FAILURE OF THE FIRST EVOLUTIONISTS TO SEE THEIR POSITION AS
TELEOLOGICAL.
It follows necessarily from the doctrine of Dr. Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck, if not from that of Buffon himself, that the greater number of
organs are as purposive to the evolutionist as to the theologian, and
far more intelligibly so. Circumstances, however, prevented these
writers from acknowledging this fact to the world, and perhaps even to
themselves. Their _crux_ was, as it still is to so many evolutionists,
the presence of rudimentary organs, and the processes of embryological
development. They would not admit that rudimentary and therefore useless
organs were designed by a Creator to take their place once and for ever
as part of a scheme whose main idea was, that every animal structure was
to serve some useful end in connection with its possessor.
This was the doctrine of final causes as then commonly held; in the face
of rudimentary organs it was absurd. Buffon was above all things else a
plain matter of fact thinker, who refused to go far beyond the obvious.
Like all other profound writers, he was, if I may say so, profoundly
superficial. He felt that the aim of research does not consist in the
knowing this or that, but in the easing of the desire to know or
understand more completely--in the peace of mind which passeth all
understanding. His was the perfection of a healthy mental organism by
which over effort is felt instinctively to be as vicious and
contemptible as indolence. He knew this too well to know the grounds of
his knowledge, but we smaller people who know it less completely, can
see that such felicitous instinctive tempering together of the two great
contradictory principles, love of effort and love of ease, has underlain
every step of all healthy growth through all conceivable time. Nothing
is worth looking at which is seen either too obviously or with too much
difficulty. Nothing is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly
easily, and some little deficiency of effort is more pardonable than any
very perceptible excess; for virtue has ever erred rather on the side of
self-indulgence than of asceticism, and well-being has ever advanced
through the pleasures rather than through austerity.
According to Buffon, then--as also according to Dr. Darwin, who was just
such another practical and genial thinker, and who was distinctly a
pupil of Buffon, though a most intelligent and original one--if an organ
after a reasonable amount of inspection appeared to be useless, it was
to be called useless without more ado, and theories were to be ordered
out of court if they were troublesome. In like manner, if animals bred
freely _inter se_ before our eyes, as for example the horse and ass, the
fact was to be noted, but no animals were to be classed as capable of
interbreeding until they had asserted their right to such classification
by breeding with tolerable certainty. If, again, an animal looked as if
it felt, that is to say, if it moved about pretty quickly or made a
noise, it must be held to feel; if it did neither of these things, it
did not look as if it felt and therefore it must be said not to feel.
_De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est lex_ was one of the
chief axioms of their philosophy; no writers have had a greater horror
of mystery or of ideas that have not become so mastered as to be, or to
have been, superficial. Lamarck was one of those men of whom I believe
it has been said that they have brain upon the brain. He had his theory
that an animal could not feel unless it had a nervous system, and at
least a spinal marrow--and that it could not think at all without a
brain--all his facts, therefore, have to be made to square with this.
With Buffon and Dr. Darwin we feel safe that however wrong they may
sometimes be, their conclusions have always been arrived at on that
fairly superficial view of things in which, as I have elsewhere said,
our nature alone permits us to be comforted.
To these writers, then, the doctrine of final causes for rudimentary
organs was a piece of mystification and an absurdity; no less fatal to
any such doctrine were the processes of embryological development. It
was plain that the commonly received teleology must be given up; but the
idea of design or purpose was so associated in their minds with
theological design that they avoided it altogether. They seem to have
forgotten that an internal teleology is as much teleology as an external
one; hence, unfortunately, though their whole theory of development is
intensely purposive, it is the fact rather than the name of teleology
which has hitherto been insisted upon, even by the greatest writers on
evolution--the name having been denied even by those who were most
insisting on the thing itself.
It is easy to understand the difficulty felt by the fathers of evolution
when we remember how much had to be seen before the facts could lie well
before them. It was necessary to attain, firstly, to a perception of the
unity of person between parents and offspring in successive generations;
secondly, it must be seen that an organism's memory goes back for
generations beyond its birth, to the first beginnings in fact, of which
we know anything whatever; thirdly, the latency of that memory, as of
memory generally till the associated ideas are reproduced, must be
brought to bear upon the facts of heredity; and lastly, the
unconsciousness with which habitual actions come to be performed, must
be assigned as the explanation of the unconsciousness with which we grow
and discharge most of our natural functions.
Buffon was too busy with the fact that animals descended with
modification at all, to go beyond the development and illustration of
this great truth. I doubt whether he ever saw more than the first, and
that dimly, of the four considerations above stated.
Dr. Darwin was the first to point out the first two considerations with
some clearness, but he can hardly be said to have understood their full
importance: the two latter ideas do not appear to have occurred to him.
Lamarck had little if any perception of any one of the four. When,
however, they are firmly seized and brought into their due bearings one
upon another, the facts of heredity become as simple as those of a man
making a tobacco pipe, and rudimentary organs are seen to be essentially
of the same character as the little rudimentary protuberance at the
bottom of the pipe to which I referred in 'Erewhon.'[23]
These organs are now no longer useful, but they once were so, and were
therefore once purposive, though not so now. They are the expressions of
a bygone usefulness; sayings, as it were, about which there was at one
time infinite wrangling, as to what both the meaning and the expression
should best be, so that they then had living significance in the mouths
of those who used them, though they have become such mere shibboleths
and cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more of their meaning
than we do of Julius Caesar in the month of July. They continue to be
reproduced through the force of habit, and through indisposition to get
out of any familiar groove of action until it becomes too unpleasant for
us to remain in it any longer. It has long been felt that embryology and
rudimentary structures indicated community of descent. Dr. Darwin and
Lamarck insisted on this, as have all subsequent writers on evolution;
but the explanation of why and how the structures come to be
repeated--namely, that they are simply examples of the force of
habit--can only be perceived intelligently by those who admit so much
unity between parents and offspring that the self-development of the
latter can be properly called habitual (as being a repetition of an act
by one and the same individual), and can only be fully sympathized with
by those who recognize that if habit be admitted as the key to the fact
at all, the unconscious manner in which the habit comes to be repeated
is only of a piece with all our other observations concerning habit. For
the fuller development of the foregoing, I must refer the reader to my
work 'Life and Habit.'
The purposiveness, which even Dr. Darwin, and Lamarck still less, seem
never to have quite recognized in spite of their having insisted so much
on what amounts to the same thing, now comes into full view. It is seen
that the organs external to the body, and those internal to it are, the
second as much as the first, things which we have made for our own
convenience, and with a prevision that we shall have need of them; the
main difference between the manufacture of these two classes of organs
being, that we have made the one kind so often that we can no longer
follow the processes whereby we make them, while the others are new
things which we must make introspectively or not at all, and which are
not yet so incorporate with our vitality as that we should think they
grow instead of being manufactured. The manufacture of the tool, and the
manufacture of the living organ prove therefore to be but two species of
the same genus, which, though widely differentiated, have descended as
it were from one common filament of desire and inventive faculty. The
greater or less complexity of the organs goes for very little. It is
only a question of the amount of intelligence and voluntary
self-adaptation which we must admit, and this must be settled rather by
an appeal to what we find in organism, and observe concerning it, than
by what we may have imagined _a priori_.
Given a small speck of jelly with some kind of circumstance-suiting
power, some power of slightly varying its actions in accordance with
slightly varying circumstances and desires--given such a jelly-speck
with a power of assimilating other matter, and thus, of reproducing
itself, given also that it should be possessed of a memory, and we can
show how the whole animal world can have descended it may be from an
amoeba without interference from without, and how every organ in every
creature is designed at first roughly and tentatively but finally
fashioned with the most consummate perfection, by the creature which has
had need of that organ, which best knew what it wanted, and was never
satisfied till it had got that which was the best suited to its varying
circumstances in their entirety. We can even show how, if it becomes
worth the Ethiopian's while to try and change his skin, or the leopard's
to change his spots, they can assuredly change them within a not
unreasonable time and adapt their covering to their own will and
convenience, and to that of none other; thus what is commonly conceived
of as direct creation by God is moved back to a time and space
inconceivable in their remoteness, while the aim and design so obvious
in nature are shown to be still at work around us, growing ever busier
and busier, and advancing from day to day both in knowledge and power.
It was reserved for Mr. Darwin and for those who have too rashly
followed him to deny purpose as having had any share in the development
of animal and vegetable organs; to see no evidence of design in those
wonderful provisions which have been the marvel and delight of observers
in all ages. The one who has drawn our attention more than perhaps any
other living writer to those very marvels of coadaptation, is the
foremost to maintain that they are the result not of desire and design,
either within the creature or without it, but of blind chance, working
no whither, and due but to the accumulation of innumerable lucky
accidents.
"There are men," writes Professor Tyndall in the 'Nineteenth Century,'
for last November, "and by no means the minority, who, however wealthy
in regard to facts, can never rise into the region of principles; and
they are sometimes intolerant of those that can. They are formed to plod
meritoriously on in the lower levels of thought; unpossessed of the
pinions necessary to reach the heights, they cannot realize the mental
act--the act of inspiration it might well be called--by which a man of
genius, after long pondering and proving, reaches a theoretic conception
which unravels and illuminates the tangle of centuries of observation
and experiment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, who, at the
present moment, stand in this relation to Mr. Darwin."
The more rhapsodical parts of the above must go for what they are worth,
but I should be sorry to think that what remains conveyed a censure
which might fall justly on myself. As I read the earlier part of the
passage I confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very
different from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older
men and also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had
"unravelled and illuminated" a tangled skein, but believed him, on the
contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in
great part, if not wholly, plain. With the older writers, I had felt as
though in the hands of men who wished to understand themselves and to
make their reader understand them with the smallest possible exertion.
The older men, if not in full daylight, at any rate saw in what quarter
of the sky the dawn was breaking, and were looking steadily towards it.
It is not they who have put their hands over their own eyes and ours,
and who are crying out that there is no light, but chance and blindness
everywhere.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Page 210, first edition.