Books: Luck or Cunning?

S >> Samuel Butler >> Luck or Cunning?

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It is easy to understand how the error of philosophers arose, for,
slaves of habit as we all are, we are more especially slaves when
the habit is one that has not been found troublesome. There is no
denying that it saves trouble to have things either one thing or the
other, and indeed for all the common purposes of life if a thing is
either alive or dead the small supplementary residue of the opposite
state should be neglected as too small to be observable. If it is
good to eat we have no difficulty in knowing when it is dead enough
to be eaten; if not good to eat, but valuable for its skin, we know
when it is dead enough to be skinned with impunity; if it is a man,
we know when he has presented enough of the phenomena of death to
allow of our burying him and administering his estate; in fact, I
cannot call to mind any case in which the decision of the question
whether man or beast is alive or dead is frequently found to be
perplexing; hence we have become so accustomed to think there can be
no admixture of the two states, that we have found it almost
impossible to avoid carrying this crude view of life and death into
domains of thought in which it has no application. There can be no
doubt that when accuracy is required we should see life and death
not as fundamentally opposed, but as supplementary to one another,
without either's being ever able to exclude the other altogether;
thus we should indeed see some things as more living than others,
but we should see nothing as either unalloyedly living or
unalloyedly non-living. If a thing is living, it is so living that
it has one foot in the grave already; if dead, it is dead as a thing
that has already re-entered into the womb of Nature. And within the
residue of life that is in the dead there is an element of death;
and within this there is an element of life, and so ad infinitum--
again, as reflections in two mirrors that face one another.

In brief, there is nothing in life of which there are not germs,
and, so to speak, harmonics in death, and nothing in death of which
germs and harmonics may not be found in life. Each emphasizes what
the other passes over most lightly--each carries to its extreme
conceivable development that which in the other is only sketched in
by a faint suggestion--but neither has any feature rigorously
special to itself. Granted that death is a greater new departure in
an organism's life, than any since that congeries of births and
deaths to which the name embryonic stages is commonly given, still
it is a new departure of the same essential character as any other--
that is to say, though there be much new there is much, not to say
more, old along with it. We shrink from it as from any other change
to the unknown, and also perhaps from an instinctive sense that the
fear of death is a sine qua non for physical and moral progress, but
the fear is like all else in life, a substantial thing which, if its
foundations be dug about, is found to rest on a superstitious basis.

Where, and on what principle, are the dividing lines between living
and non-living to be drawn? All attempts to draw them hitherto have
ended in deadlock and disaster; of this M. Vianna De Lima, in his
"Expose Sommaire des Theories transformistes de Lamarck, Darwin, et
Haeckel," {150a} says that all attempts to trace une ligne de
demarcation nette et profonde entre la matiere vivante et la matiere
inerte have broken down. {150b} Il y a un reste de vie dans le
cadavre, says Diderot, {150c} speaking of the more gradual decay of
the body after an easy natural death, than after a sudden and
violent one; and so Buffon begins his first volume by saying that
"we can descend, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the most
perfect creature to the most formless matter--from the most highly
organised matter to the most entirely inorganic substance." {150d}

Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non-living within
the body? If we answer "yes," then, as we have seen, moiety after
moiety is filched from us, till we find ourselves left face to face
with a tenuous quasi immaterial vital principle or soul as animating
an alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying
community of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point
in common to render a union between the two possible, or give the
one a grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of
disembodied spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be
listened to, comes back as it would seem, with a scientific
imprimatur; if, on the other hand, we exclude the non-living from
the body, then what are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying
skin, or hair that is ready to fall off? Are they less living than
brain? Answer "yes," and degrees are admitted, which we have
already seen prove fatal; answer "no," and we must deny that one
part of the body is more vital than another--and this is refusing to
go as far even as common sense does; answer that these things are
not very important, and we quit the ground of equity and high
philosophy on which we have given ourselves such airs, and go back
to common sense as unjust judges that will hear those widows only
who importune us.

As with the non-living so also with the living. Are we to let it
pass beyond the limits of the body, and allow a certain temporary
overflow of livingness to ordain as it were machines in use? Then
death will fare, if we once let life without the body, as life fares
if we once let death within it. It becomes swallowed up in life,
just as in the other case life was swallowed up in death. Are we to
confine it to the body? If so, to the whole body, or to parts? And
if to parts, to what parts, and why? The only way out of the
difficulty is to rehabilitate contradiction in terms, and say that
everything is both alive and dead at one and the same time--some
things being much living and little dead, and others, again, much
dead and little living. Having done this we have only got to settle
what a thing is--when a thing is a thing pure and simple, and when
it is only a congeries of things--and we shall doubtless then live
very happily and very philosophically ever afterwards.

But here another difficulty faces us. Common sense does indeed know
what is meant by a "thing" or "an individual," but philosophy cannot
settle either of these two points. Professor Mivart made the
question "What are Living Beings?" the subject of an article in one
of our leading magazines only a very few years ago. He asked, but
he did not answer. And so Professor Moseley was reported (Times,
January 16, 1885) as having said that it was "almost impossible" to
say what an individual was. Surely if it is only "almost"
impossible for philosophy to determine this, Professor Moseley
should have at any rate tried to do it; if, however, he had tried
and failed, which from my own experience I should think most likely,
he might have spared his "almost." "Almost" is a very dangerous
word. I once heard a man say that an escape he had had from
drowning was "almost" providential. The difficulty about defining
an individual arises from the fact that we may look at "almost"
everything from two different points of view. If we are in a
common-sense humour for simplifying things, treating them broadly,
and emphasizing resemblances rather than differences, we can find
excellent reasons for ignoring recognised lines of demarcation,
calling everything by a new name, and unifying up till we have
united the two most distant stars in heaven as meeting and being
linked together in the eyes and souls of men; if we are in this
humour individuality after individuality disappears, and ere long,
if we are consistent, nothing will remain but one universal whole,
one true and only atom from which alone nothing can be cut off and
thrown away on to something else; if, on the other hand, we are in a
subtle philosophically accurate humour for straining at gnats and
emphasizing differences rather than resemblances, we can draw
distinctions, and give reasons for subdividing and subdividing,
till, unless we violate what we choose to call our consistency
somewhere, we shall find ourselves with as many names as atoms and
possible combinations and permutations of atoms. The lines we draw,
the moments we choose for cutting this or that off at this or that
place, and thenceforth the dubbing it by another name, are as
arbitrary as the moments chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter
for leaving off beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an
approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ready kind.

What else, however, can we do? We can only escape the Scylla of
calling everything by one name, and recognising no individual
existences of any kind, by falling into the Charybdis of having a
name for everything, or by some piece of intellectual sharp practice
like that of the shrewd but unprincipled Ulysses. If we were
consistent honourable gentlemen, into Charybdis or on to Scylla we
should go like lambs; every subterfuge by the help of which we
escape our difficulty is but an arbitrary high-handed act of
classification that turns a deaf ear to everything not robust enough
to hold its own; nevertheless even the most scrupulous of
philosophers pockets his consistency at a pinch, and refuses to let
the native hue of resolution be sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought, nor yet fobbed by the rusty curb of logic. He is right,
for assuredly the poor intellectual abuses of the time want
countenancing now as much as ever, but so far as he countenances
them, he should bear in mind that he is returning to the ground of
common sense, and should not therefore hold himself too stiffly in
the matter of logic.

As with life and death so with design and absence of design or luck.
So also with union and disunion. There is never either absolute
design rigorously pervading every detail, nor yet absolute absence
of design pervading any detail rigorously, so, as between
substances, there is neither absolute union and homogeneity, not
absolute disunion and heterogeneity; there is always a little place
left for repentance; that is to say, in theory we should admit that
both design and chance, however well defined, each have an aroma, as
it were, of the other. Who can think of a case in which his own
design--about which he should know more than any other, and from
which, indeed, all his ideas of design are derived--was so complete
that there was no chance in any part of it? Who, again, can bring
forward a case even of the purest chance or good luck into which no
element of design had entered directly or indirectly at any
juncture? This, nevertheless, does not involve our being unable
ever to ascribe a result baldly either to luck or cunning. In some
cases a decided preponderance of the action, whether seen as a whole
or looked at in detail, is recognised at once as due to design,
purpose, forethought, skill, and effort, and then we properly
disregard the undesigned element; in others the details cannot
without violence be connected with design, however much the position
which rendered the main action possible may involve design--as, for
example, there is no design in the way in which individual pieces of
coal may hit one another when shot out of a sack, but there may be
design in the sack's being brought to the particular place where it
is emptied; in others design may be so hard to find that we rightly
deny its existence, nevertheless in each case there will be an
element of the opposite, and the residuary element would, if seen
through a mental microscope, be found to contain a residuary element
of ITS opposite, and this again of ITS opposite, and so on ad
infinitum, as with mirrors standing face to face. This having been
explained, and it being understood that when we speak of design in
organism we do so with a mental reserve of exceptis excipiendis,
there should be no hesitation in holding the various modifications
of plants and animals to be in such preponderating measure due to
function, that design, which underlies function, is the fittest idea
with which to connect them in our minds.

We will now proceed to inquire how Mr. Darwin came to substitute, or
try to substitute, the survival of the luckiest fittest, for the
survival of the most cunning fittest, as held by Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck; or more briefly how he came to substitute luck for cunning.

CHAPTER XII--Why Darwin's Variations were Accidental

Some may perhaps deny that Mr. Darwin did this, and say he laid so
much stress on use and disuse as virtually to make function his main
factor of evolution.

If, indeed, we confine ourselves to isolated passages, we shall find
little difficulty in making out a strong case to this effect.
Certainly most people believe this to be Mr. Darwin's doctrine, and
considering how long and fully he had the ear of the public, it is
not likely they would think thus if Mr. Darwin had willed otherwise,
nor could he have induced them to think as they do if he had not
said a good deal that was capable of the construction so commonly
put upon it; but it is hardly necessary, when addressing biologists,
to insist on the fact that Mr. Darwin's distinctive doctrine is the
denial of the comparative importance of function, or use and disuse,
as a purveyor of variations,--with some, but not very considerable,
exceptions, chiefly in the cases of domesticated animals.

He did not, however, make his distinctive feature as distinct as he
should have done. Sometimes he said one thing, and sometimes the
directly opposite. Sometimes, for example, the conditions of
existence "included natural selection" or the fact that the best
adapted to their surroundings live longest and leave most offspring;
{156a} sometimes "the principle of natural selection" "fully
embraced" "the expression of conditions of existence." {156b} It
would not be easy to find more unsatisfactory writing than this is,
nor any more clearly indicating a mind ill at ease with itself.
Sometimes "ants work BY INHERITED INSTINCTS and inherited tools;"
{157a} sometimes, again, it is surprising that the case of ants
working by inherited instincts has not been brought as a
demonstrative argument "against the well-known doctrine of INHERITED
HABIT, as advanced by Lamarck." {157b} Sometimes the winglessness
of beetles inhabiting ocean islands is "mainly due to natural
selection," {157c} and though we might be tempted to ascribe the
rudimentary condition of the wing to disuse, we are on no account to
do so--though disuse was probably to some extent "combined with"
natural selection; at other times "it is probable that disuse has
been the main means of rendering the wings of beetles living on
small exposed islands" rudimentary. {157d} We may remark in passing
that if disuse, as Mr. Darwin admits on this occasion, is the main
agent in rendering an organ rudimentary, use should have been the
main agent in rendering it the opposite of rudimentary--that is to
say, in bringing about its development. The ostensible raison
d'etre, however, of the "Origin of Species" is to maintain that this
is not the case.

There is hardly an opinion on the subject of descent with
modification which does not find support in some one passage or
another of the "Origin of Species." If it were desired to show that
there is no substantial difference between the doctrine of Erasmus
Darwin and that of his grandson, it would be easy to make out a good
case for this, in spite of Mr. Darwin's calling his grandfather's
views "erroneous," in the historical sketch prefixed to the later
editions of the "Origin of Species." Passing over the passage
already quoted on p. 62 of this book, in which Mr. Darwin declares
"habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary"--a sentence, by the
way, than which none can be either more unfalteringly Lamarckian or
less tainted with the vices of Mr. Darwin's later style--passing
this over as having been written some twenty years before the
"Origin of Species"--the last paragraph of the "Origin of Species"
itself is purely Lamarckian and Erasmus-Darwinian. It declares the
laws in accordance with which organic forms assumed their present
shape to be--"Growth with reproduction; Variability from the
indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life and
from use and disuse, &c." {158a} Wherein does this differ from the
confession of faith made by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck? Where are
the accidental fortuitous, spontaneous variations now? And if they
are not found important enough to demand mention in this peroration
and stretto, as it were, of the whole matter, in which special
prominence should be given to the special feature of the work, where
ought they to be made important?

Mr. Darwin immediately goes on: "A ratio of existence so high as to
lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural
selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of
less improved forms;" so that natural selection turns up after all.
Yes--in the letters that compose it, but not in the spirit; not in
the special sense up to this time attached to it in the "Origin of
Species." The expression as used here is one with which Erasmus
Darwin would have found little fault, for it means not as elsewhere
in Mr. Darwin's book and on his title-page the preservation of
"favoured" or lucky varieties, but the preservation of varieties
that have come to be varieties through the causes assigned in the
preceding two or three lines of Mr. Darwin's sentence; and these are
mainly functional or Erasmus-Darwinian; for the indirect action of
the conditions of life is mainly functional, and the direct action
is admitted on all hands to be but small.

It now appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page,
that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the
fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations
from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her
personification) can select. The bottles have the same labels, and
they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other
toast and water. Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to
select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations
that are mainly accidental; in the first case she will eventually
get an accumulation of variation, and widely different types will
come into existence; in the second, the variations will not occur
with sufficient steadiness for accumulation to be possible. In the
body of Mr. Darwin's book the variations are supposed to be mainly
due to accident, and function, though not denied all efficacy, is
declared to be the greatly subordinate factor; natural selection,
therefore, has been hitherto throughout tantamount to luck; in the
peroration the position is reversed in toto; the selection is now
made from variations into which luck has entered so little that it
may be neglected, the greatly preponderating factor being function;
here, then, natural selection is tantamount to cunning. We are such
slaves of words that, seeing the words "natural selection" employed-
-and forgetting that the results ensuing on natural selection will
depend entirely on what it is that is selected from, so that the
gist of the matter lies in this and not in the words "natural
selection"--it escaped us that a change of front had been made, and
a conclusion entirely alien to the tenor of the whole book smuggled
into the last paragraph as the one which it had been written to
support; the book preached luck, the peroration cunning.

And there can be no doubt Mr. Darwin intended that the change of
front should escape us; for it cannot be believed that he did not
perfectly well know what he had done. Mr. Darwin edited and re-
edited with such minuteness of revision that it may be said no
detail escaped him provided it was small enough; it is incredible
that he should have allowed this paragraph to remain from first to
last unchanged (except for the introduction of the words "by the
Creator," which are wanting in the first edition) if they did not
convey the conception he most wished his readers to retain. Even if
in his first edition he had failed to see that he was abandoning in
his last paragraph all that it had been his ostensible object most
especially to support in the body of his book, he must have become
aware of it long before he revised the "Origin of Species" for the
last time; still he never altered it, and never put us on our guard.

It was not Mr. Darwin's manner to put his reader on his guard; we
might as well expect Mr. Gladstone to put us on our guard about the
Irish land bills. Caveat lector seems to have been his motto. Mr.
Spencer, in the articles already referred to, is at pains to show
that Mr. Darwin's opinions in later life underwent a change in the
direction of laying greater stress on functionally produced
modifications, and points out that in the sixth edition of the
"Origin of Species" Mr. Darwin says, "I think there can be no doubt
that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged
certain parts, and disuse diminished them;" whereas in his first
edition he said, "I think there can be LITTLE doubt" of this. Mr.
Spencer also quotes a passage from "The Descent of Man," in which
Mr. Darwin said that EVEN IN THE FIRST EDITION of the "Origin of
Species" he had attributed great effect to function, as though in
the later ones he had attributed still more; but if there was any
considerable change of position, it should not have been left to be
toilsomely collected by collation of editions, and comparison of
passages far removed from one another in other books. If his mind
had undergone the modification supposed by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Darwin
should have said so in a prominent passage of some later edition of
the "Origin of Species." He should have said--"In my earlier
editions I underrated, as now seems probable, the effects of use and
disuse as purveyors of the slight successive modifications whose
accumulation in the ordinary course of things results in specific
difference, and I laid too much stress on the accumulation of merely
accidental variations;" having said this, he should have summarised
the reasons that had made him change his mind, and given a list of
the most important cases in which he has seen fit to alter what he
had originally written. If Mr. Darwin had dealt thus with us we
should have readily condoned all the mistakes he would have been at
all likely to have made, for we should have known him as one who was
trying to help us, tidy us up, keep us straight, and enable us to
use our judgments to the best advantage. The public will forgive
many errors alike of taste and judgment, where it feels that a
writer persistently desires this.

I can only remember a couple of sentences in the later editions of
the "Origin of Species" in which Mr. Darwin directly admits a change
of opinion as regards the main causes of organic modification. How
shuffling the first of these is I have already shown in "Life and
Habit," p. 260, and in "Evolution, Old and New," p. 359; I need not,
therefore, say more here, especially as there has been no rejoinder
to what I then said. Curiously enough the sentence does not bear
out Mr. Spencer's contention that Mr. Darwin in his later years
leaned more decidedly towards functionally produced modifications,
for it runs: {161a}--"In the earlier editions of this work I
underrated, as now seems probable, the frequency and importance of
modifications due," not, as Mr. Spencer would have us believe, to
use and disuse, but "to spontaneous variability," by which can only
be intended, "to variations in no way connected with use and
disuse," as not being assignable to any known cause of general
application, and referable as far as we are concerned to accident
only; so that he gives the natural survival of the luckiest, which
is indeed his distinctive feature, if it deserve to be called a
feature at all, greater prominence than ever. Nevertheless there is
no change in his concluding paragraph, which still remains an
embodiment of the views of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

The other passage is on p. 421 of the edition of 1876. It stands:-
"I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have
thoroughly" (why "thoroughly"?) "convinced me that species have been
modified during a long course of descent. This has been effected
chiefly through the natural selection of numerous, successive,
slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the
inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an
unimportant manner, that is, in relation to adaptive structures,
whether past or present, by the direct action of external
conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to
arise spontaneously. It appears that I formerly underrated the
frequency and value of these latter forms of variation as leading to
permanent modifications of structure independently of natural
selection."

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