Statement of the Question at Issue
OF the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book—I mean
the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of
design into organic modification—the second is both the more important
and the one which stands most in need of support. The substantial
identity between heredity and memory is becoming generally admitted; as
regards my second point, however, I cannot flatter myself that I have
made much way against the formidable array of writers on the
neo-Darwinian side; I shall therefore devote the rest of my book as far
as possible to this subject only. Natural selection (meaning by these
words the preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable
variations that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck and
in no way arising out of function) has been, to use an Americanism than
which I can find nothing apter, the biggest biological boom of the last
quarter of a century; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that
Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should
show some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification
called in question. Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen
{70a} and Professor Ray Lankester {70b} in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause
{70c} in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory
of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by myself; if
they are not to be left in possession of the field the sooner they are
met the better.
Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;—whether luck or cunning is
the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development.
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning.
They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the
situation—within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as
organism retreats farther backwards from ourselves—and persistent effort
to turn it to account. They made this the soul of all development
whether of mind or body.
And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for
better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready wit and
_savoir faire_ than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have
more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone
through waters of misery which they have used as wells.
The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and
thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by
“striking oil,” and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of
the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired. No speculation,
no commerce; “nothing venture, nothing have,” is as true for the
development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither
Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting that highly
picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture do from time
to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest and most
dead-level organisms under the name of “sports;” but they would hold that
even these occur most often and most happily to those that have
persevered in well-doing for some generations. Unto the organism that
hath is given, and from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that
even “sports” prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains
the sheet anchor of the early evolutionists. They believe, in fact, that
more organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way. The
race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to
the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round organism that
is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness.
_Festina_, but _festina lente_—perhaps as involving so completely the
contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—is the motto
they would assign to organism, and _Chi va piano va lontano_, they hold
to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even
after these), at any rate as the amœba.
To repeat in other words. All enduring forms establish a _modus vivendi_
with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the
surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow
limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their
habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding
change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity
depends in great measure upon their failure to perceive that they are
moulding themselves. If a change is so great that they are seriously
incommoded by its novelty, they are not likely to acquiesce in it kindly
enough to grow to it, but they will make no difficulty about the miracle
involved in accommodating themselves to a difference of only two or three
per cent. {72a}
As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as fresh
change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established,
there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be
accumulated in the course of generations—provided, of course, always,
that the modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive
habits and physical development of the organism in their collective
capacity. Where the change is too great, or where an organ has been
modified cumulatively in some one direction, until it has reached a
development too seriously out of harmony with the habits of the organism
taken collectively, then the organism holds itself excused from further
effort, throws up the whole concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation
and reconstruction of death. It is only on the relinquishing of further
effort that this death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on
from change to change, altering and being altered—that is to say, either
killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or killing
the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves. There is a ceaseless
higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle between these
two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both have in no
small part to re-enter into the womb from whence they came and be born
again in some form which shall give greater satisfaction.
All change is _pro tanto_ death or _pro tanto_ birth. Change is the
common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and death are
not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one another; in the
highest life there is still much death, and in the most complete death
there is still not a little life. _La vie_, says Claud Bernard, {73a}
_c’est la mort_: he might have added, and perhaps did, _et la mort ce
n’est que la vie transformée_. Life and death are the extreme modes of
something which is partly both and wholly neither; this something is
common, ordinary change; solve any change and the mystery of life and
death will be revealed; show why and how anything becomes ever anything
other in any respect than what it is at any given moment, and there will
be little secret left in any other change. One is not in its ultimate
essence more miraculous that another; it may be more striking—a greater
_congeries_ of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but
not more miraculous; all change is _quâ_ us absolutely incomprehensible
and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its
essence, as apart from its phenomena, be inquired into.
But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a
dissolution, or a combination of the two. Growth is the coming together
of elements with _quasi_ similar characteristics. I understand it is
believed to be the coming together of matter in certain states of motion
with other matter in states so nearly similar that the rhythms of the one
coalesce with and hence reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the
other—making, rather than marring and undoing them. Life and growth are
an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession
of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is “the
diapason closing full in man”; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in
pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges
through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of
life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to
the comparative simplicity of the amœba. Death, again, like life, ranges
through every degree of complexity. All pleasant changes are recreative;
they are _pro tanto_ births; all unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as
such, _pro tanto_ deaths, but we can no more exhaust either wholly of the
other, than we can exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and
pain lurk within one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as
rest and unrest in one another.
There is no greater mystery in life than in death. We talk as though the
riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death is just as
great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making five, the other is
five splitting into two and two. Solve either, and we have solved the
other; they should be studied not apart, for they are never parted, but
together, and they will tell more tales of one another than either will
tell about itself. If there is one thing which advancing knowledge makes
clearer than another, it is that death is swallowed up in life, and life
in death; so that if the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then
indeed is our salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness
there is neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures
of speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as most
convenient. There is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but a being
ever with the Lord only, in the eternal φορα, or going to and fro and
heat and fray of the universe. When we were young we thought the one
certain thing was that we should one day come to die; now we know the one
certain thing to be that we shall never wholly do so. _Non omnis
moriar_, says Horace, and “I die daily,” says St. Paul, as though a life
beyond the grave, and a death on this side of it, were each some strange
thing which happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely
once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly called that of
death, and who does not die daily and hourly? Does any man in continuing
to live from day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a
changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives
from moment to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment
to moment also? Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and more
complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the most
essential factor of his life, from the day that he became “he” at all?
When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are sounded, and
so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life
that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer. If in the
midst of life we are in death, so also in the midst of death we are in
life, and whether we live or whether we die, whether we like it and know
anything about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—living always, dying
always, and in the Lord always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is
no respecter of persons.
Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as
functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and
substance, are—for the condition of every substance may be considered as
the expression and outcome of its mind. Where there is consciousness
there is change; where there is no change there is no consciousness; may
we not suspect that there is no change without a _pro tanto_
consciousness however simple and unspecialised? Change and motion are
one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or motion), as the
ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, and
all feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited, to be the
interaction of those states which for want of better terms we call mind
and matter. Action may be regarded as a kind of middle term between mind
and matter; it is the throe of thought and thing, the quivering clash and
union of body and soul; commonplace enough in practice; miraculous, as
violating every canon on which thought and reason are founded, if we
theorise about it, put it under the microscope, and vivisect it. It is
here, if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction
in terms of combining with that which is without material substance and
cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with matter,
till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.
All body is more or less ensouled. As it gets farther and farther from
ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say to
ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about it—as
though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power of being
understood rather than of understanding. We are intelligent, and no
intelligence, so different from our own as to baffle our powers of
comprehension deserves to be called intelligence at all. The more a
thing resembles ourselves, the more it thinks as we do—and thus by
implication tells us that we are right, the more intelligent we think it;
and the less it thinks as we do, the greater fool it must be; if a
substance does not succeed in making it clear that it understands our
business, we conclude that it cannot have any business of its own, much
less understand it, or indeed understand anything at all. But letting
this pass, so far as we are concerned, χρημάτων πάντων μέτρον άνθρωπος;
we are body ensouled, and soul embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible
for us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist
either of soul without body, or body without soul. Unmattered condition,
therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned matter; and we must
hold that all body with which we can be conceivably concerned is more or
less ensouled, and all soul, in like manner, more or less embodied.
Strike either body or soul—that is to say, effect either a physical or a
mental change, and the harmonics of the other sound. So long as body is
minded in a certain way—so long, that is to say, as it feels, knows,
remembers, concludes, and forecasts one set of things—it will be in one
form; if it assumes a new one, otherwise than by external violence, no
matter how slight the change may be, it is only through having changed
its mind, through having forgotten and died to some trains of thought,
and having been correspondingly born anew by the adoption of new ones.
What it will adopt depends upon which of the various courses open to it
it considers most to its advantage.
What it will think to its advantage depends mainly on the past habits of
its race. Its past and now invisible lives will influence its desires
more powerfully than anything it may itself be able to add to the sum of
its likes and dislikes; nevertheless, over and above preconceived opinion
and the habits to which all are slaves, there is a small salary, or, as
it were, agency commission, which each may have for himself, and spend
according to his fancy; from this, indeed, income-tax must be deducted;
still there remains a little margin of individual taste, and here, high
up on this narrow, inaccessible ledge of our souls, from year to year a
breed of not unprolific variations build where reason cannot reach them
to despoil them; for _de gustibus non est disputandum_.
Here we are as far as we can go. Fancy, which sometimes sways so much
and is swayed by so little, and which sometimes, again, is so hard to
sway, and moves so little when it is swayed; whose ways have a method of
their own, but are not as our ways—fancy, lies on the extreme borderland
of the realm within which the writs of our thoughts run, and extends into
that unseen world wherein they have no jurisdiction. Fancy is as the
mist upon the horizon which blends earth and sky; where, however, it
approaches nearest to the earth and can be reckoned with, it is seen as
melting into desire, and this as giving birth to design and effort. As
the net result and outcome of these last, living forms grow gradually but
persistently into physical conformity with their own intentions, and
become outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual faiths, or
wants of faith, that have been most within them. They thus very
gradually, but none the less effectually, design themselves.
In effect, therefore, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck introduce uniformity
into the moral and spiritual worlds as it was already beginning to be
introduced into the physical. According to both these writers
development has ever been a matter of the same energy, effort, good
sense, and perseverance, as tend to advancement of life now among
ourselves. In essence it is neither more nor less than this, as the
rain-drop which denuded an ancient formation is of the same kind as that
which is denuding a modern one, though its effect may vary in geometrical
ratio with the effect it has produced already. As we are extending
reason to the lower animals, so we must extend a system of moral
government by rewards and punishments no less surely; and if we admit
that to some considerable extent man is man, and master of his fate, we
should admit also that all organic forms which are saved at all have been
in proportionate degree masters of their fate too, and have worked out,
not only their own salvation, but their salvation according, in no small
measure, to their own goodwill and pleasure, at times with a light heart,
and at times in fear and trembling. I do not say that Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck saw all the foregoing as clearly as it is easy to see it now;
what I have said, however, is only the natural development of their
system.