Books: Luck or Cunning?

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With this Mr. Darwin's best friends ought to be content; his
admirers are not well advised in representing him as endowed with
all sorts of qualities which he was very far from possessing. Thus
it is pretended that he was one of those men who were ever on the
watch for new ideas, ever ready to give a helping hand to those who
were trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a
mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required
them at his hands. No conception can be more wantonly inexact. I
grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and
obsequious Mr. Darwin was "ever ready," &c. So the Emperors of
Austria wash a few poor people's feet on some one of the festivals
of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this
yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are in
the habit of washing poor people's feet. I can understand Mr.
Darwin's not having taken any public notice, for example, of "Life
and Habit," for though I did not attack him in force in that book,
it was abundantly clear that an attack could not be long delayed,
and a man may be pardoned for not doing anything to advertise the
works of his opponents; but there is no excuse for his never having
referred to Professor Hering's work either in "Nature," when
Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to it (July 13,
1876), or in some one of his subsequent books. If his attitude
towards those who worked in the same field as himself had been the
generous one which his admirers pretend, he would have certainly
come forward, not necessarily as adopting Professor Hering's theory,
but still as helping it to obtain a hearing.

His not having done so is of a piece with his silence about Buffon,
Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck in the early editions of the "Origin of
Species," and with the meagre reference to them which is alone found
in the later ones. It is of a piece also with the silence which Mr.
Darwin invariably maintained when he saw his position irretrievably
damaged, as, for example, by Mr. Spencer's objection already
referred to, and by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin in the North
British Review (June 1867). Science, after all, should form a
kingdom which is more or less not of this world. The ideal
scientist should know neither self nor friend nor foe--he should be
able to hob-nob with those whom he most vehemently attacks, and to
fly at the scientific throat of those to whom he is personally most
attached; he should be neither grateful for a favourable review nor
displeased at a hostile one; his literary and scientific life should
be something as far apart as possible from his social; it is thus,
at least, alone that any one will be able to keep his eye single for
facts, and their legitimate inferences. We have seen Professor
Mivart lately taken to task by Mr. Romanes for having said {248a}
that Mr. Darwin was singularly sensitive to criticism, and made it
impossible for Professor Mivart to continue friendly personal
relations with him after he had ventured to maintain his own
opinion. I see no reason to question Professor Mivart's accuracy,
and find what he has said to agree alike with my own personal
experience of Mr. Darwin, and with all the light that his works
throw upon his character.

The most substantial apology that can be made for his attempt to
claim the theory of descent with modification is to be found in the
practice of Lamarck, Mr. Patrick Matthew, the author of the
"Vestiges of Creation," and Mr. Herbert Spencer, and, again, in the
total absence of complaint which this practice met with. If Lamarck
might write the "Philosophie Zoologique" without, so far as I
remember, one word of reference to Buffon, and without being
complained of, why might not Mr. Darwin write the "Origin of
Species" without more than a passing allusion to Lamarck? Mr.
Patrick Matthew, again, though writing what is obviously a resume of
the evolutionary theories of his time, makes no mention of Lamarck,
Erasmus Darwin, or Buffon. I have not the original edition of the
"Vestiges of Creation" before me, but feel sure I am justified in
saying that it claimed to be a more or less Minerva-like work, that
sprang full armed from the brain of Mr. Chambers himself. This at
least is how it was received by the public; and, however violent the
opposition it met with, I cannot find that its author was blamed for
not having made adequate mention of Lamarck. When Mr. Spencer wrote
his first essay on evolution in the Leader (March 20, 1852) he did
indeed begin his argument, "Those who cavalierly reject the doctrine
of Lamarck," &c., so that his essay purports to be written in
support of Lamarck; but when he republished his article in 1858, the
reference to Lamarck was cut out.

I make no doubt that it was the bad example set him by the writers
named in the preceding paragraph which betrayed Mr. Darwin into
doing as they did, but being more conscientious than they, he could
not bring himself to do it without having satisfied himself that he
had got hold of a more or less distinctive feature, and this, of
course, made matters worse. The distinctive feature was not due to
any deep-laid plan for pitchforking mind out of the universe, or as
part of a scheme of materialistic philosophy, though it has since
been made to play an important part in the attempt to further this;
Mr. Darwin was perfectly innocent of any intention of getting rid of
mind, and did not, probably, care the toss of sixpence whether the
universe was instinct with mind or no--what he did care about was
carrying off the palm in the matter of descent with modification,
and the distinctive feature was an adjunct with which his nervous,
sensitive, Gladstonian nature would not allow him to dispense.

And why, it may be asked, should not the palm be given to Mr. Darwin
if he wanted it, and was at so much pains to get it? Why, if
science is a kingdom not of this world, make so much fuss about
settling who is entitled to what? At best such questions are of a
sorry personal nature, that can have little bearing upon facts, and
it is these that alone should concern us. The answer is, that if
the question is so merely personal and unimportant, Mr. Darwin may
as well yield as Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck; Mr. Darwin's
admirers find no difficulty in appreciating the importance of a
personal element as far as he is concerned; let them not wonder,
then, if others, while anxious to give him the laurels to which he
is entitled, are somewhat indignant at the attempt to crown him with
leaves that have been filched from the brows of the great dead who
went before him. Palmam qui meruit ferat. The instinct which tells
us that no man in the scientific or literary world should claim more
than his due is an old and, I imagine, a wholesome one, and if a
scientific self-denying ordinance is demanded, we may reply with
justice, Que messieurs les Charles-Darwinies commencent. Mr. Darwin
will have a crown sufficient for any ordinary brow remaining in the
achievement of having done more than any other writer, living or
dead, to popularise evolution. This much may be ungrudgingly
conceded to him, but more than this those who have his scientific
position most at heart will be well advised if they cease henceforth
to demand.

CHAPTER XIX--Conclusion

And now I bring this book to a conclusion. So many things requiring
attention have happened since it was begun that I leave it in a very
different shape to the one which it was originally intended to bear.
I have omitted much that I had meant to deal with, and have been
tempted sometimes to introduce matter the connection of which with
my subject is not immediately apparent. Such however, as the book
is, it must now go in the form into which it has grown almost more
in spite of me than from malice prepense on my part. I was afraid
that it might thus set me at defiance, and in an early chapter
expressed a doubt whether I should find it redound greatly to my
advantage with men of science; in this concluding chapter I may say
that doubt has deepened into something like certainty. I regret
this, but cannot help it.

Among the points with which it was most incumbent upon me to deal
was that of vegetable intelligence. A reader may well say that
unless I give plants much the same sense of pleasure and pain,
memory, power of will, and intelligent perception of the best way in
which to employ their opportunities that I give to low animals, my
argument falls to the ground. If I declare organic modification to
be mainly due to function, and hence in the closest correlation with
mental change, I must give plants, as well as animals, a mind, and
endow them with power to reflect and reason upon all that most
concerns them. Many who will feel little difficulty about admitting
that animal modification is upon the whole mainly due to the secular
cunning of the animals themselves will yet hesitate before they
admit that plants also can have a reason and cunning of their own.

Unwillingness to concede this is based principally upon the error
concerning intelligence to which I have already referred--I mean to
our regarding intelligence not so much as the power of understanding
as that of being understood by ourselves. Once admit that the
evidence in favour of a plant's knowing its own business depends
more on the efficiency with which that business is conducted than
either on our power of understanding how it can be conducted, or on
any signs on the plant's part of a capacity for understanding things
that do not concern it, and there will be no further difficulty
about supposing that in its own sphere a plant is just as
intelligent as an animal, and keeps a sharp look-out upon its own
interests, however indifferent it may seem to be to ours. So strong
has been the set of recent opinion in this direction that with
botanists the foregoing now almost goes without saying, though few
five years ago would have accepted it.

To no one of the several workers in this field are we more indebted
for the change which has been brought about in this respect than to
my late valued and lamented friend Mr. Alfred Tylor. Mr. Tylor was
not the discoverer of the protoplasmic continuity that exists in
plants, but he was among the very first to welcome this discovery,
and his experiments at Carshalton in the years 1883 and 1884
demonstrated that, whether there was protoplasmic continuity in
plants or no, they were at any rate endowed with some measure of
reason, forethought, and power of self-adaptation to varying
surroundings. It is not for me to give the details of these
experiments. I had the good fortune to see them more than once
while they were in progress, and was present when they were made the
subject of a paper read by Mr. Sydney B. J. Skertchly before the
Linnean Society, Mr. Tylor being then too ill to read it himself.
The paper has since been edited by Mr. Skertchly, and published.
{253a} Anything that should be said further about it will come best
from Mr. Skertchly; it will be enough here if I give the resume of
it prepared by Mr. Tylor himself.

In this Mr. Tylor said:- "The principles which underlie this paper
are the individuality of plants, the necessity for some co-
ordinating system to enable the parts to act in concert, and the
probability that this also necessitates the admission that plants
have a dim sort of intelligence.

"It is shown that a tree, for example, is something more than an
aggregation of tissues, but is a complex being performing acts as a
whole, and not merely responsive to the direct influence of light,
&c. The tree knows more than its branches, as the species know more
than the individual, the community than the unit.

"Moreover, inasmuch as my experiments show that many plants and
trees possess the power of adapting themselves to unfamiliar
circumstances, such as, for instance, avoiding obstacles by bending
aside before touching, or by altering the leaf arrangement, it seems
probable that at least as much voluntary power must be accorded to
such plants as to certain lowly organised animals.

"Finally, a connecting system by means of which combined movements
take place is found in the threads of protoplasm which unite the
various cells, and which I have now shown to exist even in the wood
of trees.

"One of the important facts seems to be the universality of the
upward curvature of the tips of growing branches of trees, and the
power possessed by the tree to straighten its branches afterwards,
so that new growth shall by similar means be able to obtain the
necessary light and air.

"A house, to use a sanitary analogy, is functionally useless without
it obtains a good supply of light and air. The architect strives so
to produce the house as to attain this end, and still leave the
house comfortable. But the house, though dependent upon, is not
produced by, the light and air. So a tree is functionally useless,
and cannot even exist without a proper supply of light and air; but,
whereas it has been the custom to ascribe the heliotropic and other
motions to the direct influence of those agents, I would rather
suggest that the movements are to some extent due to the desire of
the plant to acquire its necessaries of life."

The more I have reflected upon Mr. Tylor's Carshalton experiments,
the more convinced I am of their great value. No one, indeed, ought
to have doubted that plants were intelligent, but we all of us do
much that we ought not to do, and Mr. Tylor supplied a demonstration
which may be henceforth authoritatively appealed to.

I will take the present opportunity of insisting upon a suggestion
which I made in "Alps and Sanctuaries" (New edition, pp. 152, 153),
with which Mr. Tylor was much pleased, and which, at his request, I
made the subject of a few words that I ventured to say at the
Linnean Society's rooms after his paper had been read. "Admitting,"
I said, "the common protoplasmic origin of animals and plants, and
setting aside the notion that plants preceded animals, we are still
faced by the problem why protoplasm should have developed into the
organic life of the world, along two main lines, and only two--the
animal and the vegetable. Why, if there was an early schism--and
this there clearly was--should there not have been many subsequent
ones of equal importance? We see innumerable sub-divisions of
animals and plants, but we see no other such great subdivision of
organic life as that whereby it ranges itself, for the most part
readily, as either animal or vegetable. Why any subdivision?--but
if any, why not more than two great classes?"

The two main stems of the tree of life ought, one would think, to
have been formed on the same principle as the boughs which represent
genera, and the twigs which stand for species and varieties. If
specific differences arise mainly from differences of action taken
in consequence of differences of opinion, then, so ultimately do
generic; so, therefore, again, do differences between families; so
therefore, by analogy, should that greatest of differences in virtue
of which the world of life is mainly animal, or vegetable. In this
last case as much as in that of specific difference, we ought to
find divergent form the embodiment and organic expression of
divergent opinion. Form is mind made manifest in flesh through
action: shades of mental difference being expressed in shades of
physical difference, while broad fundamental differences of opinion
are expressed in broad fundamental differences of bodily shape.

Or to put it thus:-

If form and habit be regarded as functionally interdependent, that
is to say, if neither form nor habit can vary without corresponding
variation in the other, and if habit and opinion concerning
advantage are also functionally interdependent, it follows self-
evidently that form and opinion concerning advantage (and hence form
and cunning) will be functionally interdependent also, and that
there can be no great modification of the one without corresponding
modification of the other. Let there, then, be a point in respect
of which opinion might be early and easily divided--a point in
respect of which two courses involving different lines of action
presented equally-balanced advantages--and there would be an early
subdivision of primordial life, according as the one view or the
other was taken.

It is obvious that the pros and cons for either course must be
supposed very nearly equal, otherwise the course which presented the
fewest advantages would be attended with the probable gradual
extinction of the organised beings that adopted it, but there being
supposed two possible modes of action very evenly balanced as
regards advantage and disadvantages, then the ultimate appearance of
two corresponding forms of life is a sequitur from the admission
that form varies as function, and function as opinion concerning
advantage. If there are three, four, five, or six such opinions
tenable, we ought to have three, four, five, or six main
subdivisions of life. As things are, we have two only. Can we,
then, see a matter on which opinion was likely to be easily and
early divided into two, and only two, main divisions--no third
course being conceivable? If so, this should suggest itself as the
probable source from which the two main forms of organic life have
been derived.

I submit that we can see such a matter in the question whether it
pays better to sit still and make the best of what comes in one's
way, or to go about in search of what one can find. Of course we,
as animals, naturally hold that it is better to go about in search
of what we can find than to sit still and make the best of what
comes; but there is still so much to be said on the other side, that
many classes of animals have settled down into sessile habits, while
a perhaps even larger number are, like spiders, habitual liers in
wait rather than travellers in search of food. I would ask my
reader, therefore, to see the opinion that it is better to go in
search of prey as formulated, and finding its organic expression, in
animals; and the other--that it is better to be ever on the look-out
to make the best of what chance brings up to them--in plants. Some
few intermediate forms still record to us the long struggle during
which the schism was not yet complete, and the halting between two
opinions which it might be expected that some organisms should
exhibit.

"Neither class," I said in "Alps and Sanctuaries," "has been quite
consistent. Who ever is or can be? Every extreme--every opinion
carried to its logical end--will prove to be an absurdity. Plants
throw out roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind of locomotion;
and, as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do
sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of
consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a
tendril without regarding it as a melancholy and unprincipled
compromise" (New edition, p. 153).

Having called attention to this view, and commended it to the
consideration of my readers, I proceed to another which should not
have been left to be touched upon only in a final chapter, and
which, indeed, seems to require a book to itself--I refer to the
origin and nature of the feelings, which those who accept volition
as having had a large share in organic modification must admit to
have had a no less large share in the formation of volition.
Volition grows out of ideas, ideas from feelings. What, then, is
feeling, and the subsequent mental images or ideas?

The image of a stone formed in our minds is no representation of the
object which has given rise to it. Not only, as has been often
remarked, is there no resemblance between the particular thought and
the particular thing, but thoughts and things generally are too
unlike to be compared. An idea of a stone may be like an idea of
another stone, or two stones may be like one another; but an idea of
a stone is not like a stone; it cannot be thrown at anything, it
occupies no room in space, has no specific gravity, and when we come
to know more about stones, we find our ideas concerning them to be
but rude, epitomised, and highly conventional renderings of the
actual facts, mere hieroglyphics, in fact, or, as it were, counters
or bank-notes, which serve to express and to convey commodities with
which they have no pretence of analogy.

Indeed we daily find that, as the range of our perceptions becomes
enlarged either by invention of new appliances or after use of old
ones, we change our ideas though we have no reason to think that the
thing about which we are thinking has changed. In the case of a
stone, for instance, the rude, unassisted, uneducated senses see it
as above all things motionless, whereas assisted and trained ideas
concerning it represent motion as its most essential characteristic;
but the stone has not changed. So, again, the uneducated idea
represents it as above all things mindless, and is as little able to
see mind in connection with it as it lately was to see motion; it
will be no greater change of opinion than we have most of us
undergone already if we come presently to see it as no less full of
elementary mind than of elementary motion, but the stone will not
have changed.

The fact that we modify our opinions suggests that our ideas are
formed not so much in involuntary self-adjusting mimetic
correspondence with the objects that we believe to give rise to
them, as by what was in the outset voluntary, conventional
arrangement in whatever way we found convenient, of sensation and
perception-symbols, which had nothing whatever to do with the
objects, and were simply caught hold of as the only things we could
grasp. It would seem as if, in the first instance, we must have
arbitrarily attached some one of the few and vague sensations which
we could alone at first command, to certain motions of outside
things as echoed by our brain, and used them to think and feel the
things with, so as to docket them, and recognise them with greater
force, certainty, and clearness--much as we use words to help us to
docket and grasp our feelings and thoughts, or written characters to
help us to docket and grasp our words.

If this view be taken we stand in much the same attitude towards our
feelings as a dog may be supposed to do towards our own reading and
writing. The dog may be supposed to marvel at the wonderful
instinctive faculty by which we can tell the price of the different
railway stocks merely by looking at a sheet of paper; he supposes
this power to be a part of our nature, to have come of itself by
luck and not by cunning, but a little reflection will show that
feeling is not more likely to have "come by nature" than reading and
writing are. Feeling is in all probability the result of the same
kind of slow laborious development as that which has attended our
more recent arts and our bodily organs; its development must be
supposed to have followed the same lines as that of our other arts,
and indeed of the body itself, which is the ars artium--for growth
of mind is throughout coincident with growth of organic resources,
and organic resources grow with growing mind.

Feeling is the art the possession of which differentiates the
civilised organic world from that of brute inorganic matter, but
still it is an art; it is the outcome of a mind that is common both
to organic and inorganic, and which the organic has alone
cultivated. It is not a part of mind itself; it is no more this
than language and writing are parts of thought. The organic world
can alone feel, just as man can alone speak; but as speech is only
the development of powers the germs of which are possessed by the
lower animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment and
development of powers the germs of which exist in inorganic
substances. It has all the characteristics of an art, and though it
must probably rank as the oldest of those arts that are peculiar to
the organic world, it is one which is still in process of
development. None of us, indeed, can feel well on more than a very
few subjects, and many can hardly feel at all.

But, however this may be, our sensations and perceptions of material
phenomena are attendant on the excitation of certain motions in the
anterior parts of the brain. Whenever certain motions are excited
in this substance, certain sensations and ideas of resistance,
extension, &c., are either concomitant, or ensue within a period too
brief for our cognisance. It is these sensations and ideas that we
directly cognise, and it is to them that we have attached the idea
of the particular kind of matter we happen to be thinking of. As
this idea is not like the thing itself, so neither is it like the
motions in our brain on which it is attendant. It is no more like
these than, say, a stone is like the individual characters, written
or spoken, that form the word "stone," or than these last are, in
sound, like the word "stone" itself, whereby the idea of a stone is
so immediately and vividly presented to us. True, this does not
involve that our idea shall not resemble the object that gave rise
to it, any more than the fact that a looking-glass bears no
resemblance to the things reflected in it involves that the
reflection shall not resemble the things reflected; the shifting
nature, however, of our ideas and conceptions is enough to show that
they must be symbolical, and conditioned by changes going on within
ourselves as much as by those outside us; and if, going behind the
ideas which suffice for daily use, we extend our inquiries in the
direction of the reality underlying our conception, we find reason
to think that the brain-motions which attend our conception
correspond with exciting motions in the object that occasions it,
and that these, rather than anything resembling our conception
itself, should be regarded as the reality.

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