Books: Luck or Cunning?

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All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things,
is miraculous. It is the two in one, and at the same time one in
two, which is only two and two making five put before us in another
shape; yet this fusion--so easy to think so long as it is not
thought about, and so unthinkable if we try to think it--is, as it
were, the matrix from which our more thinkable thought is taken; it
is the cloud gathering in the unseen world from which the waters of
life descend in an impalpable dew. Granted that all, whether fusion
or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it
and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which
common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with
it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole
process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these
miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into
the seen again--provided we do not look back, and provided also we
do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time. To think is
to fuse and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed.
We can all feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can
fuse ideas; or we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within
reasonable limits we can feed; we know not which comes first, the
food or the ideas, but we must not overtax our strength; the moment
we do this we taste of death.

It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food
fine before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large
lumps will choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again,
that that which is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas.
Food is very thoughtful: through thought it comes, and back through
thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and
comprehension within our own system is mental as well as physical,
and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be
a cross, but not too wide a cross--that is to say, there must be a
miracle, but not upon a large scale. Granted that no one can draw a
clear line and define the limits within which a miracle is healthy
working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he can
prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute
our food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and
that at all times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass
themselves, still we know as a general rule near enough, and find
that the strongest can do but very little at a time, and, to return
to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two such hitherto unassociated ideas
as race and experience was a miracle beyond our strength.

Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the
letter to the Athenaeum above referred to, we were not in the habit
of thinking of any one as able to remember things that had happened
before he had been born or thought of. This notion will still
strike many of my non-readers as harsh and strained; no such
discord, therefore, should have been taken unprepared, and when
taken it should have been resolved with pomp and circumstance. Mr
Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never either
prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words
"experience of the race" sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with
the result that his words were barren. They were barren because
they were incoherent; they were incoherent because they were
approached and quitted too suddenly. While we were realising
"experience" our minds excluded "race," inasmuch as experience was
an idea we had been accustomed hitherto to connect only with the
individual; while realising the idea "race," for the same reason, we
as a matter of course excluded experience. We were required to fuse
two ideas that were alien to one another, without having had those
other ideas presented to us which would alone flux them. The
absence of these--which indeed were not immediately ready to hand,
or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them--made nonsense of
the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one
against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer's pages, only to find that
they had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we
put down his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know
what to do with his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly
while he chastised us with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with
whips, according to our temperaments.

I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and
the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and
plants, are one in principle--the sterility of hybrids being just as
much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas
into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed,
resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than
barrenness of ideas--that is to say, into inability to think at all,
or at any rate to think as their neighbours do.

If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race
are bona fide united by a common personality, and that in virtue of
being so united each generation remembers (within, of course, the
limits to which all memory is subject) what happened to it while
still in the persons of its progenitors--then his order to Professor
Hering and myself should be immediately obeyed; but this was just
what was at once most wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even
in the passages given above--passages collected by Mr. Spencer
himself--this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as
Professor Hering made it--put continued personality and memory in
the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to
be discovered "by implications," and then such expressions as
"accumulated experiences" and "experience of the race" become
luminous; till this had been done they were Vox et praeterea nihil.

To sum up briefly. The passages quoted by Mr. Spencer from his
"Principles of Psychology" can hardly be called clear, even now that
Professor Hering and others have thrown light upon them. If,
indeed, they had been clear Mr. Spencer would probably have seen
what they necesitated, and found the way of meeting the difficulties
of the case which occurred to Professor Hering and myself. Till we
wrote, very few writers had even suggested this. The idea that
offspring was only "an elongation or branch proceeding from its
parents" had scintillated in the ingenious brain of Dr. Erasmus
Darwin, and in that of the designer of Jesse tree windows, but it
had kindled no fire; it now turns out that Canon Kingsley had once
called instinct inherited memory, {40a} but the idea, if born alive
at all, died on the page on which it saw light: Professor Ray
Lankester, again called attention to Professor Hering's address
(Nature, July 13, 1876), but no discussion followed, and the matter
dropped without having produced visible effect. As for offspring
remembering in any legitimate sense of the words what it had done,
and what had happened to it, before it was born, no such notion was
understood to have been gravely mooted till very recently. I doubt
whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes would accept this even now, when
it is put thus undisguisedly; but this is what Professor Hering and
I mean, and it is the only thing that should be meant, by those who
speak of instinct as inherited memory. Mr Spencer cannot maintain
that these two startling novelties went without saying "by
implication" from the use of such expressions as "accumulated
experiences" or "experience of the race."

CHAPTER III--MR. HERBERT SPENCER (continued)

Whether they ought to have gone or not, they did not go.

When "Life and Habit" was first published no one considered Mr.
Spencer to be maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be in reality
phenomena of memory. When, for example, Professor Ray Lankester
first called attention to Professor Hering's address, he did not
understand Mr. Spencer to be intending this. "Professor Hering," he
wrote (Nature, July 13, 1876), "helps us to a comprehensive view of
the nature of heredity and adaptation, by giving us the word
'memory,' conscious or unconscious, for the continuity of Mr.
Spencer's polar forces or polarities of physiological units." He
evidently found the prominence given to memory a help to him which
he had not derived from reading Mr. Spencer's works.

When, again, he attacked me in the Athenaeum (March 29, 1884), he
spoke of my "tardy recognition" of the fact that Professor Hering
had preceded me "in treating all manifestations of heredity as a
form of memory." Professor Lankester's words could have no force if
he held that any other writer, and much less so well known a writer
as Mr. Spencer, had preceded me in putting forward the theory in
question.

When Mr. Romanes reviewed "Unconscious Memory" in Nature (January
27, 1881) the notion of a "race-memory," to use his own words, was
still so new to him that he declared it "simply absurd" to suppose
that it could "possibly be fraught with any benefit to science," and
with him too it was Professor Hering who had anticipated me in the
matter, not Mr. Spencer.

In his "Mental Evolution in Animals" (p. 296) he said that Canon
Kingsley, writing in 1867, was the first to advance the theory that
instinct is inherited memory; he could not have said this if Mr.
Spencer had been understood to have been upholding this view for the
last thirty years.

Mr. A. R. Wallace reviewed "Life and Habit" in Nature (March 27,
1879), but he did not find the line I had taken a familiar one, as
he surely must have done if it had followed easily by implication
from Mr. Spencer's works. He called it "an ingenious and
paradoxical explanation" which was evidently new to him. He
concluded by saying that "it might yet afford a clue to some of the
deepest mysteries of the organic world."

Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on Evolution in the
American Catholic Quarterly Review (July 1881), said, "Mr Butler is
not only perfectly logical and consistent in the startling
consequences he deduces from his principles, but," &c. Professor
Mivart could not have found my consequences startling if they had
already been insisted upon for many years by one of the best-known
writers of the day.

The reviewer of "Evolution Old and New" in the Saturday Review
(March 31, 1879), of whom all I can venture to say is that he or she
is a person whose name carries weight in matters connected with
biology, though he (for brevity) was in the humour for seeing
everything objectionable in me that could be seen, still saw no Mr.
Spencer in me. He said--"Mr Butler's own particular contribution to
the terminology of Evolution is the phrase two or three times
repeated with some emphasis" (I repeated it not two or three times
only, but whenever and wherever I could venture to do so without
wearying the reader beyond endurance) "oneness of personality
between parents and offspring." The writer proceeded to reprobate
this in language upon which a Huxley could hardly improve, but as he
declares himself unable to discover what it means, it may be
presumed that the idea of continued personality between successive
generations was new to him.

When Dr. Francis Darwin called on me a day or two before "Life and
Habit" went to the press, he said the theory which had pleased him
more than any he had seen for some time was one which referred all
life to memory; {44a} he doubtless intended "which referred all the
phenomena of heredity to memory." He then mentioned Professor Ray
Lankester's article in Nature, of which I had not heard, but he said
nothing about Mr. Spencer, and spoke of the idea as one which had
been quite new to him.

The above names comprise (excluding Mr. Spencer himself) perhaps
those of the best-known writers on evolution that can be mentioned
as now before the public; it is curious that Mr Spencer should be
the only one of them to see any substantial resemblance between the
"Principles of Psychology" and Professor Hering's address and "Life
and Habit."

I ought, perhaps, to say that Mr. Romanes, writing to the Athenaeum
(March 8, 1884), took a different view of the value of the theory of
inherited memory to the one he took in 1881.

In 1881 he said it was "simply absurd" to suppose it could "possibly
be fraught with any benefit to science" or "reveal any truth of
profound significance;" in 1884 he said of the same theory, that "it
formed the backbone of all the previous literature upon instinct" by
Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Fiske, and Spalding, "not to mention their
numerous followers, and is by all of them elaborately stated as
clearly as any theory can be stated in words."

Few except Mr. Romanes will say this. I grant it ought to "have
formed the backbone," &c., and ought "to have been elaborately
stated," &c., but when I wrote "Life and Habit" neither Mr Romanes
nor any one else understood it to have been even glanced at by more
than a very few, and as for having been "elaborately stated," it had
been stated by Professor Hering as elaborately as it could be stated
within the limits of an address of only twenty-two pages, but with
this exception it had never been stated at all. It is not too much
to say that "Life and Habit," when it first came out, was considered
so startling a paradox that people would not believe in my desire to
be taken seriously, or at any rate were able to pretend that they
thought I was not writing seriously.

Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who keep an eye
on evolution; he himself, indeed, had said (Nature, January 27,
1881) that so long as I "aimed only at entertaining" my "readers by
such works as 'Erewhon' and 'Life and Habit'" (as though these books
were of kindred character) I was in my proper sphere. It would be
doing too little credit to Mr. Romanes' intelligence to suppose him
not to have known when he said this that "Life and Habit" was
written as seriously as my subsequent books on evolution, but it
suited him at the moment to join those who professed to consider it
another book of paradoxes such as, I suppose, "Erewhon" had been, so
he classed the two together. He could not have done this unless
enough people thought, or said they thought, the books akin, to give
colour to his doing so.

One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, brought Mr.
Spencer against me. This was a writer in the St. James's Gazette
(December 2, 1880). I challenged him in a letter which appeared
(December 8, 1880), and said, "I would ask your reviewer to be kind
enough to refer your readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer's
"Principles of Psychology" which in any direct intelligible way
refer the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, to memory on
the part of offspring of the action it bona fide took in the persons
of its forefathers." The reviewer made no reply, and I concluded,
as I have since found correctly, that he could not find the
passages.

True, in his "Principles of Psychology" (vol. ii. p. 195) Mr.
Spencer says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all
intelligence is acquired through experience "so as to make it
include with the experience of each individual the experiences of
all ancestral individuals," &c. This is all very good, but it is
much the same as saying, "We have only got to stand on our heads and
we shall be able to do so and so." We did not see our way to
standing on our heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help us; we had been
accustomed, as I am afraid I must have said usque ad nauseam
already, to lose sight of the physical connection existing between
parents and offspring; we understood from the marriage service that
husband and wife were in a sense one flesh, but not that parents and
children were so also; and without this conception of the matter,
which in its way is just as true as the more commonly received one,
we could not extend the experience of parents to offspring. It was
not in the bond or nexus of our ideas to consider experience as
appertaining to more than a single individual in the common
acceptance of the term; these two ideas were so closely bound
together that wherever the one went the other went perforce. Here,
indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer's just referred to, the
race is throughout regarded as "a series of individuals"--without an
attempt to call attention to that other view, in virtue of which we
are able to extend to many an idea we had been accustomed to confine
to one.

In his chapter on Memory, Mr. Spencer certainly approaches the
Heringian view. He says, "On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded
as a kind of organised memory; on the other, Memory may be regarded
as a kind of incipient instinct" ("Principles of Psychology," ed. 2,
vol. i. p. 445). Here the ball has fallen into his hands, but if he
had got firm hold of it he could not have written, "Instinct MAY BE
regarded as A KIND OF, &c.;" to us there is neither "may be regarded
as" nor "kind of" about it; we require, "Instinct is inherited
memory," with an explanation making it intelligible how memory can
come to be inherited at all. I do not like, again, calling memory
"a kind of incipient instinct;" as Mr. Spencer puts them the words
have a pleasant antithesis, but "instinct is inherited memory"
covers all the ground, and to say that memory is inherited instinct
is surplusage.

Nor does he stick to it long when he says that "instinct is a kind
of organised memory," for two pages later he says that memory, to be
memory at all, must be tolerably conscious or deliberate; he,
therefore (vol. i. p. 447), denies that there can be such a thing as
unconscious memory; but without this it is impossible for us to see
instinct as the "kind of organised memory" which he has just been
calling it, inasmuch as instinct is notably undeliberate and
unreflecting.

A few pages farther on (vol. i. p. 452) he finds himself driven to
unconscious memory after all, and says that "conscious memory passes
into unconscious or organic memory." Having admitted unconscious
memory, he declares (vol. i. p. 450) that "as fast as those
connections among psychical states, which we form in memory, grow by
constant repetition automatic--they CEASE TO BE PART OF MEMORY," or,
in other words, he again denies that there can be an unconscious
memory.

Mr. Spencer doubtless saw that he was involved in contradiction in
terms, and having always understood that contradictions in terms
were very dreadful things--which, of course, under some
circumstances they are--thought it well so to express himself that
his readers should be more likely to push on than dwell on what was
before them at the moment. I should be the last to complain of him
merely on the ground that he could not escape contradiction in
terms: who can? When facts conflict, contradict one another, melt
into one another as the colours of the spectrum so insensibly that
none can say where one begins and the other ends, contradictions in
terms become first fruits of thought and speech. They are the basis
of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that a physical
obstacle is the basis of physical sensation. No opposition, no
sensation, applies as much to the psychical as to the physical
kingdom, as soon as these two have got well above the horizon of our
thoughts and can be seen as two. No contradiction, no
consciousness; no cross, no crown; contradictions are the very small
deadlocks without which there is no going; going is our sense of a
succession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of
cutting Gordian knots, which on a small scale please or pain as the
case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to
the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger, kill whether they
be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said in "Life and
Habit," hates that any principle should breed hermaphroditically,
but will give to each an helpmeet for it which shall cross it and be
the undoing of it; and in the undoing, do; and in the doing, undo,
and so ad infinitum. Cross-fertilisation is just as necessary for
continued fertility of ideas as for that of organic life, and the
attempt to frown this or that down merely on the ground that it
involves contradiction in terms, without at the same time showing
that the contradiction is on a larger scale than healthy thought can
stomach, argues either small sense or small sincerity on the part of
those who make it. The contradictions employed by Mr. Spencer are
objectionable, not on the ground of their being contradictions at
all, but on the ground of their being blinked, and used
unintelligently.

But though it is not possible for any one to get a clear conception
of Mr. Spencer's meaning, we may say with more confidence what it
was that he did not mean. He did not mean to make memory the
keystone of his system; he has none of that sense of the unifying,
binding force of memory which Professor Hering has so well
expressed, nor does he show any signs of perceiving the far-reaching
consequences that ensue if the phenomena of heredity are considered
as phenomena of memory. Thus, when he is dealing with the phenomena
of old age (vol. i. p. 538, ed. 2) he does not ascribe them to lapse
and failure of memory, nor surmise the principle underlying
longevity. He never mentions memory in connection with heredity
without presently saying something which makes us involuntarily
think of a man missing an easy catch at cricket; it is only rarely,
however, that he connects the two at all. I have only been able to
find the word "inherited" or any derivative of the verb "to inherit"
in connection with memory once in all the 1300 long pages of the
"Principles of Psychology." It occurs in vol ii. p. 200, 2d ed.,
where the words stand, "Memory, inherited or acquired." I submit
that this was unintelligible when Mr. Spencer wrote it, for want of
an explanation which he never gave; I submit, also, that he could
not have left it unexplained, nor yet as an unrepeated expression
not introduced till late in his work, if he had had any idea of its
pregnancy.

At any rate, whether he intended to imply what he now implies that
he intended to imply (for Mr. Spencer, like the late Mr. Darwin, is
fond of qualifying phrases), I have shown that those most able and
willing to understand him did not take him to mean what he now
appears anxious to have it supposed that he meant. Surely,
moreover, if he had meant it he would have spoken sooner, when he
saw his meaning had been missed. I can, however, have no hesitation
in saying that if I had known the "Principles of Psychology"
earlier, as well as I know the work now, I should have used it
largely.

It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to see whether
he even now assigns to continued personality and memory the place
assigned to it by Professor Hering and myself. I will therefore
give the concluding words of the letter to the Athenaeum already
referred to, in which he tells us to stand aside. He writes "I
still hold that inheritance of functionally produced modifications
is the chief factor throughout the higher stages of organic
evolution, bodily as well as mental (see 'Principles of Biology,' i.
166), while I recognise the truth that throughout the lower stages
survival of the fittest is the chief factor, and in the lowest the
almost exclusive factor."

This is the same confused and confusing utterance which Mr. Spencer
has been giving us any time this thirty years. According to him the
fact that variations can be inherited and accumulated has less to do
with the first development of organic life, than the fact that if a
square organism happens to get into a square hole, it will live
longer and more happily than a square organism which happens to get
into a round one; he declares "the survival of the fittest"--and
this is nothing but the fact that those who "fit" best into their
surroundings will live longest and most comfortably--to have more to
do with the development of the amoeba into, we will say, a mollusc
than heredity itself. True, "inheritance of functionally produced
modifications" is allowed to be the chief factor throughout the
"higher stages of organic evolution," but it has very little to do
in the lower; in these "the almost exclusive factor" is not
heredity, or inheritance, but "survival of the fittest."

Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe this; of course,
also, all who are fairly well up in the history of the development
theory will see why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this
distinction between the "factors" of the development of the higher
and lower forms of life; but no matter how or why Mr. Spencer has
been led to say what he has, he has no business to have said it.
What can we think of a writer who, after so many years of writing
upon his subject, in a passage in which he should make his meaning
doubly clear, inasmuch as he is claiming ground taken by other
writers, declares that though hereditary use and disuse, or, to use
his own words, "the inheritance of functionally produced
modifications," is indeed very important in connection with the
development of the higher forms of life, yet heredity itself has
little or nothing to do with that of the lower? Variations, whether
produced functionally or not, can only be perpetuated and
accumulated because they can be inherited;--and this applies just as
much to the lower as to the higher forms of life; the question which
Professor Hering and I have tried to answer is, "How comes it that
anything can be inherited at all? In virtue of what power is it
that offspring can repeat and improve upon the performances of their
parents?" Our answer was, "Because in a very valid sense, though
not perhaps in the most usually understood, there is continued
personality and an abiding memory between successive generations."
How does Mr. Spencer's confession of faith touch this? If any
meaning can be extracted from his words, he is no more supporting
this view now than he was when he wrote the passages he has adduced
to show that he was supporting it thirty years ago; but after all no
coherent meaning can be got out of Mr. Spencer's letter--except, of
course, that Professor Hering and myself are to stand aside. I have
abundantly shown that I am very ready to do this in favour of
Professor Hering, but see no reason for admitting Mr. Spencer's
claim to have been among the forestallers of "Life and Habit."

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