Books: Luck or Cunning?
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Samuel Butler >> Luck or Cunning?
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How is progress ever to be made if races keep reversing, Penelope-
like, in one generation all that they have been achieving in the
preceding? And how, on Mr. Darwin's system, of which the
accumulation of strokes of luck is the greatly preponderating
feature, is a hoard ever to be got together and conserved, no matter
how often luck may have thrown good things in an organism's way?
Luck, or absence of design, may be sometimes almost said to throw
good things in our way, or at any rate we may occasionally get more
through having made no design than any design we should have been
likely to have formed would have given us; but luck does not hoard
these good things for our use and make our wills for us, nor does it
keep providing us with the same good gifts again and again, and no
matter how often we reject them.
I had better, perhaps, give Mr. Spencer's own words as quoted by
himself in his article in the Nineteenth Century for April, 1886.
He there wrote as follows, quoting from section 166 of his
"Principles of Biology," which appeared in 1864:-
"Where the life is comparatively simple, or where surrounding
circumstances render some one function supremely important, the
survival of the fittest" (which means here the survival of the
luckiest) "may readily bring about the appropriate structural
change, without any aid from the transmission of functionally-
acquired modifications" (into which effort and design have entered).
"But in proportion as the life grows complex--in proportion as a
healthy existence cannot be secured by a large endowment of some one
power, but demands many powers; in the same proportion do there
arise obstacles to the increase of any particular power, by 'the
preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life'" (that is
to say, through mere survival of the luckiest). "As fast as the
faculties are multiplied, so fast does it become possible for the
several members of a species to have various kinds of superiority
over one another. While one saves its life by higher speed, another
does the like by clearer vision, another by keener scent, another by
quicker hearing, another by greater strength, another by unusual
power of enduring cold or hunger, another by special sagacity,
another by special timidity, another by special courage; and others
by other bodily and mental attributes. Now it is unquestionably
true that, other things equal, each of these attributes, giving its
possessor an equal extra chance of life, is likely to be transmitted
to posterity. But there seems no reason to believe it will be
increased in subsequent generations by natural selection. That it
may be thus increased, the animals not possessing more than average
endowments of it must be more frequently killed off than individuals
highly endowed with it; and this can only happen when the attribute
is one of greater importance, for the time being, than most of the
other attributes.
If those members of the species which have but ordinary shares of
it, nevertheless survive by virtue of other superiorities which they
severally possess, then it is not easy to see how this particular
attribute can be developed by natural selection in subsequent
generations." (For if some other superiority is a greater source of
luck, then natural selection, or survival of the luckiest, will
ensure that this other superiority be preserved at the expense of
the one acquired in the earlier generation.) "The probability seems
rather to be, that by gamogenesis, this extra endowment will, on the
average, be diminished in posterity--just serving in the long run to
compensate the deficient endowments of other individuals, whose
special powers lie in other directions; and so to keep up the normal
structure of the species. The working out of the process is here
somewhat difficult to follow" (there is no difficulty as soon as it
is perceived that Mr. Darwin's natural selection invariably means,
or ought to mean, the survival of the luckiest, and that seasons and
what they bring with them, though fairly constant on an average, yet
individually vary so greatly that what is luck in one season is
disaster in another); "but it appears to me that as fast as the
number of bodily and mental faculties increases, and as fast as the
maintenance of life comes to depend less on the amount of any one,
and more on the combined action of all, so fast does the production
of specialities of character by natural selection alone become
difficult. Particularly does this seem to be so with a species so
multitudinous in powers as mankind; and above all does it seem to be
so with such of the human powers as have but minor shares in aiding
the struggle for life--the aesthetic faculties, for example.
"Dwelling for a moment on this last illustration of the class of
difficulties described, let us ask how we are to interpret the
development of the musical faculty; how came there that endowment of
musical faculty which characterises modern Europeans at large, as
compared with their remote ancestors? The monotonous chants of low
savages cannot be said to show any melodic inspiration; and it is
not evident that an individual savage who had a little more musical
perception than the rest would derive any such advantage in the
maintenance of life as would secure the spread of his superiority by
inheritance of the variation," &c.
It should be observed that the passage given in the last paragraph
but one appeared in 1864, only five years after the first edition of
the "Origin of Species," but, crushing as it is, Mr. Darwin never
answered it. He treated it as nonexistent--and this, doubtless from
a business standpoint, was the best thing he could do. How far such
a course was consistent with that single-hearted devotion to the
interests of science for which Mr. Darwin developed such an abnormal
reputation, is a point which I must leave to his many admirers to
determine.
CHAPTER VIII--Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm
One would think the issue stated in the three preceding chapters was
decided in the stating. This, as I have already implied, is
probably the reason why those who have a vested interest in Mr.
Darwin's philosophical reputation have avoided stating it.
It may be said that, seeing the result is a joint one, inasmuch as
both "res" and "me," or both luck and cunning, enter so largely into
development, neither factor can claim pre-eminence to the exclusion
of the other. But life is short and business long, and if we are to
get the one into the other we must suppress details, and leave our
words pregnant, as painters leave their touches when painting from
nature. If one factor concerns us greatly more than the other, we
should emphasize it, and let the other go without saying, by force
of association. There is no fear of its being lost sight of;
association is one of the few really liberal things in nature; by
liberal, I mean precipitate and inaccurate; the power of words, as
of pictures, and indeed the power to carry on life at all, vests in
the fact that association does not stick to the letter of its bond,
but will take the half for the whole without even looking closely at
the coin given to make sure that it is not counterfeit. Through the
haste and high pressure of business, errors arise continually, and
these errors give us the shocks of which our consciousness is
compounded. Our whole conscious life, therefore, grows out of
memory and out of the power of association, in virtue of which not
only does the right half pass for the whole, but the wrong half not
infrequently passes current for it also, without being challenged
and found out till, as it were, the accounts come to be balanced,
and it is found that they will not do so.
Variations are an organism's way of getting over an unexpected
discrepancy between its resources as shown by the fly-leaves of its
own cheques and the universe's passbook; the universe is generally
right, or would be upheld as right if the matter were to come before
the not too incorruptible courts of nature, and in nine cases out of
ten the organism has made the error in its own favour, so that it
must now pay or die. It can only pay by altering its mode of life,
and how long is it likely to be before a new departure in its mode
of life comes out in its own person and in those of its family?
Granted it will at first come out in their appearance only, but
there can be no change in appearance without some slight
corresponding organic modification. In practice there is usually
compromise in these matters. The universe, if it does not give an
organism short shrift and eat it at once, will commonly abate
something of its claim; it gets tricked out of an additional moiety
by the organism; the organism really does pay something by way of
changed habits; this results in variation, in virtue of which the
accounts are cooked, cobbled, and passed by a series of those
miracles of inconsistency which was call compromises, and after this
they cannot be reopened--not till next time.
Surely of the two factors which go to the making up of development,
cunning is the one more proper to be insisted on as determining the
physical and psychical well or ill being, and hence, ere long, the
future form of the organism. We can hardly open a newspaper without
seeing some sign of this; take, for example, the following extract
from a letter in the Times of the day on which I am writing
(February 8, 1886)-- "You may pass along a road which divides a
settlement of Irish Celts from one of Germans. They all came to the
country equally without money, and have had to fight their way in
the forest, but the difference in their condition is very
remarkable; on the German side there is comfort, thrift, peace, but
on the other side the spectacle is very different." Few will deny
that slight organic differences, corresponding to these differences
of habit, are already perceptible; no Darwinian will deny that these
differences are likely to be inherited, and, in the absence of
intermarriage between the two colonies, to result in still more
typical difference than that which exists at present. According to
Mr. Darwin, the improved type of the more successful race would not
be due mainly to transmitted perseverance in well-doing, but to the
fact that if any member of the German colony "happened" to be born
"ever so slightly," &c. Of course this last is true to a certain
extent also; if any member of the German colony does "happen to be
born," &c., then he will stand a better chance of surviving, and, if
he marries a wife like himself, of transmitting his good qualities;
but how about the happening? How is it that this is of such
frequent occurrence in the one colony, and is so rare in the other?
Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis. True, but how and why? Through
the race being favoured? In one sense, doubtless, it is true that
no man can have anything except it be given him from above, but it
must be from an above into the composition of which he himself
largely enters. God gives us all things; but we are a part of God,
and that part of Him, moreover, whose department it more especially
is to look after ourselves. It cannot be through luck, for luck is
blind, and does not pick out the same people year after year and
generation after generation; shall we not rather say, then, that it
is because mind, or cunning, is a great factor in the achievement of
physical results, and because there is an abiding memory between
successive generations, in virtue of which the cunning of an earlier
one enures to the benefit of its successors?
It is one of the commonplaces of biology that the nature of the
organism (which is mainly determined by ancestral antecedents) is
greatly more important in determining its future than the conditions
of its environment, provided, of course, that these are not too
cruelly abnormal, so that good seed will do better on rather poor
soil, than bad seed on rather good soil; this alone should be enough
to show that cunning, or individual effort, is more important in
determining organic results than luck is, and therefore that if
either is to be insisted on to the exclusion of the other, it should
be cunning, not luck. Which is more correctly said to be the main
means of the development of capital--Luck? or Cunning? Of course
there must be something to be developed--and luck, that is to say,
the unknowable and unforeseeable, enters everywhere; but is it more
convenient with our oldest and best-established ideas to say that
luck is the main means of the development of capital, or that
cunning is so? Can there be a moment's hesitation in admitting that
if capital is found to have been developed largely, continuously, by
many people, in many ways, over a long period of time, it can only
have been by means of continued application, energy, effort,
industry, and good sense? Granted there has been luck too; of
course there has, but we let it go without saying, whereas we cannot
let the skill or cunning go without saying, inasmuch as we feel the
cunning to have been the essence of the whole matter.
Granted, again, that there is no test more fallacious on a small
scale than that of immediate success. As applied to any particular
individual, it breaks down completely. It is unfortunately no rare
thing to see the good man striving against fate, and the fool born
with a silver spoon in his mouth. Still on a large scale no test
can be conceivably more reliable; a blockhead may succeed for a
time, but a succession of many generations of blockheads does not go
on steadily gaining ground, adding field to field and farm to farm,
and becoming year by year more capable and prosperous. Given time--
of which there is no scant in the matter of organic development--and
cunning will do more with ill luck than folly with good. People do
not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of whist running,
if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves. Cunning, if it
can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere luck unaided by
cunning, no matter what start luck may have had, if the race be a
fairly long one. Growth is a kind of success which does indeed come
to some organisms with less effort than to others, but it cannot be
maintained and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish
organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, for, as a
general rule, unless the variation has so much connection with the
organism's past habits and ways of thought as to be in no proper
sense of the word "fortuitous," the organism will not know what to
do with it when it has got it, no matter how favourable it may be,
and it is little likely to be handed down to descendants. Indeed
the kind of people who get on best in the world--and what test to a
Darwinian can be comparable to this?--commonly do insist on cunning
rather than on luck, sometimes perhaps even unduly; speaking, at
least, from experience, I have generally found myself more or less
of a failure with those Darwinians to whom I have endeavoured to
excuse my shortcomings on the score of luck.
It may be said that the contention that the nature of the organism
does more towards determining its future than the conditions of its
immediate environment do, is only another way of saying that the
accidents which have happened to an organism in the persons of its
ancestors throughout all time are more irresistible by it for good
or ill than any of the more ordinary chances and changes of its own
immediate life. I do not deny this; but these ancestral accidents
were either turned to account, or neglected where they might have
been taken advantage of; they thus passed either into skill, or want
of skill; so that whichever way the fact is stated the result is the
same; and if simplicity of statement be regarded, there is no more
convenient way of putting the matter than to say that though luck is
mighty, cunning is mightier still. Organism commonly shows its
cunning by practising what Horace preached, and treating itself as
more plastic than its surroundings; those indeed who have had the
greatest the first to admit that they had gained their ends more by
reputation as moulders of circumstances have ever been shaping their
actions and themselves to suit events, than by trying to shape
events to suit themselves and their actions. Modification, like
charity, begins at home.
But however this may be, there can be no doubt that cunning is in
the long run mightier than luck as regards the acquisition of
property, and what applies to property applies to organism also.
Property, as I have lately seen was said by Rosmini, is a kind of
extension of the personality into the outside world. He might have
said as truly that it is a kind of penetration of the outside world
within the limits of the personality, or that it is at any rate a
prophesying of, and essay after, the more living phase of matter in
the direction of which it is tending. If approached from the
dynamical or living side of the underlying substratum, it is the
beginning of the comparatively stable equilibrium which we call
brute matter; if from the statical side, that is to say, from that
of brute matter, it is the beginning of that dynamical state which
we associate with life; it is the last of ego and first of non ego,
or vice versa, as the case may be; it is the ground whereon the two
meet and are neither wholly one nor wholly the other, but a whirling
mass of contradictions such as attends all fusion.
What property is to a man's mind or soul that his body is also, only
more so. The body is property carried to the bitter end, or
property is the body carried to the bitter end, whichever the reader
chooses; the expression "organic wealth" is not figurative; none
other is so apt and accurate; so universally, indeed, is this
recognised that the fact has found expression in our liturgy, which
bids us pray for all those who are any wise afflicted "in mind,
body, or estate;" no inference, therefore, can be more simple and
legitimate than the one in accordance with which the laws that
govern the development of wealth generally are supposed also to
govern the particular form of health and wealth which comes most
closely home to us--I mean that of our bodily implements or organs.
What is the stomach but a living sack, or purse of untanned leather,
wherein we keep our means of subsistence? Food is money made easy;
it is petty cash in its handiest and most reduced form; it is our
way of assimilating our possessions and making them indeed our own.
What is the purse but a kind of abridged extra corporeal stomach
wherein we keep the money which we convert by purchase into food, as
we presently convert the food by digestion into flesh and blood?
And what living form is there which is without a purse or stomach,
even though it have to job it by the meal as the amoeba does, and
exchange it for some other article as soon as it has done eating?
How marvellously does the analogy hold between the purse and the
stomach alike as regards form and function; and I may say in passing
that, as usual, the organ which is the more remote from protoplasm
is at once more special, more an object of our consciousness, and
less an object of its own.
Talk of ego and non ego meeting, and of the hopelessness of avoiding
contradiction in terms--talk of this, and look, in passing, at the
amoeba. It is itself qua maker of the stomach and being fed; it is
not itself qua stomach and qua its using itself as a mere tool or
implement to feed itself with. It is active and passive, object and
subject, ego and non ego--every kind of Irish bull, in fact, which a
sound logician abhors--and it is only because it has persevered, as
I said in "Life and Habit," in thus defying logic and arguing most
virtuously in a most vicious circle, that it has come in the persons
of some of its descendants to reason with sufficient soundness. And
what the amoeba is man is also; man is only a great many amoebas,
most of them dreadfully narrow-minded, going up and down the country
with their goods and chattels like gipsies in a caravan; he is only
a great many amoebas that have had much time and money spent on
their education, and received large bequests of organised
intelligence from those that have gone before them.
The most incorporate tool--we will say an eye, or a tooth, or the
closed fist when used to strike--has still something of the non ego
about it in so far as it is used; those organs, again, that are the
most completely separate from the body, as the locomotive engine,
must still from time to time kiss the soil of the human body, and be
handled and thus crossed with man again if they would remain in
working order. They cannot be cut adrift from the most living form
of matter (I mean most living from our point of view), and remain
absolutely without connection with it for any length of time, any
more than a seal can live without coming up sometimes to breathe;
and in so far as they become linked on to living beings they live.
Everything is living which is in close communion with, and
interpermeated by, that something which we call mind or thought.
Giordano Bruno saw this long ago when he made an interlocutor in one
of his dialogues say that a man's hat and cloak are alive when he is
wearing them. "Thy boots and spurs live," he exclaims, "when thy
feet carry them; thy hat lives when thy head is within it; and so
the stable lives when it contains the horse or mule, or even
yourself;" nor is it easy to see how this is to be refuted except at
a cost which no one in his senses will offer.
It may be said that the life of clothes in wear and implements in
use is no true life, inasmuch as it differs from flesh and blood
life in too many and important respects; that we have made up our
minds about not letting life outside the body too decisively to
allow the question to be reopened; that if this be tolerated we
shall have societies for the prevention of cruelty to chairs and
tables, or cutting clothes amiss, or wearing them to tatters, or
whatever other absurdity may occur to idle and unkind people; the
whole discussion, therefore, should be ordered out of court at once.
I admit that this is much the most sensible position to take, but it
can only be taken by those who turn the deafest of deaf ears to the
teachings of science, and tolerate no going even for a moment below
the surface of things. People who take this line must know how to
put their foot down firmly in the matter of closing a discussion.
Some one may perhaps innocently say that some parts of the body are
more living and vital than others, and those who stick to common
sense may allow this, but if they do they must close the discussion
on the spot; if they listen to another syllable they are lost; if
they let the innocent interlocutor say so much as that a piece of
well-nourished healthy brain is more living than the end of a
finger-nail that wants cutting, or than the calcareous parts of a
bone, the solvent will have been applied which will soon make an end
of common sense ways of looking at the matter. Once even admit the
use of the participle "dying," which involves degrees of death, and
hence an entry of death in part into a living body, and common sense
must either close the discussion at once, or ere long surrender at
discretion.
Common sense can only carry weight in respect of matters with which
every one is familiar, as forming part of the daily and hourly
conduct of affairs; if we would keep our comfortable hard and fast
lines, our rough and ready unspecialised ways of dealing with
difficult questions, our impatience of what St. Paul calls "doubtful
disputations," we must refuse to quit the ground on which the
judgments of mankind have been so long and often given that they are
not likely to be questioned. Common sense is not yet formulated in
manners of science or philosophy, for only few consider them; few
decisions, therefore, have been arrived at which all hold final.
Science is, like love, "too young to know what conscience," or
common sense, is. As soon as the world began to busy itself with
evolution it said good-bye to common sense, and must get on with
uncommon sense as best it can. The first lesson that uncommon sense
will teach it is that contradiction in terms is the foundation of
all sound reasoning--and, as an obvious consequence, compromise, the
foundation of all sound practice. This, it follows easily, involves
the corollary that as faith, to be of any value, must be based on
reason, so reason, to be of any value, must be based on faith, and
that neither can stand alone or dispense with the other, any more
than culture or vulgarity can stand unalloyed with one another
without much danger of mischance.
It may not perhaps be immediately apparent why the admission that a
piece of healthy living brain is more living than the end of a
finger-nail, is so dangerous to common sense ways of looking at life
and death; I had better, therefore, be more explicit. By this
admission degrees of livingness are admitted within the body; this
involves approaches to non-livingness. On this the question arises,
"Which are the most living parts?" The answer to this was given a
few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists
shouted with one voice, "Great is protoplasm. There is no life but
protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet." Read Huxley's "Physical
Basis of Mind." Read Professor Mivart's article, "What are Living
Beings?" in the Contemporary Review, July, 1879. Read Dr. Andrew
Wilson's article in the Gentleman's Magazine, October, 1879.
Remember Professor Allman's address to the British Association,
1879; ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved
scientific attitude as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic
parts of the body, and he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion
arrived at by all of them is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone
truly living, and that the non-protoplasmic are non-living.
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