APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES TO ACTIONS AND HABITS ACQUIRED
BEFORE BIRTH.
BUT if we once admit the principle that consciousness and volition have a
tendency to vanish as soon as practice has rendered any habit exceedingly
familiar, so that the mere presence of an elaborate but unconscious
performance shall carry with it a presumption of infinite practice, we
shall find it impossible to draw the line at those actions which we see
acquired after birth, no matter at how early a period. The whole history
and development of the embryo in all its stages forces itself on our
consideration. Birth has been made too much of. It is a salient feature
in the history of the individual, but not more salient than a hundred
others, and far less so than the commencement of his existence as a
single cell uniting in itself elements derived from both parents, or
perhaps than any point in his whole existence as an embryo. For many
years after we are born we are still very incomplete. We cease to
oxygenise our blood vicariously as soon as we are born, but we still
derive our sustenance from our mothers. Birth is but the beginning of
doubt, the first hankering after scepticism, the dreaming of a dawn of
trouble, the end of certainty and of settled convictions. Not but what
before birth there have been unsettled convictions (more’s the pity) with
not a few, and after birth we have still so made up our minds upon many
points as to have no further need of reflection concerning them;
nevertheless, in the main, birth is the end of that time when we really
knew our business, and the beginning of the days wherein we know not what
we would do, or do. It is therefore the beginning of consciousness, and
infancy is as the dosing of one who turns in his bed on waking, and takes
another short sleep before he rises. When we were yet unborn, our
thoughts kept the roadway decently enough; then were we blessed; we
thought as every man thinks, and held the same opinions as our fathers
and mothers had done upon nearly every subject. Life was not an art—and
a very difficult art—much too difficult to be acquired in a lifetime; it
was a science of which we were consummate masters.
In this sense, then, birth may indeed be looked upon as the most salient
feature in a man’s life; but this is not at all the sense in which it is
commonly so regarded. It is commonly considered as the point at which we
begin to live. More truly it is the point at which we leave off knowing
how to live.
A chicken, for example, is never so full of consciousness, activity,
reasoning faculty, and volition, as when it is an embryo in the eggshell,
making bones, and flesh, and feathers, and eyes, and claws, with nothing
but a little warmth and white of egg to make them from. This is indeed
to make bricks with but a small modicum of straw. There is no man in the
whole world who knows consciously and articulately as much as a
half-hatched hen’s egg knows unconsciously. Surely the egg in its own
way must know quite as much as the chicken does. We say of the chicken
that it knows how to run about as soon as it is hatched. So it does; but
had it no knowledge before it was hatched? What made it lay the
foundations of those limbs which should enable it to run about? What
made it grow a horny tip to its bill before it was hatched, so that it
might peck all round the larger end of the eggshell and make a hole for
itself to get out at? Having once got outside the eggshell, the chicken
throws away this horny tip; but is it reasonable to suppose that it would
have grown it at all unless it had known that it would want something
with which to break the eggshell? And again, is it in the least
agreeable to our experience that such elaborate machinery should be made
without endeavour, failure, perseverance, intelligent contrivance,
experience, and practice?
In the presence of such considerations, it seems impossible to refrain
from thinking that there must be a closer continuity of identity, life,
and memory, between successive generations than we generally imagine. To
shear the thread of life, and hence of memory, between one generation and
its successor, is so to speak, a brutal measure, an act of intellectual
butchery, and like all such strong high-handed measures, a sign of
weakness in him who is capable of it till all other remedies have been
exhausted. It is mere horse science, akin to the theories of the
convulsionists in the geological kingdom, and of the believers in the
supernatural origin of the species of plants and animals. Yet it is to
be feared that we have not a few among us who would feel shocked rather
at the attempt towards a milder treatment of the facts before them, than
at a continuance of the present crass tyranny with which we try to crush
them inside our preconceived opinions. It is quite common to hear men of
education maintain that not even when it was on the point of being
hatched, had the chicken sense enough to know that it wanted to get
outside the eggshell. It did indeed peck all round the end of the shell,
which, if it wanted to get out, would certainly be the easiest way of
effecting its purpose; but it did not, they say, peck because it was
aware of this, but “promiscuously.” Curious, such a uniformity of
promiscuous action among so many eggs for so many generations. If we see
a man knock a hole in a wall on finding that he cannot get out of a place
by any other means, and if we see him knock this hole in a very
workmanlike way, with an implement with which he has been at great pains
to make for a long the past, but which he throws away as soon as he has
no longer use for it, thus showing that he had made it expressly for the
purpose of escape, do we say that this person made the implement and
broke the wall of his prison promiscuously? No jury would acquit a
burglar on these grounds. Then why, without much more evidence to the
contrary than we have, or can hope to have, should we not suppose that
with chickens, as with men, signs of contrivance are indeed signs of
contrivance, however quick, subtle, and untraceable, the contrivance may
be? Again, I have heard people argue that though the chicken, when
nearly hatched, had such a glimmering of sense that it pecked the shell
because it wanted to get out, yet that it is not conceivable that, so
long before it was hatched, it should have had the sense to grow the
horny tip to its bill for use when wanted. This, at any rate, they say,
it must have grown, as the persons previously referred to would maintain,
promiscuously.
Now no one indeed supposes that the chicken does what it does, with the
same self-consciousness with which a tailor makes a suit of clothes. Not
any one who has thought upon the subject is likely to do it so great an
injustice. The probability is that it knows what it is about to an
extent greater than any tailor ever did or will, for, to say the least of
it, many thousands of years to come. It works with such absolute
certainty and so vast an experience, that it is utterly incapable of
following the operations of its own mind—as accountants have been known
to add up long columns of pounds, shillings, and pence, running the three
fingers of one hand, a finger for each column, up the page, and putting
the result down correctly at the bottom, apparently without an effort.
In the case of the accountant, we say that the processes which his mind
goes through are so rapid and subtle as to elude his own power of
observation as well as ours. We do not deny that his mind goes though
processes of some kind; we very readily admit that it must do so, and say
that these processes are so rapid and subtle, owing, as a general rule,
to long experience in addition. Why then should we find it so difficult
to conceive that this principle, which we observe to play so large a part
in mental physiology, wherever we can observe mental physiology at all,
may have a share also in the performance of intricate operations
otherwise inexplicable, though the creature performing them is not man,
or man only in embryo?
Again, after the chicken is hatched, it grows more feathers and bones and
blood, but we still say that it knows nothing about all this. What then
do we say it _does_ know? One is almost ashamed to confess that we only
credit it with knowing what it appears to know by processes which we find
it exceedingly easy to follow, or perhaps rather, which we find it
absolutely impossible to avoid following, as recognising too great a
family likeness between them, and those which are most easily followed in
our own minds, to be able to sit down in comfort under a denial of the
resemblance. Thus, for example, if we see a chicken running away from a
fox, we do admit that the chicken knows the fox would kill it if it
caught it.
On the other hand, if we allow that the half-hatched chicken grew the
horny tip to be ready for use, with an intensity of unconscious
contrivance which can be only attributed to experience, we are driven to
admit that from the first moment the men began to sit upon it—and earlier
too than this—the egg was always full of consciousness and volition, and
that during its embryological condition the unhatched chicken is doing
exactly what it continues doing from the moment it is hatched till it
dies; that is to say, attempting to better itself, doing (as Aristotle
says all creatures do all things upon all occasions) what it considers
most for its advantage under the existing circumstances. What it may
think most advantageous will depend, while it is in the eggshell, upon
exactly the same causes as will influence its opinions in later life—to
wit, upon its habits, its past circumstances and ways of thinking; for
there is nothing, as Shakespeare tells us, good or ill, but thinking
makes it so.
The egg thinks feathers much more to its advantage than hair or fur, and
much more easily made. If it could speak, it would probably tell us that
we could make them ourselves very easily after a few lessons, if we took
the trouble to try, but that hair was another matter, which it really
could not see how any protoplasm could be got to make. Indeed, during
the more intense and active part of our existence, in the earliest
stages, that is to say, of our embryological life, we could probably have
turned our protoplasm into feathers instead of hair if we had cared about
doing so. If the chicken can make feathers, there seems no sufficient
reason for thinking that we cannot do so, beyond the fact that we prefer
hair, and have preferred it for so many ages that we have lost the art
along with the desire of making feathers, if indeed any of our ancestors
ever possessed it. The stuff with which we make hair is practically the
same as that with which chickens make feathers. It is nothing but
protoplasm, and protoplasm is like certain prophecies, out of which
anything can be made by the creature which wants to make it. Everything
depends upon whether a creature knows its own mind sufficiently well, and
has enough faith in its own powers of achievement. When these two
requisites are wanting, the strongest giant cannot lift a two-ounce
weight; when they are given, a bullock can take an eyelash out of its eye
with its hind-foot, or a minute jelly speck can build itself a house out
of various materials which it will select according to its purpose with
the nicest care, though it have neither brain to think with, nor eyes to
see with, nor hands nor feet to work with, nor is it anything but a
minute speck of jelly—faith and protoplasm only.
That this is indeed so, the following passage from Dr. Carpenter’s
“Mental Physiology” may serve to show:—
“The simplest type of an animal consists of a minute mass of
‘protoplasm,’ or living jelly, which is not yet _differentiated_ into
‘organs;’ every part having the same endowments, and taking an equal
share in every action which the creature performs. One of these ‘jelly
specks,’ the amœba, moves itself about by changing the form of its body,
extemporising a foot (or pseudopodium), first in one direction, and then
in another; and then, when it has met with a nutritive particle,
extemporises a stomach for its reception, by wrapping its soft body
around it. Another, instead of going about in search of food, remains in
one place, but projects its protoplasmic substance into long pseudopodia,
which entrap and draw in very minute particles, or absorb nutrient
material from the liquid through which they extend themselves, and are
continually becoming fused (as it were) into the central body, which is
itself continually giving off new pseudopodia. Now we can scarcely
conceive that a creature of such simplicity should possess any distinct
_consciousness_ of its needs” (why not?), “or that its actions should be
directed by any _intention_ of its own; and yet the writer has lately
found results of the most singular elaborateness to be wrought out by the
instrumentality of these minute jelly specks, which build up tests or
casings of the most regular geometrical symmetry of form, and of the most
artificial construction.”
On this Dr. Carpenter remarks:—“Suppose a human mason to be put down by
the side of a pile of stones of various shapes and sizes, and to be told
to build a dome of these, smooth on both surfaces, without using more
than the least possible quantity of a very tenacious, but very costly,
cement, in holding the stones together. If he accomplished this well, he
would receive credit for great intelligence and skill. Yet this is
exactly what these little ‘jelly specks’ do on a most minute scale; the
‘tests’ they construct, when highly magnified, bearing comparison with
the most skilful masonry of man. From _the same sandy bottom_ one
species picks up the _coarser_ quartz grains, cements them together with
_phosphate of iron_ secreted from its own substance” (should not this
rather be, “which it has contrived in some way or other to manufacture”?)
and thus constructs a flask-shaped ‘test,’ having a short neck and a
large single orifice. Another picks up the _finest_ grains, and puts
them together, with the same cement, into perfectly spherical ‘tests’ of
the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores
disposed at pretty regular intervals. Another selects the _minutest_
sand grains and the terminal portions of sponge spicules, and works them
up together—apparently with no cement at all, by the mere laying of the
spicules—into perfect white spheres, like homœopathic globules, each
having a single-fissured orifice. And another, which makes a straight,
many-chambered ‘test,’ that resembles in form the chambered shell of an
orthoceratite—the conical mouth of each chamber projecting into the
cavity of the next—while forming the walls of its chambers of ordinary
sand grains rather loosely held together, shapes the conical mouth of the
successive chambers by firmly cementing together grains of ferruginous
quartz, which it must have picked out from the general mass.”
“To give these actions,” continues Dr. Carpenter, “the vague designation
of ‘instinctive’ does not in the least help us to account for them, since
what we want is to discover the _mechanism_ by which they are worked out;
and it is most difficult to conceive how so artificial a selection can be
made by a creature so simple” (Mental Physiology, 4th ed. pp. 41–43)
This is what protoplasm can do when it has the talisman of faith—of faith
which worketh all wonders, either in the heavens above, or in the earth
beneath, or in the waters under the earth. Truly if a man have faith,
even as a grain of mustard seed, though he may not be able to remove
mountains, he will at any rate be able to do what is no less
difficult—make a mustard plant.
Yet this is but a barren kind of comfort, for we have not, and in the
nature of things cannot have, sufficient faith in the unfamiliar,
inasmuch as the very essence of faith involves the notion of familiarity,
which can grow but slowly, from experience to confidence, and can make no
sudden leap at any time. Such faith cannot be founded upon reason,—that
is to say, upon a recognised perception on the part of the person holding
it that he is holding it, and of the reasons for his doing so—or it will
shift as other reasons come to disturb it. A house built upon reason is
a house built upon the sand. It must be built upon the current cant and
practice of one’s peers, for this is the rock which, though not
immovable, is still most hard to move.
But however this may be, we observe broadly that the intensity of the
will to make this or that, and of the confidence that one can make it,
depends upon the length of time during which the maker’s forefathers have
wanted the same thing before it; the older the custom the more inveterate
the habit, and, with the exception, perhaps, that the reproductive system
is generally the crowning act of development—an exception which I will
hereafter explain—the earlier its manifestation, until, for some reason
or another, we relinquish it and take to another, which we must, as a
general rule, again adhere to for a vast number of generations, before it
will permanently supplant the older habit. In our own case, the habit of
breathing like a fish through gills may serve as an example. We have now
left off this habit, yet we did it formerly for so many generations that
we still do it a little; it still crosses our embryological existence
like a faint memory or dream, for not easily is an inveterate habit
broken. On the other hand—again speaking broadly—the more recent the
habit the later the fashion of its organ, as with the teeth, speech, and
the higher intellectual powers, which are too new for development before
we are actually born.
But to return for a short time to Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Carpenter evidently
feels, what must indeed be felt by every candid mind, that there is no
sufficient reason for supposing that these little specks of jelly,
without brain or eyes, or stomach, or hands, or feet, but the very lowest
known form of animal life, are not imbued with a consciousness of their
needs, and the reasoning faculties which shall enable them to gratify
those needs in a manner, all things considered, equalling the highest
flights of the ingenuity of the highest animal—man. This is no
exaggeration. It is true, that in an earlier part of the passage, Dr.
Carpenter has said that we can scarcely conceive so simple a creature to
“possess any distinct _consciousness_ of its needs, or that its actions
should be directed by any intention of its own;” but, on the other hand,
a little lower down he says, that if a workman did what comes to the same
thing as what the amœba does, he “would receive credit for great
intelligence and skill.” Now if an amœba can do that, for which a
workman would receive credit as for a highly skilful and intelligent
performance, the amœba should receive no less credit than the workman; he
should also be no less credited with skill and intelligence, which words
unquestionably involve a distinct consciousness of needs and an action
directed by an intention of its own. So that Dr. Carpenter seems rather
to blow hot and cold with one breath. Nevertheless there can be no doubt
to which side the minds of the great majority of mankind will incline
upon the evidence before them; they will say that the creature is highly
reasonable and intelligent, though they would readily admit that long
practice and familiarity may have exhausted its powers of attention to
all the stages of its own performance, just as a practised workman in
building a wall certainly does not consciously follow all the processes
which he goes through.
As an example, however, of the extreme dislike which philosophers of a
certain school have for making the admissions which seem somewhat
grudgingly conceded by Dr. Carpenter, we may take the paragraph which
immediately follows the ones which we have just quoted. Dr. Carpenter
there writes:—
“The writer has often amused himself and others, when by the seaside,
with getting a _terebella_ (a marine worm that cases its body in a sandy
tube) out of its house, and then, putting it into a saucer of water with
a supply of sand and comminuted shell, watching its appropriation of
these materials in constructing a new tube. The extended tentacles soon
spread themselves over the bottom of the saucer and lay hold of whatever
comes in their way, ‘all being fish that comes to their net,’ and in half
an hour or thereabouts the new house is finished, though on a very rude
and artificial type. Now here the organisation is far higher; the
instrumentality obviously serves the needs of the animal and suffices for
them; and we characterise the action, on account of its uniformity and
apparent _un_intelligence, as instinctive.”
No comment will, one would think, be necessary to make the reader feel
that the difference between the terebella and the amœba is one of degree
rather than kind, and that if the action of the second is as conscious
and reasonable as that, we will say, of a bird making her nest, the
action of the first should be so also. It is only a question of being a
little less skilful, or more so, but skill and intelligence would seem
present in both cases. Moreover, it is more clever of the terebella to
have made itself the limbs with which it can work, than of the amœba to
be able to work without the limbs; and perhaps it is more sensible also
to want a less elaborate dwelling, provided it is sufficient for
practical purposes. But whether the terebella be less intelligent than
the amœba or not, it does quite enough to establish its claim to
intelligence of a higher order; and one does not see ground for the
satisfaction which Dr. Carpenter appears to find at having, as it were,
taken the taste of the amœba’s performance out of our mouth, by setting
us about the less elaborate performance of the terebella, which he thinks
we can call unintelligent and instinctive.
I may be mistaken in the impression I have derived from the paragraphs I
have quoted. I commonly say they give me the impression that I have
tried to convey to the reader, _i.e._, that the writer’s assent to
anything like intelligence, or consciousness of needs, an animal low down
in the scale of life, is grudging, and that he is more comfortable when
he has got hold of onto to which he can point and say that mere, at any
rate, is an unintelligent and merely instinctive creature. I have only
called attention to the passage as an example of the intellectual bias of
a large number of exceedingly able and thoughtful persons, among whom, so
far as I am able to form an opinion at all, few have greater claims to
our respectful attention than Dr. Carpenter himself.
For the embryo of a chicken, then, we damn exactly the same kind of
reasoning power and contrivance which we damn for the amœba, or for our
own intelligent performances in later life. We do not claim for it much,
if any, perception of its own forethought, for we know very well that it
is among the most prominent features of intellectual activity that, after
a number of repetitions, it ceases to be perceived, and that it does not,
in ordinary cases, cease to be perceived till after a very great number
of repetitions. The fact that the embryo chicken makes itself always as
nearly as may be in the same way, would lead us to suppose that it would
be unconscious of much of its own action, _provided it were always the
same chicken which made itself over and over again_. So far we can see,
it always _is_ unconscious of the greater part of its own wonderful
performance. Surely then we have a presumption that _it is the same
chicken which makes itself over and over again_; for such unconsciousness
is not won, so far as our experience goes, by any other means than by
frequent repetition of the same act on the part of one and the same
individual. How this can be we shall perceive in subsequent chapters.
In the meantime, we may say that all knowledge and volition would seem to
be merely parts of the knowledge and volition of the primordial cell
(whatever this may be), which slumbers but never dies—which has grown,
and multiplied, and differentiated itself into the compound life of the
womb, and which never becomes conscious of knowing what it has once
learnt effectually, till it is for some reason on the point of, or in
danger of, forgetting it.
The action, therefore, of an embryo making its way up in the world from a
simple cell to a baby, developing for itself eyes, ears, hands, and feet
while yet unborn, proves to be exactly of one and the same kind as that
of a man of fifty who goes into the City and tells his broker to buy him
so many Great Northern A shares—that is to say, an effort of the will
exercised in due course on a balance of considerations as to the
immediate expediency, and guided by past experience; while children who
do not reach birth are but prenatal spendthrifts, ne’er-do-weels,
inconsiderate innovators, the unfortunate in business, either through
their own fault or that of others, or through inevitable mischances,
beings who are culled out before birth instead of after; so that even the
lowest idiot, the most contemptible in health or beauty, may yet reflect
with pride that they were _born_. Certainly we observe that those who
have had good fortune (mother and sole cause of virtue, and sole virtue
in itself), and have profited by their experience, and known their
business best before birth, so that they made themselves both to be and
to look well, do commonly on an average prove to know it best in
after-life: they grow their clothes best who have grown their limbs best.
It is rare that those who have not remembered how to finish their own
bodies fairly well should finish anything well in later life. But how
small is the addition to their unconscious attainments which even the
Titans of human intellect have consciously accomplished, in comparison
with the problems solved by the meanest baby living, nay, even by one
whose birth is untimely! In other words, how vast is that back knowledge
over which we have gone fast asleep, through the prosiness of perpetual
repetition; and how little in comparison, is that whose novelty keeps it
still within the scope of our conscious perception! What is the
discovery of the laws of gravitation as compared with the knowledge which
sleeps in every hen’s egg upon a kitchen shelf?
It is all a matter of habit and fashion. Thus we see kings and
councillors of the earth admired for facing death before what they are
pleased to call dishonour. If, on being required to go without anything
they have been accustomed to, or to change their habits, or do what is
unusual in the case of other kings under like circumstances, then, if
they but fold their cloak decently around them, and die upon the spot of
shame at having had it even required of them to do thus or thus, then are
they kings indeed, of old race, that know their business from generation
to generation. Or if, we will say, a prince, on having his dinner
brought to him ill-cooked, were to feel the indignity so keenly as that
he should turn his face to the wall, and breathe out his wounded soul in
one sigh, do we not admire him as a “_real_ prince,” who knows the
business of princes so well that he can conceive of nothing foreign to it
in connection with himself, the bare effort to realise a state of things
other than what princes have been accustomed to being immediately fatal
to him? Yet is there no less than this in the demise of every
half-hatched hen’s egg, shaken rudely by a schoolboy, or neglected by a
truant mother; for surely the prince would not die if he knew how to do
otherwise, and the hen’s egg only dies of being required to do something
to which it is not accustomed.
But the further consideration of this and other like reflections would
too long detain us. Suffice it that we have established the position
that all living creatures which show any signs of intelligence, must
certainly each one have already gone through the embryonic stages an
infinite number of times, or they could no more have achieved the
intricate process of self-development unconsciously, than they could play
the piano unconsciously without any previous knowledge of the instrument.
It remains, therefore, to show the when and where of their having done
so, and this leads us naturally to the subject of the following
chapter—Personal Identity.