Books: Luck or Cunning?

S >> Samuel Butler >> Luck or Cunning?

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Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the Times appears to perceive
that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice
depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do
not appear to see that though the expression natural selection must
be always more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with
metaphor for purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural
selection which is open to no other objection than this, and which,
when its metaphorical character is borne well in mind, may be used
without serious risk of error, whereas natural selection from
variations that are mainly fortuitous is chimerical as well as
metaphorical. Both writers speak of natural selection as though
there could not possibly be any selection in the course of nature,
or natural survival, of any but accidental variations. Thus Mr.
Romanes says: {66a} "The swamping effect of free inter-crossing
upon an individual variation constitutes perhaps the most formidable
difficulty with which THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION is beset."
And the writer of the article in the Times above referred to says:
"In truth THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION presents many facts and
results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of
accounting for the existence of species." The assertion made in
each case is true if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous
variations is intended, but it does not hold good if the selection
is supposed to be made from variations under which there lies a
general principle of wide and abiding application. It is not likely
that a man of Mr. Romanes' antecedents should not be perfectly awake
to considerations so obvious as the foregoing, and I am afraid I am
inclined to consider his whole suggestion as only an attempt upon
the part of the wearer of Mr. Darwin's mantle to carry on Mr.
Darwin's work in Mr. Darwin's spirit.

I have seen Professor Hering's theory adopted recently more
unreservedly by Dr. Creighton in his "Illustrations of Unconscious
Memory in Disease." {67a} Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system
on Professor Hering's address, and endorses it; it is with much
pleasure that I have seen him lend the weight of his authority to
the theory that each cell and organ has an individual memory. In
"Life and Habit" I expressed a hope that the opinions it upheld
would be found useful by medical men, and am therefore the more glad
to see that this has proved to be the case. I may perhaps be
pardoned if I quote the passage in" Life and Habit" to which I am
referring. It runs:-

"Mutatis mutandis, the above would seem to hold as truly about
medicine as about politics. We cannot reason with our cells, for
they know so much more" (of course I mean "about their own
business") "than we do, that they cannot understand us;--but though
we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they have been most
accustomed to, and what, therefore, they are most likely to expect;
we can see that they get this as far as it is in our power to give
it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them, only bearing
in mind that they will rebel equally against too sudden a change of
treatment and no change at all" (p. 305).

Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which--
though I did not notice his saying so--he would doubtless see as a
mode of cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same
advantages as this, and requiring the same precautions against
abuse; he would not, however, I am sure, deny that there could be no
fertility of good results if too wide a cross were attempted, so
that I may claim the weight of his authority as supporting both the
theory of an unconscious memory in general, and the particular
application of it to medicine which I had ventured to suggest.

"Has the word 'memory,'" he asks, "a real application to unconscious
organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only
in a figure of speech?"

"If I had thought," he continues later, "that unconscious memory was
no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these
various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have
judged it not unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class
of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is
more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is
hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as
the force of habit. To say that a neurotic subject is like a person
with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is
like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons
with things that we all understand.

"For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that
retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty
throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily,
conscious or unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain
class of maladies according to the phraseology of memory and habit
as a real description and not a figurative." (p. 2.)

As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards "alterative
action" as "habit-breaking action."

As regards the organism's being guided throughout its development to
maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that
"Professor Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic
complication." "I should prefer to say," he adds, "the acme of
organic implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements
are perfectly simple, having nothing in their form or structure to
show for the marvellous potentialities within them.

"I now come to the application of these considerations to the
doctrine of unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of
organic implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the
acme of organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of
consciousness. Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is
explicit memory; generation is potential memory, consciousness is
actual memory."

I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly
as I should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the
reader to turn to Dr. Creighton's book, I will proceed to the
subject indicated in my title.

CHAPTER V--Statement of the Question at Issue

Of the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book--
I mean the connection between heredity and memory, and the
reintroduction of design into organic modification--the second is
both the more important and the one which stands most in need of
support. The substantial identity between heredity and memory is
becoming generally admitted; as regards my second point, however, I
cannot flatter myself that I have made much way against the
formidable array of writers on the neo-Darwinian side; I shall
therefore devote the rest of my book as far as possible to this
subject only. Natural selection (meaning by these words the
preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable
variations that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck
and in no way arising out of function) has been, to use an
Americanism than which I can find nothing apter, the biggest
biological boom of the last quarter of a century; it is not,
therefore, to be wondered at that Professor Ray Lankester, Mr.
Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should show some impatience at
seeing its value as prime means of modification called in question.
Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen {70a} and
Professor Ray Lankester {70b} in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause {70c}
in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory
of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by
myself; if they are not to be left in possession of the field the
sooner they are met the better.

Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;--whether luck or
cunning is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic
development. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in
favour of cunning. They settled it in favour of intelligent
perception of the situation--within, of course, ever narrower and
narrower limits as organism retreats farther backwards from
ourselves--and persistent effort to turn it to account. They made
this the soul of all development whether of mind or body.

And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both
for better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready
wit and savoir faire than others; that some give more proofs of
genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that
some have even gone through waters of misery which they have used as
wells.

The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense
and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made
by "striking oil," and ere now been transmitted to descendants in
spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired. No
speculation, no commerce; "nothing venture, nothing have," is as
true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any other
kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about
admitting that highly picturesque and romantic incidents of
developmental venture do from time to time occur in the race
histories even of the dullest and most dead-level organisms under
the name of "sports;" but they would hold that even these occur most
often and most happily to those that have persevered in well-doing
for some generations. Unto the organism that hath is given, and
from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that even "sports"
prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains the sheet
anchor of the early evolutionists. They believe, in fact, that more
organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way. The
race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle
to the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round
organism that is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world
obstructiveness. Festina, but festina lente--perhaps as involving
so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all
modification--is the motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va
piano va lontano, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the
hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at any rate as
the amoeba.

To repeat in other words. All enduring forms establish a modus
vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because both they
and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but
somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can to some
extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in,
involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs
employed; but their plasticity depends in great measure upon their
failure to perceive that they are moulding themselves. If a change
is so great that they are seriously incommoded by its novelty, they
are not likely to acquiesce in it kindly enough to grow to it, but
they will make no difficulty about the miracle involved in
accommodating themselves to a difference of only two or three per
cent. {72a}

As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as
fresh change does not supervene till the preceding one is well
established, there seems no limit to the amount of modification
which may be accumulated in the course of generations--provided, of
course, always, that the modification continues to be in conformity
with the instinctive habits and physical development of the organism
in their collective capacity. Where the change is too great, or
where an organ has been modified cumulatively in some one direction,
until it has reached a development too seriously out of harmony with
the habits of the organism taken collectively, then the organism
holds itself excused from further effort, throws up the whole
concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation and reconstruction of
death. It is only on the relinquishing of further effort that this
death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on from change
to change, altering and being altered--that is to say, either
killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or
killing the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves. There is a
ceaseless higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle
between these two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or
both have in no small part to re-enter into the womb from whence
they came and be born again in some form which shall give greater
satisfaction.

All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth. Change is the
common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and
death are not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one
another; in the highest life there is still much death, and in the
most complete death there is still not a little life. La vie, says
Claud Bernard, {73a} c'est la mort: he might have added, and
perhaps did, et la mort ce n'est que la vie transformee. Life and
death are the extreme modes of something which is partly both and
wholly neither; this something is common, ordinary change; solve any
change and the mystery of life and death will be revealed; show why
and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than
what it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left
in any other change. One is not in its ultimate essence more
miraculous that another; it may be more striking--a greater
congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but
not more miraculous; all change is qua us absolutely
incomprehensible and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the
greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its phenomena, be
inquired into.

But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a
dissolution, or a combination of the two. Growth is the coming
together of elements with quasi similar characteristics. I
understand it is believed to be the coming together of matter in
certain states of motion with other matter in states so nearly
similar that the rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence
reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the other--making, rather than
marring and undoing them. Life and growth are an attuning, death
and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or
smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is "the diapason
closing full in man"; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in
pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it
ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless
combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find
in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba.
Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of complexity.
All pleasant changes are recreative; they are pro tanto births; all
unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as such, pro tanto deaths, but
we can no more exhaust either wholly of the other, than we can
exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and pain lurk within
one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as rest and
unrest in one another.

There is no greater mystery in life than in death. We talk as
though the riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death
is just as great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making
five, the other is five splitting into two and two. Solve either,
and we have solved the other; they should be studied not apart, for
they are never parted, but together, and they will tell more tales
of one another than either will tell about itself. If there is one
thing which advancing knowledge makes clearer than another, it is
that death is swallowed up in life, and life in death; so that if
the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then indeed is our
salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness there is
neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures of
speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as
most convenient. There is neither perfect life nor perfect death,
but a being ever with the Lord only, in the eternal f??a, or going
to and fro and heat and fray of the universe. When we were young we
thought the one certain thing was that we should one day come to
die; now we know the one certain thing to be that we shall never
wholly do so. Non omnis moriar, says Horace, and "I die daily,"
says St. Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death on
this side of it, were each some strange thing which happened to them
alone of all men; but who dies absolutely once for all, and for ever
at the hour that is commonly called that of death, and who does not
die daily and hourly? Does any man in continuing to live from day
to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a changed body,
with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives from moment
to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to
moment also? Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and
more complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the
most essential factor of his life, from the day that he became "he"
at all? When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are
sounded, and so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite
harmonics of life that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards
from a censer. If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in
the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live or whether we
die, whether we like it and know anything about it or no, still we
do it to the Lord--living always, dying always, and in the Lord
always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is no respecter of
persons.

Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as
functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and
substance, are--for the condition of every substance may be
considered as the expression and outcome of its mind. Where there
is consciousness there is change; where there is no change there is
no consciousness; may we not suspect that there is no change without
a pro tanto consciousness however simple and unspecialised? Change
and motion are one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or
motion), as the ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may
suspect all change, and all feeling, attendant or consequent,
however limited, to be the interaction of those states which for
want of better terms we call mind and matter. Action may be
regarded as a kind of middle term between mind and matter; it is the
throe of thought and thing, the quivering clash and union of body
and soul; commonplace enough in practice; miraculous, as violating
every canon on which thought and reason are founded, if we theorise
about it, put it under the microscope, and vivisect it. It is here,
if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction
in terms of combining with that which is without material substance
and cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with
matter, till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.

All body is more or less ensouled. As it gets farther and farther
from ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say
to ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about
it--as though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power
of being understood rather than of understanding. We are
intelligent, and no intelligence, so different from our own as to
baffle our powers of comprehension deserves to be called
intelligence at all. The more a thing resembles ourselves, the more
it thinks as we do--and thus by implication tells us that we are
right, the more intelligent we think it; and the less it thinks as
we do, the greater fool it must be; if a substance does not succeed
in making it clear that it understands our business, we conclude
that it cannot have any business of its own, much less understand
it, or indeed understand anything at all. But letting this pass, so
far as we are concerned, [Greek text]; we are
body ensouled, and soul embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible for
us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist
either of soul without body, or body without soul. Unmattered
condition, therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned
matter; and we must hold that all body with which we can be
conceivably concerned is more or less ensouled, and all soul, in
like manner, more or less embodied. Strike either body or soul--
that is to say, effect either a physical or a mental change, and the
harmonics of the other sound. So long as body is minded in a
certain way--so long, that is to say, as it feels, knows, remembers,
concludes, and forecasts one set of things--it will be in one form;
if it assumes a new one, otherwise than by external violence, no
matter how slight the change may be, it is only through having
changed its mind, through having forgotten and died to some trains
of thought, and having been correspondingly born anew by the
adoption of new ones. What it will adopt depends upon which of the
various courses open to it it considers most to its advantage.

What it will think to its advantage depends mainly on the past
habits of its race. Its past and now invisible lives will influence
its desires more powerfully than anything it may itself be able to
add to the sum of its likes and dislikes; nevertheless, over and
above preconceived opinion and the habits to which all are slaves,
there is a small salary, or, as it were, agency commission, which
each may have for himself, and spend according to his fancy; from
this, indeed, income-tax must be deducted; still there remains a
little margin of individual taste, and here, high up on this narrow,
inaccessible ledge of our souls, from year to year a breed of not
unprolific variations build where reason cannot reach them to
despoil them; for de gustibus non est disputandum.

Here we are as far as we can go. Fancy, which sometimes sways so
much and is swayed by so little, and which sometimes, again, is so
hard to sway, and moves so little when it is swayed; whose ways have
a method of their own, but are not as our ways--fancy, lies on the
extreme borderland of the realm within which the writs of our
thoughts run, and extends into that unseen world wherein they have
no jurisdiction. Fancy is as the mist upon the horizon which blends
earth and sky; where, however, it approaches nearest to the earth
and can be reckoned with, it is seen as melting into desire, and
this as giving birth to design and effort. As the net result and
outcome of these last, living forms grow gradually but persistently
into physical conformity with their own intentions, and become
outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual faiths, or
wants of faith, that have been most within them. They thus very
gradually, but none the less effectually, design themselves.

In effect, therefore, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck introduce
uniformity into the moral and spiritual worlds as it was already
beginning to be introduced into the physical. According to both
these writers development has ever been a matter of the same energy,
effort, good sense, and perseverance, as tend to advancement of life
now among ourselves. In essence it is neither more nor less than
this, as the rain-drop which denuded an ancient formation is of the
same kind as that which is denuding a modern one, though its effect
may vary in geometrical ratio with the effect it has produced
already. As we are extending reason to the lower animals, so we
must extend a system of moral government by rewards and punishments
no less surely; and if we admit that to some considerable extent man
is man, and master of his fate, we should admit also that all
organic forms which are saved at all have been in proportionate
degree masters of their fate too, and have worked out, not only
their own salvation, but their salvation according, in no small
measure, to their own goodwill and pleasure, at times with a light
heart, and at times in fear and trembling. I do not say that
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck saw all the foregoing as clearly as it is
easy to see it now; what I have said, however, is only the natural
development of their system.

CHAPTER VI--Statement of the Question at Issue (continued)

So much for the older view; and now for the more modern opinion.
According to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, and ostensibly, I am afraid
I should add, a great majority of our most prominent biologists, the
view taken by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is not a sound one. Some
organisms, indeed, are so admirably adapted to their surroundings,
and some organs discharge their functions with so much appearance of
provision, that we are apt to think they must owe their development
to sense of need and consequent contrivance, but this opinion is
fantastic; the appearance of design is delusive; what we are tempted
to see as an accumulated outcome of desire and cunning, we should
regard as mainly an accumulated outcome of good luck.

Let us take the eye as a somewhat crucial example. It is a seeing-
machine, or thing to see with. So is a telescope; the telescope in
its highest development is a secular accumulation of cunning,
sometimes small, sometimes great; sometimes applied to this detail
of the instrument, and sometimes to that. It is an admirable
example of design; nevertheless, as I said in "Evolution Old and
New," he who made the first rude telescope had probably no idea of
any more perfect form of the instrument than the one he had himself
invented. Indeed, if he had, he would have carried his idea out in
practice. He would have been unable to conceive such an instrument
as Lord Rosse's; the design, therefore, at present evidenced by the
telescope was not design all on the part of one and the same person.
Nor yet was it unmixed with chance; many a detail has been doubtless
due to an accident or coincidence which was forthwith seized and
made the best of. Luck there always has been and always will be,
until all brains are opened, and all connections made known, but
luck turned to account becomes design; there is, indeed, if things
are driven home, little other design than this. The telescope,
therefore, is an instrument designed in all its parts for the
purpose of seeing, and, take it all round, designed with singular
skill.

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