Books: Luck or Cunning?
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Samuel Butler >> Luck or Cunning?
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I followed up these two books with "Unconscious Memory," the main
object of which was to show how Professor Hering of Prague had
treated the connection between memory and heredity; to show, again,
how substantial was the difference between Von Hartmann and myself
in spite of some little superficial resemblance; to put forward a
suggestion as regards the physics of memory, and to meet the most
plausible objection which I have yet seen brought against "Life and
Habit."
Since writing these three books I have published nothing on the
connection between heredity and memory, except a few pages of
remarks on Mr. Romanes' "Mental Evolution in Animals" in my book,
{23a} from which I will draw whatever seems to be more properly
placed here. I have collected many facts that make my case
stronger, but am precluded from publishing them by the reflection
that it is strong enough already. I have said enough in "Life and
Habit" to satisfy any who wish to be satisfied, and those who wish
to be dissatisfied would probably fail to see the force of what I
said, no matter how long and seriously I held forth to them; I
believe, therefore, that I shall do well to keep my facts for my own
private reading and for that of my executors.
I once saw a copy of "Life and Habit" on Mr. Bogue's counter, and
was told by the very obliging shopman that a customer had just
written something in it which I might like to see. I said of course
I should like to see, and immediately taking the book read the
following--which it occurs to me that I am not justified in
publishing. What was written ran thus:-
"As a reminder of our pleasant hours on the broad Atlantic, will Mr.
-- please accept this book (which I think contains more truth, and
less evidence of it, than any other I have met with) from his friend
-- ?"
I presume the gentleman had met with the Bible--a work which lays
itself open to a somewhat similar comment. I was gratified,
however, at what I had read, and take this opportunity of thanking
the writer, an American, for having liked my book. It was so plain
he had been relieved at not finding the case smothered to death in
the weight of its own evidences, that I resolved not to forget the
lesson his words had taught me.
The only writer in connection with "Life and Habit" to whom I am
anxious to reply is Mr. Herbert Spencer, but before doing this I
will conclude the present chapter with a consideration of some
general complaints that have been so often brought against me that
it may be worth while to notice them.
These general criticisms have resolved themselves mainly into two.
Firstly, it is said that I ought not to write about biology on the
ground of my past career, which my critics declare to have been
purely literary. I wish I might indulge a reasonable hope of one
day becoming a literary man; the expression is not a good one, but
there is no other in such common use, and this must excuse it; if a
man can be properly called literary, he must have acquired the habit
of reading accurately, thinking attentively, and expressing himself
clearly. He must have endeavoured in all sorts of ways to enlarge
the range of his sympathies so as to be able to put himself easily
en rapport with those whom he is studying, and those whom he is
addressing. If he cannot speak with tongues himself, he is the
interpreter of those who can--without whom they might as well be
silent. I wish I could see more signs of literary culture among my
scientific opponents; I should find their books much more easy and
agreeable reading if I could; and then they tell me to satirise the
follies and abuses of the age, just as if it was not this that I was
doing in writing about themselves.
What, I wonder, would they say if I were to declare that they ought
not to write books at all, on the ground that their past career has
been too purely scientific to entitle them to a hearing? They would
reply with justice that I should not bring vague general
condemnations, but should quote examples of their bad writing. I
imagine that I have done this more than once as regards a good many
of them, and I dare say I may do it again in the course of this
book; but though I must own to thinking that the greater number of
our scientific men write abominably, I should not bring this against
them if I believed them to be doing their best to help us; many such
men we happily have, and doubtless always shall have, but they are
not those who push to the fore, and it is these last who are most
angry with me for writing on the subjects I have chosen. They
constantly tell me that I am not a man of science; no one knows this
better than I do, and I am quite used to being told it, but I am not
used to being confronted with the mistakes that I have made in
matters of fact, and trust that this experience is one which I may
continue to spare no pains in trying to avoid.
Nevertheless I again freely grant that I am not a man of science. I
have never said I was. I was educated for the Church. I was once
inside the Linnean Society's rooms, but have no present wish to go
there again; though not a man of science, however, I have never
affected indifference to the facts and arguments which men of
science have made it their business to lay before us; on the
contrary, I have given the greater part of my time to their
consideration for several years past. I should not, however, say
this unless led to do so by regard to the interests of theories
which I believe to be as nearly important as any theories can be
which do not directly involve money or bodily convenience.
The second complaint against me is to the effect that I have made no
original experiments, but have taken all my facts at second hand.
This is true, but I do not see what it has to do with the question.
If the facts are sound, how can it matter whether A or B collected
them? If Professor Huxley, for example, has made a series of
valuable original observations (not that I know of his having done
so), why am I to make them over again? What are fact-collectors
worth if the fact co-ordinators may not rely upon them? It seems to
me that no one need do more than go to the best sources for his
facts, and tell his readers where he got them. If I had had
occasion for more facts I daresay I should have taken the necessary
steps to get hold of them, but there was no difficulty on this
score; every text-book supplied me with all, and more than all, I
wanted; my complaint was that the facts which Mr. Darwin supplied
would not bear the construction he tried to put upon them; I tried,
therefore, to make them bear another which seemed at once more sound
and more commodious; rightly or wrongly I set up as a builder, not
as a burner of bricks, and the complaint so often brought against me
of not having made experiments is about as reasonable as complaint
against an architect on the score of his not having quarried with
his own hands a single one of the stones which he has used in
building. Let my opponents show that the facts which they and I use
in common are unsound, or that I have misapplied them, and I will
gladly learn my mistake, but this has hardly, to my knowledge, been
attempted. To me it seems that the chief difference between myself
and some of my opponents lies in this, that I take my facts from
them with acknowledgment, and they take their theories from me--
without.
One word more and I have done. I should like to say that I do not
return to the connection between memory and heredity under the
impression that I shall do myself much good by doing so. My own
share in the matter was very small. The theory that heredity is
only a mode of memory is not mine, but Professor Hering's. He wrote
in 1870, and I not till 1877. I should be only too glad if he would
take his theory and follow it up himself; assuredly he could do so
much better than I can; but with the exception of his one not
lengthy address published some fifteen or sixteen years ago he has
said nothing upon the subject, so far at least as I have been able
to ascertain; I tried hard to draw him in 1880, but could get
nothing out of him. If, again, any of our more influential writers,
not a few of whom evidently think on this matter much as I do, would
eschew ambiguities and tell us what they mean in plain language, I
would let the matter rest in their abler hands, but of this there
does not seem much chance at present.
I wish there was, for in spite of the interest I have felt in
working the theory out and the information I have been able to
collect while doing so, I must confess that I have found it somewhat
of a white elephant. It has got me into the hottest of hot water,
made a literary Ishmael of me, lost me friends whom I have been
sorry to lose, cost me a good deal of money, done everything to me,
in fact, which a good theory ought not to do. Still, as it seems to
have taken up with me, and no one else is inclined to treat it
fairly, I shall continue to report its developments from time to
time as long as life and health are spared me. Moreover, Ishmaels
are not without their uses, and they are not a drug in the market
just now.
I may now go on to Mr. Spencer.
CHAPTER II--MR. HERBERT SPENCER
Mr. Herbert Spencer wrote to the Athenaeum (April 5, 1884), and
quoted certain passages from the 1855 edition of his "Principles of
Psychology," "the meanings and implications" from which he contended
were sufficiently clear. The passages he quoted were as follows:-
Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive sequences are not
determined by the experiences of the INDIVIDUAL organism manifesting
them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are
determined by the experiences of the RACE of organisms forming its
ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless successive
generations have established these sequences as organic relations
(p. 526).
The modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life
are also bequeathed (p. 526).
That is to say, the tendencies to certain combinations of psychical
changes have become organic (p. 527).
The doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by
experience must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the
connections established by the accumulated experiences of every
individual, but to all those established by the accumulated
experiences of every race (p. 529).
Here, then, we have one of the simpler forms of instinct which,
under the requisite conditions, must necessarily be established by
accumulated experiences (p. 547).
And manifestly, if the organisation of inner relations, in
correspondence with outer relations, results from a continual
registration of experiences, &c. (p. 551).
On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised
memory; on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of
incipient instinct (pp. 555-6).
Memory, then, pertains to all that class of psychical states which
are in process of being organised. It continues so long as the
organising of them continues; and disappears when the organisation
of them is complete. In the advance of the correspondence, each
more complex class of phenomena which the organism acquires the
power of recognising is responded to at first irregularly and
uncertainly; and there is then a weak remembrance of the relations.
By multiplication of experiences this remembrance becomes stronger,
and the response more certain. By further multiplication of
experiences the internal relations are at last automatically
organised in correspondence with the external ones; and so conscious
memory passes into unconscious or organic memory. At the same time,
a new and still more complex order of experiences is thus rendered
appreciable; the relations they present occupy the memory in place
of the simpler one; they become gradually organised; and, like the
previous ones, are succeeded by others more complex still (p. 563).
Just as we saw that the establishment of those compound reflex
actions which we call instincts is comprehensible on the principle
that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into
correspondence with outer relations; so the establishment of those
consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations
constituting our ideas of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the
same principle (p. 579).
In a book published a few weeks before Mr. Spencer's letter appeared
{29a} I had said that though Mr. Spencer at times closely approached
Professor Hering and "Life and Habit," he had nevertheless nowhere
shown that he considered memory and heredity to be parts of the same
story and parcel of one another. In his letter to the Athenaeum,
indeed, he does not profess to have upheld this view, except "by
implications;" nor yet, though in the course of the six or seven
years that had elapsed since "Life and Habit" was published I had
brought out more than one book to support my earlier one, had he
said anything during those years to lead me to suppose that I was
trespassing upon ground already taken by himself. Nor, again, had
he said anything which enabled me to appeal to his authority--which
I should have been only too glad to do; at last, however, he wrote,
as I have said, to the Athenaeum a letter which, indeed, made no
express claim, and nowhere mentioned myself, but "the meanings and
implications" from which were this time as clear as could be
desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering and myself to
stand aside.
The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. Spencer, or any
others that can be found in his works, show that he regarded
heredity in all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit
that this conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer's writings,
and that even the passages in which he approaches it most closely
are unintelligible till read by the light of Professor Hering's
address and of "Life and Habit."
True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as "the
experience of the race," "accumulated experiences," and others like
them, but he did not explain--and it was here the difficulty lay--
how a race could have any experience at all. We know what we mean
when we say that an individual has had experience; we mean that he
is the same person now (in the common use of the words), on the
occasion of some present action, as the one who performed a like
action at some past time or times, and that he remembers how he
acted before, so as to be able to turn his past action to account,
gaining in proficiency through practice. Continued personality and
memory are the elements that constitute experience; where these are
present there may, and commonly will, be experience; where they are
absent the word "experience" cannot properly be used.
Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many.
We now see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no
means the whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is
the race that is one, and the individual many. We all admit and
understand this readily enough now, but it was not understood when
Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the
Athenaeum above referred to. In the then state of our ideas a race
was only a succession of individuals, each one of them new persons,
and as such incapable of profiting by the experience of its
predecessors except in the very limited number of cases where oral
teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, was possible. The thread
of life was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between
each successive generation, and the importance of the physical and
psychical connection between parents and offspring had been quite,
or nearly quite, lost sight of. It seems strange how this could
ever have been allowed to come about, but it should be remembered
that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly discourage
attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise troublesome
questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible for
what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the
generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody
else is on many grounds the most convenient. Every now and then,
however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued
personality side of the connection between successive generations is
as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine,
and these tenth purposes--some of which are not unimportant--are
obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which
the more commonly needed conception has overgrown the other.
Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted
every hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to
speak, in stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our
mental storehouse, while the other was so seldom asked for that it
became not worth while to keep it. By-and-by it was found so
troublesome to send out for it, and so hard to come by even then,
that people left off selling it at all, and if any one wanted it he
must think it out at home as best he could; this was troublesome, so
by common consent the world decided no longer to busy itself with
the continued personality of successive generations--which was all
very well until it also decided to busy itself with the theory of
descent with modification. On the introduction of a foe so inimical
to many of our pre-existing ideas the balance of power among them
was upset, and a readjustment became necessary, which is still far
from having attained the next settlement that seems likely to be
reasonably permanent.
To change the illustration, the ordinary view is true for seven
places of decimals, and this commonly is enough; occasions, however,
have now arisen when the error caused by neglect of the omitted
places is appreciably disturbing, and we must have three or four
more. Mr. Spencer showed no more signs of seeing that he must
supply these, and make personal identity continue between successive
generations before talking about inherited (as opposed to post-natal
and educational) experience, than others had done before him; the
race with him, as with every one else till recently, was not one
long individual living indeed in pulsations, so to speak, but no
more losing continued personality by living in successive
generations, than an individual loses it by living in consecutive
days; a race was simply a succession of individuals, each one of
which was held to be an entirely new person, and was regarded
exclusively, or very nearly so, from this point of view.
When I wrote "Life and Habit" I knew that the words "experience of
the race" sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines and
newspapers, but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I
should have given their source. To me they conveyed no meaning, and
vexed me as an attempt to make me take stones instead of bread, and
to palm off an illustration upon me as though it were an
explanation. When I had worked the matter out in my own way, I saw
that the illustration, with certain additions, would become an
explanation, but I saw also that neither he who had adduced it nor
any one else could have seen how right he was, till much had been
said which had not, so far as 1 knew, been said yet, and which
undoubtedly would have been said if people had seen their way to
saying it.
"What is this talk," I wrote, "which is made about the experience of
the race, as though the experience of one man could profit another
who knows nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner it nourishes
him and not his neighbour; if he learns a difficult art it is he
that can do it and not his neighbour" ("Life and Habit," p. 49).
When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the
father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the
son was fed when the father ate before he begot him.
"Is there any way," I continued, "of showing that this experience of
the race about which so much is said without the least attempt to
show in what way it may, or does, become the experience of the
individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single
being only, who repeats on a great many different occasions, and in
slightly different ways, certain performances with which he has
already become exceedingly familiar?"
I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the
expression in question, that it was fallacious till this was done.
When I first began to write "Life and Habit" I did not believe it
could be done, but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were,
of my cu de sac, I saw the path which led straight to the point I
had despaired of reaching--I mean I saw that personality could not
be broken as between generations, without also breaking it between
the years, days, and moments of a man's life. What differentiates
"Life and Habit" from the "Principles of Psychology" is the
prominence given to continued personal identity, and hence to bona
fide memory, as between successive generations; but surely this
makes the two books differ widely.
Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost any direction,
if the change is brought about gradually and in accordance with the
rules of all development. As in music we may take almost any
possible discord with pleasing effect if we have prepared and
resolved it rightly, so our ideas will outlive and outgrow almost
any modification which is approached and quitted in such a way as to
fuse the old and new harmoniously. Words are to ideas what the
fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore it--only that the
prince was seen till he put on the cloak, whereas ideas are unseen
until they don the robe of words which reveals them to us; the
words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit each other and
stick to one another in our minds as soon as they are brought
together, or the ideas will fly off, and leave the words void of
that spirit by the aid of which alone they can become transmuted
into physical action and shape material things with their own
impress. Whether a discord is too violent or no, depends on what we
have been accustomed to, and on how widely the new differs from the
old, but in no case can we fuse and assimilate more than a very
little new at a time without exhausting our tempering power--and
hence presently our temper.
Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de minimis non
curat lex,--though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,--yet
too sudden a change in the manner in which our ideas are associated
is as cataclysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are
material convulsions, or too violent revolutions in politics. This
must always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, and
the only lawful home of the miracle is in the microscopically small.
Here, indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and ever
shall be, but we are deadened if they are required of us on a scale
which is visible to the naked eye. If we are told to work them our
hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we
are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If we are required
to believe them--which only means to fuse them with our other ideas-
-we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in
the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have
fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds
swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro
tanto kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go
mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and
yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and
essence of life; to cease to work them is to die. And by miracle I
do not merely mean something new, strange, and not very easy of
comprehension--I mean something which violates every canon of
thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect;
something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in
terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of
something out of nothing. This, which when writ large maddens and
kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest
and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in
which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as
growth and decay, or as life and death.
Claude Bernard says, Rien ne nait, rien ne se cree, tout se
continue. La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d'aucune creation,
elle est d'une eternelle continuation; {35a} but surely he is
insisting upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another
which is just as real, and just as important; he might have said,
Rien ne se continue, tout nait, tout se cree. La nature ne nous
offre le spectacle d'aucune continuation. Elle est d'une eternelle
creation; for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and,
indeed, the two stand or fall together. True, discontinuity, where
development is normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only
the difference between looking at distances on a small instead of a
large map; we cannot have even the smallest change without a small
partial corresponding discontinuity; on a small scale--too small,
indeed, for us to cognise--these breaks in continuity, each one of
which must, so far as our understanding goes, rank as a creation,
are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us, as is
the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale
for us to find it out. Creations, then, there must be, but they
must be so small that practically they are no creations. We must
have a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in
continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the help of change
at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It comes,
therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and
harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is
no conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by
flying in the face of every rule that professors of the art of
thinking have drawn up for our instruction. These rules may be good
enough as servants, but we have let them become the worst of
masters, forgetting that philosophy is made for man, not man for
philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which we have
thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens, and
have no more miracle, but see God and live--nor has confusion of
tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul said
well that the just shall live by faith; and the question "By what
faith?" is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as
species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its
own way both living and saving.
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