Transcribed from the 1910 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.lorg
Life and Habit
_By_
Samuel Butler
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
* * * * *
Jonathan Cape
Eleven Gower Street, London
* * * * *
FIRST PUBLISHED 1878
SECOND EDITION 1878
NEW EDITION WITH ADDENDA AND
PREFACE BY R. A. STREATFEILD 1910
REPRINTED 1924
* * * * *
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BUTLER AND TANNER LTD., FROME AND LONDON
* * * * *
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
TO
CHARLES PAINE PAULI, Esq.
BARRISTER-AT-LAW
IN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF HIS INVALUABLE
CRITICISM OF THE PROOF-SHEETS OF THIS AND
OF MY PREVIOUS BOOKS
AND IN RECOGNITION OF AN OLD AND
WELL-TRIED-FRIENDSHIP
PREFACE.
SINCE Samuel Butler published “Life and Habit” thirty-three {vii} years
have elapsed—years fruitful in change and discovery, during which many of
the mighty have been put down from their seat and many of the humble have
been exalted. I do not know that Butler can truthfully be called humble,
indeed, I think he had very few misgivings as to his ultimate triumph,
but he has certainly been exalted with a rapidity that he himself can
scarcely have foreseen. During his lifetime he was a literary pariah,
the victim of an organized conspiracy of silence. He is now, I think it
may be said without exaggeration, universally accepted as one of the most
remarkable English writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century.
I will not weary my readers by quoting the numerous tributes paid by
distinguished contemporary writers to Butler’s originality and force of
mind, but I cannot refrain from illustrating the changed attitude of the
scientific world to Butler and his theories by a reference to “Darwin and
Modern Science,” the collection of essays published in 1909 by the
University of Cambridge, in commemoration of the Darwin centenary. In
that work Professor Bateson, while referring repeatedly to Butler’s
biological works, speaks of him as “the most brilliant and by far the
most interesting of Darwin’s opponents, whose works are at length
emerging from oblivion.” With the growth of Butler’s reputation “Life
and Habit” has had much to do. It was the first and is undoubtedly the
most important of his writings on evolution. From its loins, as it were,
sprang his three later books, “Evolution Old and New,” “Unconscious
Memory,” and “Luck or Cunning”, which carried its arguments further
afield. It will perhaps interest Butler’s readers if I here quote a
passage from his note-books, lately published in the “New Quarterly
Review” (Vol. III. No. 9), in which he summarizes his work in biology:
“To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have
been mainly these:
“1. The identification of heredity and memory, and the corollaries
relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of
old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids, and the principles
underlying longevity—all of which follow as a matter of course. This was
‘Life and Habit’ [1877].
“2. The re-introduction of teleology into organic life, which to me
seems hardly, if at all, less important than the ‘Life and Habit’ theory.
This was ‘Evolution Old and New’ [1879].
“3. An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory. This
was Unconscious Memory’ [1880]. I was alarmed by the suggestion and
fathered it upon Professor Hering, who never, that I can see, meant to
say anything of the kind, but I forced my view upon him, as it were, by
taking hold of a sentence or two in his lecture, ‘On Memory as a
Universal Function of Organised Matter,’ and thus connected memory with
vibrations.
“What I want to do now (1885) is to connect vibrations not only with
memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the
memory resides, thus adopting Newland’s law (sometimes called
Mendelejeff’s law) that there is only one substance, and that the
characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given time
will determine whether it will appear to us as, we will say, hydrogen, or
sodium, or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other.” [This is
touched upon in the concluding chapter of “Luck or Cunning?” 1887].
The present edition of “Life and Habit” is practically a re-issue of that
of 1878. I find that about the year 1890, although the original edition
was far from being exhausted, Butler began to make corrections of the
text of “Life and Habit,” presumably with the intention of publishing a
revised edition. The copy of the book so corrected is now in my
possession. In the first five chapters there are numerous emendations,
very few of which, however, affect the meaning to any appreciable extent,
being mainly concerned with the excision of redundancies and the
simplification of style. I imagine that by the time he had reached the
end of the fifth chapter Butler realised that the corrections he had made
were not of sufficient importance to warrant a new edition, and
determined to let the book stand as it was. I believe, therefore, that I
am carrying out his wishes in reprinting the present edition from the
original plates. I have found, however, among his papers three entirely
new passages, which he probably wrote during the period of correction and
no doubt intended to incorporate into the revised edition. Mr. Henry
Festing Jones has also given me a copy of a passage which Butler wrote
and gummed into Mr. Jones’s copy of “Life and Habit.” These four
passages I have printed as an appendix at the end of the present volume.
One more point deserves notice. Butler often refers in “Life and Habit”
to Darwin’s “Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication.” When
he does so it is always under the name “Plants and Animals.” More often
still he refers to Darwin’s “Origin of Species by means Natural
Selection,” terming it at one time “Origin of Species” and at another
“Natural Selection,” sometimes, as on p. 278, using both names within a
few lines of each other. Butler was as a rule scrupulously careful about
quotations, and I can offer no explanation of this curious confusion of
titles.
R. A. STREATFEILD.
_November_, 1910.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE.
THE Italics in the passages quoted in this book are generally mine, but I
found it almost impossible to call the reader’s attention to this upon
every occasion. I have done so once or twice, as thinking it necessary
in these cases that there should be no mistake; on the whole, however, I
thought it better to content myself with calling attention in a preface
to the fact that the author quoted is not, as a general rule, responsible
for the Italics.
S. BUTLER.
_November_ 13, 1877.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE BY R. A. STREATFEILD vii
AUTHOR’S ORIGINAL PREFACE x
CHAPTER
I. ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS 1
II. CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS—THE LAW AND 20
GRACE
III. APPLICATION OF FOREGOING CHAPTERS TO CERTAIN 43
HABITS ACQUIRED AFTER BIRTH WHICH ARE COMMONLY
CONSIDERED INSTINCTIVE
IV. APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES TO 59
ACTIONS AND HABITS ACQUIRED BEFORE BIRTH
V. PERSONAL IDENTITY 78
VI. PERSONAL IDENTITY—(_continued_) 91
VII. OUR SUBORDINATE PERSONALITIES 104
VIII. APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS—THE 125
ASSIMILATION OF OUTSIDE MATTER
IX. ON THE ABEYANCE OF MEMORY 150
X. WHAT WE SHOULD EXPECT TO FIND IF 166
DIFFERENTIATIONS OF STRUCTURE AND INSTINCT ARE
MAINLY DUE TO MEMORY
XI. INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY 198
XII. INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS 220
XIII. LAMARCK AND MR. DARWIN 252
XIV. MR. MIVART AND MR. DARWIN 273
XV. CONCLUDING REMARKS 294
APPENDIX AUTHOR’S ADDENDA 308
CHAPTER I.
ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS.
IT will be our business in the following chapters to consider whether the
unconsciousness, or quasi-unconsciousness, with which we perform certain
acquired actions, would seem to throw any light upon Embryology and
inherited instincts, and otherwise to follow the train of thought which
the class of actions above-mentioned would suggest; more especially in so
far as they appear to bear upon the origin of species and the
continuation of life by successive generations, whether in the animal or
vegetable kingdoms.
In the outset, however, I would wish most distinctly to disclaim for
these pages the smallest pretension to scientific value, originality, or
even to accuracy of more than a very rough and ready kind—for unless a
matter be true enough to stand a good deal of misrepresentation, its
truth is not of a very robust order, and the blame will rather lie with
its own delicacy if it be crushed, than with the carelessness of the
crusher. I have no wish to instruct, and not much to be instructed; my
aim is simply to entertain and interest the numerous class of people who,
like myself, know nothing of science, but who enjoy speculating and
reflecting (not too deeply) upon the phenomena around them. I have
therefore allowed myself a loose rein, to run on with whatever came
uppermost, without regard to whether it was new or old; feeling sure that
if true, it must be very old or it never could have occurred to one so
little versed in science as myself; and knowing that it is sometimes
pleasanter to meet the old under slightly changed conditions, than to go
through the formalities and uncertainties of making new acquaintance. At
the same time, I should say that whatever I have knowingly taken from any
one else, I have always acknowledged.
It is plain, therefore, that my book cannot be intended for the perusal
of scientific people; it is intended for the general public only, with
whom I believe myself to be in harmony, as knowing neither much more nor
much less than they do.
Taking then, the art of playing the piano as an example of the kind of
action we are in search of, we observe that a practised player will
perform very difficult pieces apparently without effort, often, indeed,
while thinking and talking of something quite other than his music; yet
he will play accurately and, possibly, with much expression. If he has
been playing a fugue, say in four parts, he will have kept each part well
distinct, in such a manner as to prove that his mind was not prevented,
by its other occupations, from consciously or unconsciously following
four distinct trains of musical thought at the same time, nor from making
his fingers act in exactly the required manner as regards each note of
each part.
It commonly happens that in the course of four or five minutes a player
may have struck four or five thousand notes. If we take into
consideration the rests, dotted notes, accidentals, variations of time,
&c., we shall find his attention must have been exercised on many more
occasions than when he was actually striking notes: so that it may not be
too much to say that the attention of a first-rate player may have been
exercised—to an infinitesimally small extent—but still truly exercised—on
as many as ten thousand occasions within the space of five minutes, for
no note can be struck nor point attended to without a certain amount of
attention, no matter how rapidly or unconsciously given.
Moreover, each act of attention has been followed by an act of volition,
and each act of volition by a muscular action, which is composed of many
minor actions; some so small that we can no more follow them than the
player himself can perceive them; nevertheless, it may have been
perfectly plain that the player was not attending to what he was doing,
but was listening to conversation on some other subject, not to say
joining in it himself. If he has been playing the violin, he may have
done all the above, and may also have been walking about. Herr Joachim
would unquestionably be able to do all that has here been described.
So complete would the player’s unconsciousness of the attention he is
giving, and the brain power he is exerting appear to be, that we shall
find it difficult to awaken his attention to any particular part of his
performance without putting him out. Indeed we cannot do so. We shall
observe that he finds it hardly less difficult to compass a voluntary
consciousness of what he has once learnt so thoroughly that it has
passed, so to speak, into the domain of unconsciousness, than he found it
to learn the note or passage in the first instance. The effort after a
second consciousness of detail baffles him—compels him to turn to his
music or play slowly. In fact it seems as though he knew the piece too
well to be able to know that he knows it, and is only conscious of
knowing those passages which he does not know so thoroughly.
At the end of his performance, his memory would appear to be no less
annihilated than was his consciousness of attention and volition. For of
the thousands of acts requiring the exercise of both the one and the
other, which he has done during the five minutes, we will say, of his
performance, he will remember hardly one when it is over. If he calls to
mind anything beyond the main fact that he has played such and such a
piece, it will probably be some passage which he has found more difficult
than the others, and with the like of which he has not been so long
familiar. All the rest he will forget as completely as the breath which
he has drawn while playing.
He finds it difficult to remember even the difficulties he experienced in
learning to play. A few may have so impressed him that they remain with
him, but the greater part will have escaped him as completely as the
remembrance of what he ate, or how he put on his clothes, this day ten
years ago; nevertheless, it is plain he remembers more than he remembers
remembering, for he avoids mistakes which he made at one time, and his
performance proves that all the notes are in his memory, though if called
upon to play such and such a bar at random from the middle of the piece,
and neither more nor less, he will probably say that he cannot remember
it unless he begins from the beginning of the phrase which leads to it.
Very commonly he will be obliged to begin from the beginning of the
movement itself, and be unable to start at any other point unless he have
the music before him; and if disturbed, as we have seen above, he will
have to start _de novo_ from an accustomed starting-point.
Yet nothing can be more obvious than that there must have been a time
when what is now so easy as to be done without conscious effort of the
brain was only done by means of brain work which was very keenly
perceived, even to fatigue and positive distress. Even now, if the
player is playing something the like of which he has not met before, we
observe he pauses and becomes immediately conscious of attention.
We draw the inference, therefore, as regards pianoforte or violin
playing, that the more the familiarity or knowledge of the art, the less
is there consciousness of such knowledge; even so far as that there
should seem to be almost as much difficulty in awakening consciousness
which has become, so to speak, latent,—a consciousness of that which is
known too well to admit of recognised self-analysis while the knowledge
is being exercised—as in creating a consciousness of that which is not
yet well enough known to be properly designated as known at all. On the
other hand, we observe that the less the familiarly or knowledge, the
greater the consciousness of whatever knowledge there is.
Considering other like instances of the habitual exercise of intelligence
and volition, which, from long familiarity with the method of procedure,
escape the notice of the person exercising them, we naturally think of
writing. The formation of each letter requires attention and volition,
yet in a few minutes a practised writer will form several hundred
letters, and be able to think and talk of something else all the time he
is doing so. It will not probably remember the formation of a single
character in any page that he has written; nor will he be able to give
more than the substance of his writing if asked to do so. He knows how
to form each letter so well, and he knows so well each word that he is
about to write, that he has ceased to be conscious of his knowledge or to
notice his acts of volition, each one of which is, nevertheless, followed
by a corresponding muscular action. Yet the uniformity of our
handwriting, and the manner in which we almost invariably adhere to one
method of forming the same character, would seem to suggest that during
the momentary formation of each letter our memories must revert (with an
intensity too rapid for our perception) to many if not to all the
occasions on which we have ever written the same letter previously—the
memory of these occasions dwelling in our minds as what has been called a
residuum—an unconsciously struck balance or average of them all—a fused
mass of individual reminiscences of which no trace can be found in our
consciousness, and of which the only effect would seem to lie in the
gradual changes of handwriting which are perceptible in most people till
they have reached middle-age, and sometimes even later. So far are we
from consciously remembering any one of the occasions on which we have
written such and such a letter, that we are not even conscious of
exercising our memory at all, any more than we are in health conscious of
the action of our heart. But, if we are writing in some unfamiliar way,
as when printing our letters instead of writing them in our usual running
hand, our memory is so far awakened that we become conscious of every
character we form; sometimes it is even perceptible as memory to
ourselves, as when we try to remember how to print some letter, for
example a g, and cannot call to mind on which side of the upper half of
the letter we ought to put the link which connects it with the lower, and
are successful in remembering; but if we become very conscious of
remembering, it shows that we are on the brink of only trying to
remember,—that is to say, of not remembering at all.
As a general rule, we remember for a time the substance of what we have
written, for the subject is generally new to us; but if we are writing
what we have often written before, we lose consciousness of this too, as
fully as we do of the characters necessary to convey the substance to
another person, and we shall find ourselves writing on as it were
mechanically while thinking and talking of something else. So a paid
copyist, to whom the subject of what he is writing is of no importance,
does not even notice it. He deals only with familiar words and familiar
characters without caring to go behind them, and thereupon writes on in a
quasi-unconscious manner; but if he comes to a word or to characters with
which he is but little acquainted, he becomes immediately awakened to the
consciousness of either remembering or trying to remember. His
consciousness of his own knowledge or memory would seem to belong to a
period, so to speak, of twilight between the thick darkness of ignorance
and the brilliancy of perfect knowledge; as colour which vanishes with
extremes of light or of shade. Perfect ignorance and perfect knowledge
are alike unselfconscious.
The above holds good even more noticeably in respect of reading. How
many thousands of individual letters do our eyes run over every morning
in the “Times” newspaper, how few of them do we notice, or remember
having noticed? Yet there was a time when we had such difficulty in
reading even the simplest words, that we had to take great pains to
impress them upon our memory so as to know them when we came to then
again. Now, not even a single word of all we have seen will remain with
us, unless it is a new one, or an old one used in an unfamiliar sense, in
which case we notice, and may very likely remember it. Our memory
retains the substance only, the substance only being unfamiliar.
Nevertheless, although we do not perceive more than the general result of
our perception, there can be no doubt of our having perceived every
letter in every word that we have read at all, for if we come upon a word
misspelt our attention is at once aroused; unless, indeed, we have
actually corrected the misspelling, as well as noticed it, unconsciously,
through exceeding familiarity with the way in which it ought to be spelt.
Not only do we perceive the letters we have seen without noticing that we
have perceived them, but we find it almost impossible to notice that we
notice them when we have once learnt to read fluently. To try to do so
puts us out, and prevents our being able to read. We may even go so far
as to say that if a man can attend to the individual characters, it is a
sign that he cannot yet read fluently. If we know how to read well, we
are as unconscious of the means and processes whereby we attain the
desired result as we are about the growth of our hair or the circulation
of our blood. So that here again it would seem that we only know what we
know still to some extent imperfectly, and that what we know thoroughly
escapes our conscious perception though none the less actually perceived.
Our perception in fact passes into a latent stage, as also our memory and
volition.
Walking is another example of the rapid exercise of volition with but
little perception of each individual act of exercise. We notice any
obstacle in our path, but it is plain we do not notice that we perceive
much that we have nevertheless been perceiving; for if a man goes down a
lane by night he will stumble over many things which he would have
avoided by day, although he would not have noticed them. Yet time was
when walking was to each one of us a new and arduous task—as arduous as
we should now find it to wheel a wheelbarrow on a tight-rope; whereas, at
present, though we can think of our steps to a certain extent without
checking our power to walk, we certainly cannot consider our muscular
action in detail without having to come to a dead stop.
Talking—especially in one’s mother tongue—may serve as a last example.
We find it impossible to follow the muscular action of the mouth and
tongue in framing every letter or syllable we utter. We have probably
spoken for years and years before we became aware that the letter h is a
labial sound, and until we have to utter a word which is difficult from
its unfamiliarity we speak “trippingly on the tongue” with no attention
except to the substance of what we wish to say. Yet talking was not
always the easy matter to us which it is at present—as we perceive more
readily when we are learning a new language which it may take us months
to master. Nevertheless, when we have once mastered it we speak it
without further consciousness of knowledge or memory, as regards the more
common words, and without even noticing our consciousness. Here, as in
the other instances already given, as long as we did not know perfectly,
we were conscious of our acts of perception, volition, and reflection,
but when our knowledge has become perfect we no longer notice our
consciousness, nor our volition; nor can we awaken a second artificial
consciousness without some effort, and disturbance of the process of
which we are endeavouring to become conscious. We are no longer, so to
speak, under the law, but under grace.
An ascending scale may be perceived in the above instances.
In playing, we have an action acquired long after birth, difficult of
acquisition, and never thoroughly familiarised to the power of absolutely
unconscious performance, except in the case of those who have either an
exceptional genius for music, or who have devoted the greater part of
their time to practising. Except in the case of these persons it is
generally found easy to become more or less conscious of any passage
without disturbing the performance, and our action remains so completely
within our control that we can stop playing at any moment we please.
In writing, we have an action generally acquired earlier, done for the
most part with great unconsciousness of detail, fairly well within our
control to stop at any moment; though not so completely as would be
imagined by those who have not made the experiment of trying to stop in
the middle of a given character when writing at fit speed. Also, we can
notice our formation of any individual character without our writing
being materially hindered.
Reading is usually acquired earlier still. We read with more
unconsciousness of attention than we write. We find it more difficult to
become conscious of any character without discomfiture, and we cannot
arrest ourselves in the middle of a word, for example, and hardly before
the end of a sentence; nevertheless it is on the whole well within our
control.
Walking is so early an acquisition that we cannot remember having
acquired it. In running fast over average ground we find it very
difficult to become conscious of each individual step, and should
possibly find it more difficult still, if the inequalities and roughness
of uncultured land had not perhaps caused the development of a power to
create a second consciousness of our steps without hindrance to our
running or walking. Pursuit and flight, whether in the chase or in war,
must for many generations have played a much more prominent part in the
lives of our ancestors than they do in our own. If the ground over which
they had to travel had been generally as free from obstruction as our
modern cultivated lands, it is possible that we might not find it as easy
to notice our several steps as we do at present. Even as it is, if while
we are running we would consider the action of our muscles, we come to a
dead stop, and should probably fall if we tried to observe too suddenly;
for we must stop to do this, and running, when we have once committed
ourselves to it beyond a certain point, is not controllable to a step or
two without loss of equilibrium.
We learn to talk, much about the same time that we learn to walk, but
talking requires less muscular effort than walking, and makes generally
less demand upon our powers. A man may talk a long while before he has
done the equivalent of a five-mile walk; it is natural, therefore, that
we should have had more practice in talking than in walking, and hence
that we should find it harder to pay attention to our words than to our
steps. Certainly it is very hard to become conscious of every syllable
or indeed of every word we say; the attempt to do so will often bring us
to a check at once; nevertheless we can generally stop talking if we wish
to do so, unless the crying of infants be considered as a kind of
_quasi_-speech: this comes earlier, and is often quite uncontrollable, or
more truly perhaps is done with such complete control over the muscles by
the will, and with such absolute certainty of his own purpose on the part
of the wilier, that there is no longer any more doubt, uncertainty, or
suspense, and hence no power of perceiving any of the processes whereby
the result is attained—as a wheel which may look fast fixed because it is
so fast revolving. {13}
We may observe therefore in this ascending scale, imperfect as it is,
that the older the habit the longer the practice, the longer the
practice, the more knowledge—or, the less uncertainty; the less
uncertainty the less power of conscious self-analysis and control.
It will occur to the reader that in all the instances given above,
different individuals attain the unconscious stage of perfect knowledge
with very different degrees of facility. Some have to attain it with a
great sum; others are free born. Some learn to play, to read, write, and
talk, with hardly an effort—some show such an instinctive aptitude for
arithmetic that, like Zerah Colburn, at eight years old, they achieve
results without instruction, which in the case of most people would
require a long education. The account of Zerah Colburn, as quoted from
Mr. Baily in Dr. Carpenter’s “Mental Physiology,” may perhaps be given
here.
“He raised any number consisting of _one_ figure progressively to the
tenth power, giving the results (by actual multiplication and not by
memory) _faster than they could be set down in figures_ by the person
appointed to record them. He raised the number 8 progressively to the
_sixteenth_ power, and in naming the last result, which consisted of 15
figures, he was right in every one. Some numbers consisting of _two_
figures he raised as high as the eighth power, though he found a
difficulty in proceeding when the products became very large.
“On being asked the _square root_ of 106,929, he answered 327 before the
original number could be written down. He was then required to find the
cube root of 268,336,125, and with equal facility and promptness he
replied 645.
“He was asked how many minutes there are in 48 years, and before the
question could be taken down he replied 25,228,800, and immediately
afterwards he gave the correct number of seconds.
“On being requested to give the factors which would produce the number
247,483, he immediately named 941 and 263, which are the only two numbers
from the multiplication of which it would result. On 171,395 being
proposed, he named 5 × 34,279, 7 × 24,485, 59 × 2905, 83 × 2065, 35 ×
4897, 295 × 581, and 413 × 415.
“He was then asked to give the factors of 36,083, but he immediately
replied that it had none, which was really the case, this being a prime
number. Other numbers being proposed to him indiscriminately, he always
succeeded in giving the correct factors except in the case of prime
numbers, which he generally discovered almost as soon as they were
proposed to him. The number 4,294,967,297, which is 232 + 1, having been
given him, he discovered, as Euler had previously done, that it was not
the prime number which Fermat had supposed it to be, but that it is the
product of the factors 6,700,417 × 641. The solution of this problem was
only given after the lapse of some weeks, but the method he took to
obtain it clearly showed that he had not derived his information from any
extraneous source.
“When he was asked to multiply together numbers both consisting of more
than these figures, he seemed to decompose one or both of them into its
factors, and to work with them separately. Thus, on being asked to give
the square of 4395, he multiplied 293 by itself, and then twice
multiplied the product by 15. And on being asked to tell the square of
999,999 he obtained the correct result, 999,998,000,001, by twice
multiplying the square of 37,037 by 27. He then of his own accord
multiplied that product by 49, and said that the result (viz.,
48,999,902,000,049) was equal to the square of 6,999,993. He afterwards
multiplied this product by 49, and observed that the result (viz.,
2,400,995,198,002,401) was equal to the square of 48,999,951. He was
again asked to multiply the product by 25, and in naming the result
(viz., 60,024,879,950,060,025) he said it was equal to the square of
244,999,755.
“On being interrogated as to the manner in which he obtained these
results, the boy constantly said he did not know _how_ the answers came
into his mind. In the act of multiplying two numbers together, and in
the raising of powers, it was evident (alike from the facts just stated
and from the motion of his lips) that _some_ operation was going forward
in his mind; yet that operation could not (from the readiness with which
his answers were furnished) have been at all allied to the usual modes of
procedure, of which, indeed, he was entirely ignorant, not being able to
perform on paper a simple sum in multiplication or division. But in the
extraction of roots, and in the discovery of the factors of large
numbers, it did not appear that any operation _could_ take place, since
he gave answers _immediately_, or in a very few seconds, which, according
to the ordinary methods, would have required very difficult and laborious
calculations, and prime numbers cannot be recognised as such by any known
rule.”
I should hope that many of the above figures are wrong. I have verified
them carefully with Dr. Carpenter’s quotation, but further than this I
cannot and will not go. Also I am happy to find that in the end the boy
overcame the mathematics, and turned out a useful but by no means
particularly calculating member of society.
The case, however, is typical of others in which persons have been found
able to do without apparent effort what in the great majority of cases
requires a long apprenticeship. It is needless to multiply instances;
the point that concerns us is, that knowledge under such circumstances
being very intense, and the ease with which the result is produced
extreme, it eludes the conscious apprehension of the performer himself,
who only becomes conscious when a difficulty arises which taxes even his
abnormal power. Such a case, therefore, confirms rather than militates
against our opinion that consciousness of knowledge vanishes on the
knowledge becoming perfect—the only difference between those possessed of
any such remarkable special power and the general run of people being,
that the first are born with such an unusual aptitude for their
particular specialty that they are able to dispense with all or nearly
all the preliminary exercise of their faculty, while the latter must
exercise it for a considerable time before they can get it to work
smoothly and easily; but in either case when once the knowledge is
intense it is unconscious.
Nor again would such an instance as that of Zerah Colburn warrant us in
believing that this white heat, as it were, of unconscious knowledge can
be attained by any one without his ever having been originally cold.
Young Colburn, for example, could not extract roots when he was an embryo
of three weeks’ standing. It is true we can seldom follow the process,
but we know there must have been a time in every case when even the
desire for information or action had not been kindled; the forgetfulness
of effort on the part of those with exceptional genius for a special
subject is due to the smallness of the effort necessary, so that it makes
no impression upon the individual himself, rather than to the absence of
any effort at all. {18}
It would, therefore, appear as though perfect knowledge and perfect
ignorance were extremes which meet and become indistinguishable from one
another; so also perfect volition and perfect absence of volition,
perfect memory and utter forgetfulness; for we are unconscious of
knowing, willing, or remembering, either from not yet having known or
willed, or from knowing and willing so well and so intensely as to be no
longer conscious of either. Conscious knowledge and volition are of
attention; attention is of suspense; suspense is of doubt; doubt is of
uncertainty; uncertainty is of ignorance; so that the mere fact of
conscious knowing or willing implies the presence of more or less novelty
and doubt.
It would also appear as a general principle on a superficial view of the
foregoing instances (and the reader may readily supply himself with
others which are perhaps more to the purpose), that unconscious knowledge
and unconscious volition are never acquired otherwise than as the result
of experience, familiarity, or habit; so that whenever we observe a
person able to do any complicated action unconsciously, we may assume
both that he must have done it very often before he could acquire so
great proficiency, and also that there must have been a time when he did
not know how to do it at all.
We may assume that there was a time when he was yet so nearly on the
point of neither knowing nor willing perfectly, that he was quite alive
to whatever knowledge or volition he could exert; going further back, we
shall find him still more keenly alive to a less perfect knowledge;
earlier still, we find him well aware that he does not know nor will
correctly, but trying hard to do both the one and the other; and so on,
back and back, till both difficulty and consciousness become little more
than a sound of going in the brain, a flitting to and fro of something
barely recognisable as the desire to will or know at all—much less as the
desire to know or will definitely this or that. Finally, they retreat
beyond our ken into the repose—the inorganic kingdom—of as yet unawakened
interest.
In either case,—the repose of perfect ignorance or of perfect
knowledge—disturbance is troublesome. When first starting on an Atlantic
steamer, our rest is hindered by the screw; after a short time, it is
hindered if the screw stops. A uniform impression is practically no
impression. One cannot either learn or unlearn without pains or pain.