Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm
ONE would think the issue stated in the three preceding chapters was
decided in the stating. This, as I have already implied, is probably the
reason why those who have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin’s philosophical
reputation have avoided stating it.
It may be said that, seeing the result is a joint one, inasmuch as both
“res” and “me,” or both luck and cunning, enter so largely into
development, neither factor can claim pre-eminence to the exclusion of
the other. But life is short and business long, and if we are to get the
one into the other we must suppress details, and leave our words
pregnant, as painters leave their touches when painting from nature. If
one factor concerns us greatly more than the other, we should emphasize
it, and let the other go without saying, by force of association. There
is no fear of its being lost sight of; association is one of the few
really liberal things in nature; by liberal, I mean precipitate and
inaccurate; the power of words, as of pictures, and indeed the power to
carry on life at all, vests in the fact that association does not stick
to the letter of its bond, but will take the half for the whole without
even looking closely at the coin given to make sure that it is not
counterfeit. Through the haste and high pressure of business, errors
arise continually, and these errors give us the shocks of which our
consciousness is compounded. Our whole conscious life, therefore, grows
out of memory and out of the power of association, in virtue of which not
only does the right half pass for the whole, but the wrong half not
infrequently passes current for it also, without being challenged and
found out till, as it were, the accounts come to be balanced, and it is
found that they will not do so.
Variations are an organism’s way of getting over an unexpected
discrepancy between its resources as shown by the fly-leaves of its own
cheques and the universe’s passbook; the universe is generally right, or
would be upheld as right if the matter were to come before the not too
incorruptible courts of nature, and in nine cases out of ten the organism
has made the error in its own favour, so that it must now pay or die. It
can only pay by altering its mode of life, and how long is it likely to
be before a new departure in its mode of life comes out in its own person
and in those of its family? Granted it will at first come out in their
appearance only, but there can be no change in appearance without some
slight corresponding organic modification. In practice there is usually
compromise in these matters. The universe, if it does not give an
organism short shrift and eat it at once, will commonly abate something
of its claim; it gets tricked out of an additional moiety by the
organism; the organism really does pay something by way of changed
habits; this results in variation, in virtue of which the accounts are
cooked, cobbled, and passed by a series of those miracles of
inconsistency which was call compromises, and after this they cannot be
reopened—not till next time.
Surely of the two factors which go to the making up of development,
cunning is the one more proper to be insisted on as determining the
physical and psychical well or ill being, and hence, ere long, the future
form of the organism. We can hardly open a newspaper without seeing some
sign of this; take, for example, the following extract from a letter in
the _Times_ of the day on which I am writing (February 8, 1886)—“You may
pass along a road which divides a settlement of Irish Celts from one of
Germans. They all came to the country equally without money, and have
had to fight their way in the forest, but the difference in their
condition is very remarkable; on the German side there is comfort,
thrift, peace, but on the other side the spectacle is very different.”
Few will deny that slight organic differences, corresponding to these
differences of habit, are already perceptible; no Darwinian will deny
that these differences are likely to be inherited, and, in the absence of
intermarriage between the two colonies, to result in still more typical
difference than that which exists at present. According to Mr. Darwin,
the improved type of the more successful race would not be due mainly to
transmitted perseverance in well-doing, but to the fact that if any
member of the German colony “happened” to be born “ever so slightly,” &c.
Of course this last is true to a certain extent also; if any member of
the German colony does “happen to be born,” &c., then he will stand a
better chance of surviving, and, if he marries a wife like himself, of
transmitting his good qualities; but how about the happening? How is it
that this is of such frequent occurrence in the one colony, and is so
rare in the other? _Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis_. True, but how
and why? Through the race being favoured? In one sense, doubtless, it
is true that no man can have anything except it be given him from above,
but it must be from an above into the composition of which he himself
largely enters. God gives us all things; but we are a part of God, and
that part of Him, moreover, whose department it more especially is to
look after ourselves. It cannot be through luck, for luck is blind, and
does not pick out the same people year after year and generation after
generation; shall we not rather say, then, that it is because mind, or
cunning, is a great factor in the achievement of physical results, and
because there is an abiding memory between successive generations, in
virtue of which the cunning of an earlier one enures to the benefit of
its successors?
It is one of the commonplaces of biology that the nature of the organism
(which is mainly determined by ancestral antecedents) is greatly more
important in determining its future than the conditions of its
environment, provided, of course, that these are not too cruelly
abnormal, so that good seed will do better on rather poor soil, than bad
seed on rather good soil; this alone should be enough to show that
cunning, or individual effort, is more important in determining organic
results than luck is, and therefore that if either is to be insisted on
to the exclusion of the other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is
more correctly said to be the main means of the development of
capital—Luck? or Cunning? Of course there must be something to be
developed—and luck, that is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable,
enters everywhere; but is it more convenient with our oldest and
best-established ideas to say that luck is the main means of the
development of capital, or that cunning is so? Can there be a moment’s
hesitation in admitting that if capital is found to have been developed
largely, continuously, by many people, in many ways, over a long period
of time, it can only have been by means of continued application, energy,
effort, industry, and good sense? Granted there has been luck too; of
course there has, but we let it go without saying, whereas we cannot let
the skill or cunning go without saying, inasmuch as we feel the cunning
to have been the essence of the whole matter.
Granted, again, that there is no test more fallacious on a small scale
than that of immediate success. As applied to any particular individual,
it breaks down completely. It is unfortunately no rare thing to see the
good man striving against fate, and the fool born with a silver spoon in
his mouth. Still on a large scale no test can be conceivably more
reliable; a blockhead may succeed for a time, but a succession of many
generations of blockheads does not go on steadily gaining ground, adding
field to field and farm to farm, and becoming year by year more capable
and prosperous. Given time—of which there is no scant in the matter of
organic development—and cunning will do more with ill luck than folly
with good. People do not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of
whist running, if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves.
Cunning, if it can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere luck
unaided by cunning, no matter what start luck may have had, if the race
be a fairly long one. Growth is a kind of success which does indeed come
to some organisms with less effort than to others, but it cannot be
maintained and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish
organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, for, as a
general rule, unless the variation has so much connection with the
organism’s past habits and ways of thought as to be in no proper sense of
the word “fortuitous,” the organism will not know what to do with it when
it has got it, no matter how favourable it may be, and it is little
likely to be handed down to descendants. Indeed the kind of people who
get on best in the world—and what test to a Darwinian can be comparable
to this?—commonly do insist on cunning rather than on luck, sometimes
perhaps even unduly; speaking, at least, from experience, I have
generally found myself more or less of a failure with those Darwinians to
whom I have endeavoured to excuse my shortcomings on the score of luck.
It may be said that the contention that the nature of the organism does
more towards determining its future than the conditions of its immediate
environment do, is only another way of saying that the accidents which
have happened to an organism in the persons of its ancestors throughout
all time are more irresistible by it for good or ill than any of the more
ordinary chances and changes of its own immediate life. I do not deny
this; but these ancestral accidents were either turned to account, or
neglected where they might have been taken advantage of; they thus passed
either into skill, or want of skill; so that whichever way the fact is
stated the result is the same; and if simplicity of statement be
regarded, there is no more convenient way of putting the matter than to
say that though luck is mighty, cunning is mightier still. Organism
commonly shows its cunning by practising what Horace preached, and
treating itself as more plastic than its surroundings; those indeed who
have had the greatest the first to admit that they had gained their ends
more by reputation as moulders of circumstances have ever been shaping
their actions and themselves to suit events, than by trying to shape
events to suit themselves and their actions. Modification, like charity,
begins at home.
But however this may be, there can be no doubt that cunning is in the
long run mightier than luck as regards the acquisition of property, and
what applies to property applies to organism also. Property, as I have
lately seen was said by Rosmini, is a kind of extension of the
personality into the outside world. He might have said as truly that it
is a kind of penetration of the outside world within the limits of the
personality, or that it is at any rate a prophesying of, and essay after,
the more living phase of matter in the direction of which it is tending.
If approached from the dynamical or living side of the underlying
substratum, it is the beginning of the comparatively stable equilibrium
which we call brute matter; if from the statical side, that is to say,
from that of brute matter, it is the beginning of that dynamical state
which we associate with life; it is the last of ego and first of non ego,
or _vice versâ_, as the case may be; it is the ground whereon the two
meet and are neither wholly one nor wholly the other, but a whirling mass
of contradictions such as attends all fusion.
What property is to a man’s mind or soul that his body is also, only more
so. The body is property carried to the bitter end, or property is the
body carried to the bitter end, whichever the reader chooses; the
expression “organic wealth” is not figurative; none other is so apt and
accurate; so universally, indeed, is this recognised that the fact has
found expression in our liturgy, which bids us pray for all those who are
any wise afflicted “in mind, body, or estate;” no inference, therefore,
can be more simple and legitimate than the one in accordance with which
the laws that govern the development of wealth generally are supposed
also to govern the particular form of health and wealth which comes most
closely home to us—I mean that of our bodily implements or organs. What
is the stomach but a living sack, or purse of untanned leather, wherein
we keep our means of subsistence? Food is money made easy; it is petty
cash in its handiest and most reduced form; it is our way of assimilating
our possessions and making them indeed our own. What is the purse but a
kind of abridged extra corporeal stomach wherein we keep the money which
we convert by purchase into food, as we presently convert the food by
digestion into flesh and blood? And what living form is there which is
without a purse or stomach, even though it have to job it by the meal as
the amœba does, and exchange it for some other article as soon as it has
done eating? How marvellously does the analogy hold between the purse
and the stomach alike as regards form and function; and I may say in
passing that, as usual, the organ which is the more remote from
protoplasm is at once more special, more an object of our consciousness,
and less an object of its own.
Talk of ego and non ego meeting, and of the hopelessness of avoiding
contradiction in terms—talk of this, and look, in passing, at the amœba.
It is itself _quâ_ maker of the stomach and being fed; it is not itself
_quâ_ stomach and _quâ_ its using itself as a mere tool or implement to
feed itself with. It is active and passive, object and subject, _ego_
and _non ego_—every kind of Irish bull, in fact, which a sound logician
abhors—and it is only because it has persevered, as I said in “Life and
Habit,” in thus defying logic and arguing most virtuously in a most
vicious circle, that it has come in the persons of some of its
descendants to reason with sufficient soundness. And what the amœba is
man is also; man is only a great many amœbas, most of them dreadfully
narrow-minded, going up and down the country with their goods and
chattels like gipsies in a caravan; he is only a great many amœbas that
have had much time and money spent on their education, and received large
bequests of organised intelligence from those that have gone before them.
The most incorporate tool—we will say an eye, or a tooth, or the closed
fist when used to strike—has still something of the _non ego_ about it in
so far as it is used; those organs, again, that are the most completely
separate from the body, as the locomotive engine, must still from time to
time kiss the soil of the human body, and be handled and thus crossed
with man again if they would remain in working order. They cannot be cut
adrift from the most living form of matter (I mean most living from our
point of view), and remain absolutely without connection with it for any
length of time, any more than a seal can live without coming up sometimes
to breathe; and in so far as they become linked on to living beings they
live. Everything is living which is in close communion with, and
interpermeated by, that something which we call mind or thought.
Giordano Bruno saw this long ago when he made an interlocutor in one of
his dialogues say that a man’s hat and cloak are alive when he is wearing
them. “Thy boots and spurs live,” he exclaims, “when thy feet carry
them; thy hat lives when thy head is within it; and so the stable lives
when it contains the horse or mule, or even yourself;” nor is it easy to
see how this is to be refuted except at a cost which no one in his senses
will offer.
It may be said that the life of clothes in wear and implements in use is
no true life, inasmuch as it differs from flesh and blood life in too
many and important respects; that we have made up our minds about not
letting life outside the body too decisively to allow the question to be
reopened; that if this be tolerated we shall have societies for the
prevention of cruelty to chairs and tables, or cutting clothes amiss, or
wearing them to tatters, or whatever other absurdity may occur to idle
and unkind people; the whole discussion, therefore, should be ordered out
of court at once.
I admit that this is much the most sensible position to take, but it can
only be taken by those who turn the deafest of deaf ears to the teachings
of science, and tolerate no going even for a moment below the surface of
things. People who take this line must know how to put their foot down
firmly in the matter of closing a discussion. Some one may perhaps
innocently say that some parts of the body are more living and vital than
others, and those who stick to common sense may allow this, but if they
do they must close the discussion on the spot; if they listen to another
syllable they are lost; if they let the innocent interlocutor say so much
as that a piece of well-nourished healthy brain is more living than the
end of a finger-nail that wants cutting, or than the calcareous parts of
a bone, the solvent will have been applied which will soon make an end of
common sense ways of looking at the matter. Once even admit the use of
the participle “dying,” which involves degrees of death, and hence an
entry of death in part into a living body, and common sense must either
close the discussion at once, or ere long surrender at discretion.
Common sense can only carry weight in respect of matters with which every
one is familiar, as forming part of the daily and hourly conduct of
affairs; if we would keep our comfortable hard and fast lines, our rough
and ready unspecialised ways of dealing with difficult questions, our
impatience of what St. Paul calls “doubtful disputations,” we must refuse
to quit the ground on which the judgments of mankind have been so long
and often given that they are not likely to be questioned. Common sense
is not yet formulated in manners of science or philosophy, for only few
consider them; few decisions, therefore, have been arrived at which all
hold final. Science is, like love, “too young to know what conscience,”
or common sense, is. As soon as the world began to busy itself with
evolution it said good-bye to common sense, and must get on with uncommon
sense as best it can. The first lesson that uncommon sense will teach it
is that contradiction in terms is the foundation of all sound
reasoning—and, as an obvious consequence, compromise, the foundation of
all sound practice. This, it follows easily, involves the corollary that
as faith, to be of any value, must be based on reason, so reason, to be
of any value, must be based on faith, and that neither can stand alone or
dispense with the other, any more than culture or vulgarity can stand
unalloyed with one another without much danger of mischance.
It may not perhaps be immediately apparent why the admission that a piece
of healthy living brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail, is
so dangerous to common sense ways of looking at life and death; I had
better, therefore, be more explicit. By this admission degrees of
livingness are admitted within the body; this involves approaches to
non-livingness. On this the question arises, “Which are the most living
parts?” The answer to this was given a few years ago with a flourish of
trumpets, and our biologists shouted with one voice, “Great is
protoplasm. There is no life but protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet.”
Read Huxley’s “Physical Basis of Mind.” Read Professor Mivart’s article,
“What are Living Beings?” in the _Contemporary Review_, July, 1879. Read
Dr. Andrew Wilson’s article in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, October, 1879.
Remember Professor Allman’s address to the British Association, 1879;
ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved scientific attitude
as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic parts of the body, and
he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion arrived at by all of them
is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone truly living, and that the
non-protoplasmic are non-living.
It may suffice if I confine myself to Professor Allman’s address to the
British Association in 1879, as a representative utterance. Professor
Allman said:—
“Protoplasm lies at the base of every vital phenomenon. It is, as Huxley
has well expressed it, ‘the physical basis of life;’ wherever there is
life from its lowest to its highest manifestation there is protoplasm;
wherever there is protoplasm there is life.” {122a}
To say wherever there is life there is protoplasm, is to say that there
can be no life without protoplasm, and this is saying that where there is
no protoplasm there is no life. But large parts of the body are
non-protoplasmic; a bone is, indeed, permeated by protoplasm, but it is
not protoplasm; it follows, therefore, that according to Professor Allman
bone is not in any proper sense of words a living substance. From this
it should follow, and doubtless does follow in Professor Allman’s mind,
that large tracts of the human body, if not the greater part by weight
(as bones, skin, muscular tissues, &c.), are no more alive than a coat or
pair of boots in wear is alive, except in so far as the bones, &c., are
more closely and nakedly permeated by protoplasm than the coat or boots,
and are thus brought into closer, directer, and more permanent
communication with that which, if not life itself, still has more of the
ear of life, and comes nearer to its royal person than anything else
does. Indeed that this is Professor Allman’s opinion appears from the
passage on page 26 of the report, in which he says that in “protoplasm we
find the only form of matter in which life can manifest itself.”
According to this view the skin and other tissues are supposed to be made
from dead protoplasm which living protoplasm turns to account as the
British Museum authorities are believed to stuff their new specimens with
the skins of old ones; the matter used by the living protoplasm for this
purpose is held to be entirely foreign to protoplasm itself, and no more
capable of acting in concert with it than bricks can understand and act
in concert with the bricklayer. As the bricklayer is held to be living
and the bricks non-living, so the bones and skin which protoplasm is
supposed to construct are held non-living and the protoplasm alone
living. Protoplasm, it is said, goes about masked behind the clothes or
habits which it has fashioned. It has habited itself as animals and
plants, and we have mistaken the garment for the wearer—as our dogs and
cats doubtless think with Giordano Bruno that our boots live when we are
wearing them, and that we keep spare paws in our bedrooms which lie by
the wall and go to sleep when we have not got them on.
If, in answer to the assertion that the osseous parts of bone are
non-living, it is said that they must be living, for they heal if broken,
which no dead matter can do, it is answered that the broken pieces of
bone do not grow together; they are mended by the protoplasm which
permeates the Haversian canals; the bones themselves are no more living
merely because they are tenanted by something which really does live,
than a house lives because men and women inhabit it; and if a bone is
repaired, it no more repairs itself than a house can be said to have
repaired itself because its owner has sent for the bricklayer and seen
that what was wanted was done.
We do not know, it is said, by what means the structureless viscid
substance which we call protoplasm can build for itself a solid bone; we
do not understand how an amœba makes its test; no one understands how
anything is done unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably
does not know how he has done it. Set a man who has never painted, to
watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six, and he will no more understand
how Rembrandt can have done it, than we can understand how the amœba
makes its test, or the protoplasm cements two broken ends of a piece of
bone. _Ces choses se font mais ne s’expliquent pas_. So some denizen of
another planet looking at our earth through a telescope which showed him
much, but still not quite enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb
on end so that he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would think
the trains there a kind of caterpillar which went through the mountain by
a pure effort of the will—that enabled them in some mysterious way to
disregard material obstacles and dispense with material means. We know,
of course, that it is not so, and that exemption from the toil attendant
on material obstacles has been compounded for, in the ordinary way, by
the single payment of a tunnel; and so with the cementing of a bone, our
biologists say that the protoplasm, which is alone living, cements it
much as a man might mend a piece of broken china, but that it works by
methods and processes which elude us, even as the holes of the St.
Gothard tunnel may be supposed to elude a denizen of another world.
The reader will already have seen that the toils are beginning to close
round those who, while professing to be guided by common sense, still
parley with even the most superficial probers beneath the surface; this,
however, will appear more clearly in the following chapter. It will also
appear how far-reaching were the consequences of the denial of design
that was involved in Mr. Darwin’s theory that luck is the main element in
survival, and how largely this theory is responsible for the fatuous
developments in connection alike with protoplasm and automatism which a
few years ago seemed about to carry everything before them.