Books: Luck or Cunning?
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Samuel Butler >> Luck or Cunning?
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It may suffice if I confine myself to Professor Allman's address to
the British Association in 1879, as a representative utterance.
Professor Allman said:-
"Protoplasm lies at the base of every vital phenomenon. It is, as
Huxley has well expressed it, 'the physical basis of life;' wherever
there is life from its lowest to its highest manifestation there is
protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm there is life." {122a}
To say wherever there is life there is protoplasm, is to say that
there can be no life without protoplasm, and this is saying that
where there is no protoplasm there is no life. But large parts of
the body are non-protoplasmic; a bone is, indeed, permeated by
protoplasm, but it is not protoplasm; it follows, therefore, that
according to Professor Allman bone is not in any proper sense of
words a living substance. From this it should follow, and doubtless
does follow in Professor Allman's mind, that large tracts of the
human body, if not the greater part by weight (as bones, skin,
muscular tissues, &c.), are no more alive than a coat or pair of
boots in wear is alive, except in so far as the bones, &c., are more
closely and nakedly permeated by protoplasm than the coat or boots,
and are thus brought into closer, directer, and more permanent
communication with that which, if not life itself, still has more of
the ear of life, and comes nearer to its royal person than anything
else does. Indeed that this is Professor Allman's opinion appears
from the passage on page 26 of the report, in which he says that in
"protoplasm we find the only form of matter in which life can
manifest itself."
According to this view the skin and other tissues are supposed to be
made from dead protoplasm which living protoplasm turns to account
as the British Museum authorities are believed to stuff their new
specimens with the skins of old ones; the matter used by the living
protoplasm for this purpose is held to be entirely foreign to
protoplasm itself, and no more capable of acting in concert with it
than bricks can understand and act in concert with the bricklayer.
As the bricklayer is held to be living and the bricks non-living, so
the bones and skin which protoplasm is supposed to construct are
held non-living and the protoplasm alone living. Protoplasm, it is
said, goes about masked behind the clothes or habits which it has
fashioned. It has habited itself as animals and plants, and we have
mistaken the garment for the wearer--as our dogs and cats doubtless
think with Giordano Bruno that our boots live when we are wearing
them, and that we keep spare paws in our bedrooms which lie by the
wall and go to sleep when we have not got them on.
If, in answer to the assertion that the osseous parts of bone are
non-living, it is said that they must be living, for they heal if
broken, which no dead matter can do, it is answered that the broken
pieces of bone do not grow together; they are mended by the
protoplasm which permeates the Haversian canals; the bones
themselves are no more living merely because they are tenanted by
something which really does live, than a house lives because men and
women inhabit it; and if a bone is repaired, it no more repairs
itself than a house can be said to have repaired itself because its
owner has sent for the bricklayer and seen that what was wanted was
done.
We do not know, it is said, by what means the structureless viscid
substance which we call protoplasm can build for itself a solid
bone; we do not understand how an amoeba makes its test; no one
understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and
even then he probably does not know how he has done it. Set a man
who has never painted, to watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six,
and he will no more understand how Rembrandt can have done it, than
we can understand how the amoeba makes its test, or the protoplasm
cements two broken ends of a piece of bone. Ces choses se font mais
ne s'expliquent pas. So some denizen of another planet looking at
our earth through a telescope which showed him much, but still not
quite enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb on end so that
he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would think the trains
there a kind of caterpillar which went through the mountain by a
pure effort of the will--that enabled them in some mysterious way to
disregard material obstacles and dispense with material means. We
know, of course, that it is not so, and that exemption from the toil
attendant on material obstacles has been compounded for, in the
ordinary way, by the single payment of a tunnel; and so with the
cementing of a bone, our biologists say that the protoplasm, which
is alone living, cements it much as a man might mend a piece of
broken china, but that it works by methods and processes which elude
us, even as the holes of the St. Gothard tunnel may be supposed to
elude a denizen of another world.
The reader will already have seen that the toils are beginning to
close round those who, while professing to be guided by common
sense, still parley with even the most superficial probers beneath
the surface; this, however, will appear more clearly in the
following chapter. It will also appear how far-reaching were the
consequences of the denial of design that was involved in Mr.
Darwin's theory that luck is the main element in survival, and how
largely this theory is responsible for the fatuous developments in
connection alike with protoplasm and automatism which a few years
ago seemed about to carry everything before them.
CHAPTER IX--Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm (continued)
The position, then, stands thus. Common sense gave the inch of
admitting some parts of the body to be less living than others, and
philosophy took the ell of declaring the body to be almost all of it
stone dead. This is serious; still if it were all, for a quiet
life, we might put up with it. Unfortunately we know only too well
that it will not be all. Our bodies, which seemed so living and now
prove so dead, have served us such a trick that we can have no
confidence in anything connected with them. As with skin and bones
to-day, so with protoplasm to-morrow. Protoplasm is mainly oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out,
we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being
declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic
components. Science has not, I believe, settled all the components
of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there; she has settled
what it is in great part, and there is no trusting her not to settle
the rest at any moment, even if she has not already done so. As
soon as this has been done we shall be told that nine-tenths of the
protoplasm of which we are composed must go the way of our non-
protoplasmic parts, and that the only really living part of us is
the something with a new name that runs the protoplasm that runs the
flesh and bones that run the organs -
Why stop here? Why not add "which run the tools and properties
which are as essential to our life and health as much that is
actually incorporate with us?" The same breach which has let the
non-living effect a lodgment within the body must, in all equity,
let the organic character--bodiliness, so to speak--pass out beyond
its limits and effect a lodgment in our temporary and extra-
corporeal limbs. What, on the protoplasmic theory, the skin and
bones are, that the hammer and spade are also; they differ in the
degree of closeness and permanence with which they are associated
with protoplasm, but both bones and hammers are alike non-living
things which protoplasm uses for its own purposes and keeps closer
or less close at hand as custom and convenience may determine.
According to this view, the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are
tools of the first degree; they are not living, but they are in such
close and constant contact with that which really lives, that an
aroma of life attaches to them. Some of these, however, such as
horns, hooves, and tusks, are so little permeated by protoplasm that
they cannot rank much higher than the tools of the second degree,
which come next to them in order.
These tools of the second degree are either picked up ready-made, or
are manufactured directly by the body, as being torn or bitten into
shape, or as stones picked up to throw at prey or at an enemy.
Tools of the third degree are made by the instrumentality of tools
of the second and first degrees; as, for example, chipped flint,
arrow-heads, &c.
Tools of the fourth degree are made by those of the third, second,
and first. They consist of the simpler compound instruments that
yet require to be worked by hand, as hammers, spades, and even hand
flour-mills.
Tools of the fifth degree are made by the help of those of the
fourth, third, second, and first. They are compounded of many
tools, worked, it may be, by steam or water and requiring no
constant contact with the body.
But each one of these tools of the fifth degree was made in the
first instance by the sole instrumentality of the four preceding
kinds of tool. They must all be linked on to protoplasm, which is
the one original tool-maker, but which can only make the tools that
are more remote from itself by the help of those that are nearer,
that is to say, it can only work when it has suitable tools to work
with, and when it is allowed to use them in its own way. There can
be no direct communication between protoplasm and a steam-engine;
there may be and often is direct communication between machines of
even the fifth order and those of the first, as when an engine-man
turns a cock, or repairs something with his own hands if he has
nothing better to work with. But put a hammer, for example, to a
piece of protoplasm, and the protoplasm will no more know what to do
with it than we should be able to saw a piece of wood in two without
a saw. Even protoplasm from the hand of a carpenter who has been
handling hammers all his life would be hopelessly put off its stroke
if not allowed to work in its usual way but put bare up against a
hammer; it would make a slimy mess and then dry up; still there can
be no doubt (so at least those who uphold protoplasm as the one
living substance would say) that the closer a machine can be got to
protoplasm and the more permanent the connection, the more living it
appears to be, or at any rate the more does it appear to be endowed
with spontaneous and reasoning energy, so long, of course, as the
closeness is of a kind which protoplasm understands and is familiar
with. This, they say, is why we do not like using any implement or
tool with gloves on, for these impose a barrier between the tool and
its true connection with protoplasm by means of the nervous system.
For the same reason we put gloves on when we box so as to bar the
connection.
That which we handle most unglovedly is our food, which we handle
with our stomachs rather than with our hands. Our hands are so
thickly encased with skin that protoplasm can hold but small
conversation with what they contain, unless it be held for a long
time in the closed fist, and even so the converse is impeded as in a
strange language; the inside of our mouths is more naked, and our
stomachs are more naked still; it is here that protoplasm brings its
fullest powers of suasion to bear on those whom it would proselytise
and receive as it were into its own communion--whom it would convert
and bring into a condition of mind in which they shall see things as
it sees them itself, and, as we commonly say, "agree with" it,
instead of standing out stiffly for their own opinion. We call this
digesting our food; more properly we should call it being digested
by our food, which reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests us,
till it comes to understand us and encourage us by assuring us that
we were perfectly right all the time, no matter what any one might
have said, or say, to the contrary. Having thus recanted all its
own past heresies, it sets to work to convert everything that comes
near it and seems in the least likely to be converted. Eating is a
mode of love; it is an effort after a closer union; so we say we
love roast beef. A French lady told me once that she adored veal;
and a nurse tells her child that she would like to eat it. Even he
who caresses a dog or horse pro tanto both weds and eats it.
Strange how close the analogy between love and hunger; in each case
the effort is after closer union and possession; in each case the
outcome is reproduction (for nutrition is the most complete of
reproductions), and in each case there are residua. But to return.
I have shown above that one consequence of the attempt so vigorously
made a few years ago to establish protoplasm as the one living
substance, is the making it clear that the non-protoplasmic parts of
the body and the simpler extra-corporeal tools or organs must run on
all fours in the matter of livingness and non-livingness. If the
protoplasmic parts of the body are held living in virtue of their
being used by something that really lives, then so, though in a less
degree, must tools and machines. If, on the other hand, tools and
machines are held non-living inasmuch as they only owe what little
appearance of life they may present when in actual use to something
else that lives, and have no life of their own--so, though in a less
degree, must the non-protoplasmic parts of the body. Allow an
overflowing aroma of life to vivify the horny skin under the heel,
and from this there will be a spilling which will vivify the boot in
wear. Deny an aroma of life to the boot in wear, and it must ere
long be denied to ninety-nine per cent. of the body; and if the body
is not alive while it can walk and talk, what in the name of all
that is unreasonable can be held to be so?
That the essential identity of bodily organs and tools is no
ingenious paradoxical way of putting things is evident from the fact
that we speak of bodily organs at all. Organ means tool. There is
nothing which reveals our most genuine opinions to us so unerringly
as our habitual and unguarded expressions, and in the case under
consideration so completely do we instinctively recognise the
underlying identity of tools and limbs, that scientific men use the
word "organ" for any part of the body that discharges a function,
practically to the exclusion of any other term. Of course, however,
the above contention as to the essential identity of tools and
organs does not involve a denial of their obvious superficial
differences--differences so many and so great as to justify our
classing them in distinct categories so long as we have regard to
the daily purposes of life without looking at remoter ones.
If the above be admitted, we can reply to those who in an earlier
chapter objected to our saying that if Mr. Darwin denied design in
the eye he should deny it in the burglar's jemmy also. For if
bodily and non-bodily organs are essentially one in kind, being each
of them both living and non-living, and each of them only a higher
development of principles already admitted and largely acted on in
the other, then the method of procedure observable in the evolution
of the organs whose history is within our ken should throw light
upon the evolution of that whose history goes back into so dim a
past that we can only know it by way of inference. In the absence
of any show of reason to the contrary we should argue from the known
to the unknown, and presume that even as our non-bodily organs
originated and were developed through gradual accumulation of
design, effort, and contrivance guided by experience, so also must
our bodily organs have been, in spite of the fact that the
contrivance has been, as it were, denuded of external evidences in
the course of long time. This at least is the most obvious
inference to draw; the burden of proof should rest not with those
who uphold function as the most important means of organic
modification, but with those who impugn it; it is hardly necessary,
however, to say that Mr. Darwin never attempted to impugn by way of
argument the conclusions either of his grandfather or of Lamarck.
He waved them both aside in one or two short semi-contemptuous
sentences, and said no more about them--not, at least, until late in
life he wrote his "Erasmus Darwin," and even then his remarks were
purely biographical; he did not say one syllable by way of
refutation, or even of explanation.
I am free to confess that, overwhelming as is the evidence brought
forward by Mr. Spencer in the articles already referred to, as
showing that accidental variations, unguided by the helm of any main
general principle which should as it were keep their heads straight,
could never accumulate with the results supposed by Mr. Darwin; and
overwhelming, again, as is the consideration that Mr. Spencer's most
crushing argument was allowed by Mr. Darwin to go without reply,
still the considerations arising from the discoveries of the last
forty years or so in connection with protoplasm, seem to me almost
more overwhelming still. This evidence proceeds on different lines
from that adduced by Mr. Spencer, but it points to the same
conclusion, namely, that though luck will avail much if backed by
cunning and experience, it is unavailing for any permanent result
without them. There is an irony which seems almost always to attend
on those who maintain that protoplasm is the only living substance
which ere long points their conclusions the opposite way to that
which they desire--in the very last direction, indeed, in which they
of all people in the world would willingly see them pointed.
It may be asked why I should have so strong an objection to seeing
protoplasm as the only living substance, when I find this view so
useful to me as tending to substantiate design--which I admit that I
have as much and as seriously at heart as I can allow myself to have
any matter which, after all, can so little affect daily conduct; I
reply that it is no part of my business to inquire whether this or
that makes for my pet theories or against them; my concern is to
inquire whether or no it is borne out by facts, and I find the
opinion that protoplasm is the one living substance unstable,
inasmuch as it is an attempt to make a halt where no halt can be
made. This is enough; but, furthermore, the fact that the
protoplasmic parts of the body are MORE living than the non-
protoplasmic--which I cannot deny, without denying that it is any
longer convenient to think of life and death at all--will answer my
purpose to the full as well or better.
I pointed out another consequence, which, again, was cruelly the
reverse of what the promoters of the protoplasm movement might be
supposed anxious to arrive at--in a series of articles which
appeared in the Examiner during the summer of 1879, and showed that
if protoplasm were held to be the sole seat of life, then this unity
in the substance vivifying all, both animals and plants, must be
held as uniting them into a single corporation or body--especially
when their community of descent is borne in mind--more effectually
than any merely superficial separation into individuals can be held
to disunite them, and that thus protoplasm must be seen as the life
of the world--as a vast body corporate, never dying till the earth
itself shall pass away. This came practically to saying that
protoplasm was God Almighty, who, of all the forms open to Him, had
chosen this singularly unattractive one as the channel through which
to make Himself manifest in the flesh by taking our nature upon Him,
and animating us with His own Spirit. Our biologists, in fact, were
fast nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and
material, but who could not be made to square with pantheistic
notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic world;
and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed at the grotesqueness
of the position in which they must ere long have found themselves,
for in the autumn of 1879 the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the
leading reviews and magazines have known protoplasm no more. About
the same time bathybius, which at one time bade fair to supplant it
upon the throne of popularity, died suddenly, as I am told, at
Norwich, under circumstances which did not transpire, nor has its
name, so far as I am aware, been ever again mentioned.
So much for the conclusions in regard to the larger aspect of life
taken as a whole which must follow from confining life to
protoplasm; but there is another aspect--that, namely, which regards
the individual. The inevitable consequences of confining life to
the protoplasmic parts of the body were just as unexpected and
unwelcome here as they had been with regard to life at large; for,
as I have already pointed out, there is no drawing the line at
protoplasm and resting at this point; nor yet at the next halting-
point beyond; nor at the one beyond that. How often is this process
to be repeated? and in what can it end but in the rehabilitation of
the soul as an ethereal, spiritual, vital principle, apart from
matter, which, nevertheless, it animates, vivifying the clay of our
bodies? No one who has followed the course either of biology or
psychology during this century, and more especially during the last
five-and-twenty years, will tolerate the reintroduction of the soul
as something apart from the substratum in which both feeling and
action must be held to inhere. The notion of matter being ever
changed except by other matter in another state is so shocking to
the intellectual conscience that it may be dismissed without
discussion; yet if bathybius had not been promptly dealt with, it
must have become apparent even to the British public that there were
indeed but few steps from protoplasm, as the only living substance,
to vital principle. Our biologists therefore stifled bathybius,
perhaps with justice, certainly with prudence, and left protoplasm
to its fate.
Any one who reads Professor Allman's address above referred to with
due care will see that he was uneasy about protoplasm, even at the
time of its greatest popularity. Professor Allman never says
outright that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are no more
alive than chairs and tables are. He said what involved this as an
inevitable consequence, and there can be no doubt that this is what
he wanted to convey, but he never insisted on it with the
outspokenness and emphasis with which so startling a paradox should
alone be offered us for acceptance; nor is it easy to believe that
his reluctance to express his conclusion totidem verbis was not due
to a sense that it might ere long prove more convenient not to have
done so. When I advocated the theory of the livingness, or quasi-
livingness of machines, in the chapters of "Erewhon" of which all
else that I have written on biological subjects is a development, I
took care that people should see the position in its extreme form;
the non-livingness of bodily organs is to the full as startling a
paradox as the livingness of non-bodily ones, and we have a right to
expect the fullest explicitness from those who advance it. Of
course it must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim any
appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in actual use.
In "Erewhon" I did not think it necessary to insist on this, and did
not, indeed, yet fully know what I was driving at.
The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to the assertion
that any part of the body is non-living may be observed in the
writings of the other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to;
I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single passage in
which they declare even the osseous parts of a bone to be non-
living, though this conclusion was the raison d'etre of all they
were saying and followed as an obvious inference. The reader will
probably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can only have
been due to a feeling that the ground was one on which it behoved
them to walk circumspectly; they probably felt, after a vague, ill-
defined fashion, that the more they reduced the body to mechanism
the more they laid it open to an opponent to raise mechanism to the
body, but, however this may be, they dropped protoplasm, as I have
said, in some haste with the autumn of 1879.
CHAPTER X--The Attempt to Eliminate Mind
What, it may be asked, were our biologists really aiming at?--for
men like Professor Huxley do not serve protoplasm for nought. They
wanted a good many things, some of them more righteous than others,
but all intelligible. Among the more lawful of their desires was a
craving after a monistic conception of the universe. We all desire
this; who can turn his thoughts to these matters at all and not
instinctively lean towards the old conception of one supreme and
ultimate essence as the source from which all things proceed and
have proceeded, both now and ever? The most striking and apparently
most stable theory of the last quarter of a century had been Sir
William Grove's theory of the conservation of energy; and yet
wherein is there any substantial difference between this recent
outcome of modern amateur, and hence most sincere, science--pointing
as it does to an imperishable, and as such unchangeable, and as
such, again, for ever unknowable underlying substance the modes of
which alone change--wherein, except in mere verbal costume, does
this differ from the conclusions arrived at by the psalmist?
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