My present literary business is a little essay some 25 or 30 pp. long,
which is still all in the rough and I don’t know how it will shape, but
the gist of it is somewhat as follows:—
1. Actions which we have acquired with difficulty and now perform almost
unconsciously—as in playing a difficult piece of music, reading, talking,
walking and the multitude of actions which escape our notice inside other
actions, etc.—all this worked out with some detail, say, four or five
pages.
General deduction that we never do anything in this unconscious or
semi-conscious manner unless we know how to do it exceedingly well and
have had long practice.
Also that consciousness is a vanishing quantity and that as soon as we
know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of
it—consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty—and
hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a
thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action
with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it when we
do not know of our knowledge.
2. Whatever we do in this way is all one and the same in kind—the
difference being only in degree. Playing [almost?]
unconsciously—writing, more unconsciously (as to each letter)—reading,
very unconsciously—talking, still more unconsciously (it is almost
impossible for us to notice the action of our tongue in every
letter)—walking, much the same—breathing, still to a certain extent
within our own control—heart’s beating, perceivable but beyond our
control—digestion, unperceivable and beyond our control, digestion being
the oldest of the . . . habits.
3. A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and has
only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of considerations, in the
same way as a man who goes into the City to buy Great Northern A Shares
. . . It is only unconscious of these operations because it has done them
a very large number of times already. A man may do a thing by a fluke
once, but to say that a foetus can perform so difficult an operation as
the growth of a pair of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how
to do it, and without ever having done it before, is to contradict all
human experience. Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and
ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before. Its
unconsciousness (or speedy loss of memory) is simply the result of
over-knowledge, not of under-knowledge. It knows so well and has done it
so often that its power of self-analysis is gone. If it knew what it was
doing, or was conscious of its own act in oxidising its blood after
birth, I should suspect that it had not done it so often before; as it is
I am confident that it must have done it more often—much more often—than
any act which we perform consciously during our whole lives.
4. When, then, did it do it? Clearly when last it was an impregnate
ovum or some still lower form of life which resulted in that impregnate
ovum.
5. How is it, then, that it has not gained perceptible experience?
Simply because a single repetition makes little or no difference; but go
back 20,000 repetitions and you will find that it has gained in
experience and modified its performance very materially.
6. But how about the identity? What is identity? Identity of matter?
Surely no. There is no identity of matter between me as I now am, and me
as an impregnate ovum. Continuity of existence? Then there is identity
between me as an impregnate ovum and my father and mother as impregnate
ova. Drop out my father’s and mother’s lives between the dates of their
being impregnate ova and the moment when I became an impregnate ovum.
See the ova only and consider the second ovum as the first two ova’s
means not of reproducing themselves but of continuing
themselves—repeating themselves—the intermediate lives being nothing but,
as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye to the place where it will
grow its next tuber.
7. Given a single creature capable of reproducing itself and it must go
on reproducing itself for ever, for it would not reproduce itself, unless
it reproduced a creature that was going to reproduce itself, and so on ad
infinitum.
Then comes Descent with Modification. Similarity tempered with
dissimilarity, and dissimilarity tempered with similarity—a contradiction
in terms, like almost everything else that is true or useful or indeed
intelligible at all. In each case of what we call descent, it is still
the first reproducing creature identically the same—doing what it has
done before—only with such modifications as the struggle for existence
and natural selection have induced. No matter how highly it has been
developed, it can never be other than the primordial cell and must always
begin as the primordial cell and repeat its last performance most nearly,
but also, more or less, all its previous performances.
A begets A′ which is A with the additional experience of a dash. A′
begets A″ which is A with the additional experiences of A′ and A″; and so
on to An but you can never eliminate the A.
8. Let An stand for a man. He begins as the primordial cell—being
verily nothing but the primordial cell which goes on splitting itself up
for ever, but gaining continually in experience. Put him in the same
position as he was in before and he will do as he did before. First he
will do his tadpoles by rote, so to speak, on his head, from long
practice; then he does his fish trick; then he grows arms and legs, all
unconsciously from the inveteracy of the habit, till he comes to doing
his man, and this lesson he has not yet learnt so thoroughly. Some part
of it, as the breathing and oxidisation business, he is well up to,
inasmuch as they form part of previous roles, but the teeth and hair, the
upright position, the power of speech, though all tolerably familiar,
give him more trouble—for he is very stupid—a regular dunce in fact.
Then comes his newer and more complex environment, and this puzzles
him—arrests his attention—whereon consciousness springs into existence,
as a spark from a horse’s hoof.
To be continued—I see it will have to be more than 30 pp. It is still
foggy in parts, but I must clear it a little. It will go on to show that
we are all one animal and that death (which was at first voluntary, and
has only come to be disliked because those who did not dislike it
committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only phases of the
ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies daily.
Always very truly yours,