but
fundamentally erroneous; in short, that its only value lay in the
convenience with which it groups under one form of words, highly
charged with metaphor, an immense variety of causes, some purely
mental, some purely vital, and others purely physical or
mechanical."

CHAPTER XI--The Way of Escape

To sum up the conclusions hitherto arrived at. Our philosophers
have made the mistake of forgetting that they cannot carry the
rough-and-ready language of common sense into precincts within which
politeness and philosophy are supreme. Common sense sees life and
death as distinct states having nothing in common, and hence in all
respects the antitheses of one another; so that with common sense
there should be no degrees of livingness, but if a thing is alive at
all it is as much alive as the most living of us, and if dead at all
it is stone dead in every part of it. Our philosophers have
exercised too little consideration in retaining this view of the
matter. They say that an amoeba is as much a living being as a man
is, and do not allow that a well-grown, highly educated man in
robust health is more living than an idiot cripple. They say he
differs from the cripple in many important respects, but not in
degree of livingness. Yet, as we have seen already, even common
sense by using the word "dying" admits degrees of life; that is to
say, it admits a more and a less; those, then, for whom the
superficial aspects of things are insufficient should surely find no
difficulty in admitting that the degrees are more numerous than is
dreamed of in the somewhat limited philosophy which common sense
alone knows. Livingness depends on range of power, versatility,
wealth of body and mind--how often, indeed, do we not see people
taking a new lease of life when they have come into money even at an
advanced age; it varies as these vary, beginning with things that,
though they have mind enough for an outsider to swear by, can hardly
be said to have yet found it out themselves, and advancing to those
that know their own minds as fully as anything in this world does
so. The more a thing knows its own mind the more living it becomes,
for life viewed both in the individual and in the general as the
outcome of accumulated developments, is one long process of
specialising consciousness and sensation; that is to say, of getting
to know one's own mind more and more fully upon a greater and
greater variety of subjects. On this I hope to touch more fully in
another book; in the meantime I would repeat that the error of our
philosophers consists in not having borne in mind that when they
quitted the ground on which common sense can claim authority, they
should have reconsidered everything that common sense had taught
them.

The votaries of common sense make the same mistake as philosophers
do, but they make it in another way. Philosophers try to make the
language of common sense serve for purposes of philosophy,
forgetting that they are in another world, in which another tongue
is current; common sense people, on the other hand, every now and
then attempt to deal with matters alien to the routine of daily
life. The boundaries between the two kingdoms being very badly
defined, it is only by giving them a wide berth and being so
philosophical as almost to deny that there is any either life or
death at all, or else so full of common sense as to refuse to see
one part of the body as less living than another, that we can hope
to steer clear of doubt, inconsistency, and contradiction in terms
in almost every other word we utter. We cannot serve the God of
philosophy and the Mammon of common sense at one and the same time,
and yet it would almost seem as though the making the best that can
be made of both these worlds were the whole duty of organism.

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