DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--Excuse me if I don't reply more fully to your letter,
because my eyes are a little tired. I can only say I wish I were sick,
somewhere near you: then perhaps you would come and see me, and talk
more of these queer things. You would not find the time heavy. For the
subject is a romance.
In order to convey by a diagram any picture-idea of what heredity means,
one should have to draw a series of inverted cone-figures representing
a reticulation of millions of cross-lines. This could only be done well
under a microscope, and on a very limited scale. Because the thing goes
by arithmetical progression. The individual is the product of 2, the 2
of 4, the 4 of 8, the 8 of 16--well, you know the tale of the smith who
offered to shoe a horse with 32 nails, to receive 1 cent on the first
nail, and to double the sum upon every nail! The enormity of inheritance
is at once apparent. But to produce another individual, another life is
needed, which represents the superimposition in the child of another
infinitely complex inheritance. The fact is only worth stating as
suggesting that under normal circumstances the child would necessarily
represent an increment. He should receive not only the experience of his
father's race, but all that of his mother's race superimposed upon it.
The fact that he does very nearly do so is evidenced by the reappearance
in his descendants of parental traits always invisible in himself. Mere
multiplication ought therefore to account for a larger mental growth and
progress than exists or could ever exist.
Why doesn't it? Simply because in the brain the same selective
process goes on as in the vegetable world. As out of 10,000,000
seeds scarcely one survives: so out of a million mental impressions
scarcely one survives. Indeed, not so many. For the inheritance
is of repetitions,--rarely of single impressions. It is only when
an impression has been repeated times innumerable that it becomes
transmissible,--that it affects the cerebral structure so as to
become organic memory. The inheritance is of a very compound nature,
therefore,--requiring either enormous time for development, or enormous
experience. There is reason to believe, however, that in the case of
very highly organized brains,--such as those of the modern musician,
linguist, or mathematician,--the multiple experiences of even one
lifetime may produce structural modifications capable of transmission.
This is not the case except in men as much larger than common men as
Fuji is larger than an ant-hill. And the reason is that such a brain can
daily receive billions of impressions that common minds cannot receive
in a whole lifetime. The thinking is of the constructive character,--the
most highly complex form possible; and the extreme sensitiveness of the
structures renders habitual conceptions which represent combinations of
conscious states never entered into before. Measured by mere difference
of force, the brain of the mathematician is to the brain of the ordinary
man as the most powerful dynamo to the muscles of an ant.
Happily for mankind, not only is inheritance something more than
repetition, it is also something less than repetition. Between these two
extremes of plus and minus the physiology of mental activities in any
lifetime represents a fierce struggle for the survival of the best or
worst. Here is where the environment comes in,--determining which of a
million tendencies shall have freest play or least play. According to
circumstances the impulses of the dead are used or neglected. The more
used, the more powerful their active potentialities, and the more apt
to increase by transmission. But their vitality is racial--measurable
only by millions of years. They may lie dormant for twenty centuries,
and be suddenly called into being again--sinister and monstrous-seeming,
because no longer in harmony with the age. (Here is the point of the
selective process.)
Here comes in the consideration of a very terrible possibility. Suppose
we use integers instead of quintillions or centillions, and say that
an individual represents by inheritance a total of 10--5 of impulses
favourable to social life, 5 of the reverse. (Such a balance would
really occur in many cases.) The child inherits, under favourable
conditions, the father's balance plus the maternal balance of 9,--four
of the number being favourable. We have then a total which becomes
odd, and the single odd number gives preponderance to an accumulation
of ancestral impulse incalculable for evil. It would be like a pair
of scales, each holding a mass as large as Fuji. If the balance were
absolutely perfect, the weight of one hair would be enough to move
a mass of millions of tons. Here is your antique Nemesis awfully
magnified. Let the individual descend below a certain level, and
countless dead suddenly seize and destroy him,--like the Furies.
In all cases, however, except those of the very highest forms of
mental activity, the psychological life consists of repetitions,--not
of originalities. And environment, chance, etc., simply influence the
extent and volume of the repetitions. In the case of constructive
imagination, on the other hand, there are totally new combinations made
independently of environment or circumstances: there is almost creation,
and in certain cases absolute faculty of prediction. Instance the case
of the mathematician who, without having ever seen the Iceland Spar,
but knowing its qualities, said: "Cut it at such an angle, and you will
see a coloured circle." They cut it, and the circle was seen for the
first time by human eyes.
Properly, however, there is no such thing as an individual, but only
a combination,--one balance of an infinite sum. The charm of a very
superior man or woman is the ghostliest of all conceivable experiences.
For the man or woman in question can in a single evening become fifty, a
hundred, two hundred different people--not in fancy, but in actual fact.
Here the character of the ancestral experience has been so high and rare
that a different part of the race's mental life is instantly resurrected
at will to welcome and charm, or to master and repel, the various sorts
of character encountered, haphazard, in the salon of the aristocratic
milieu.
It would be natural to ask: If the emotions and passions are
inheritances, why are not these higher faculties inherited en masse
as well? Because feeling is infinitely older than thinking, developed
millions of years before thinking. Also because the reasoning powers
have been grown out of the feelings--as trees from soil. Those forms of
consciousness most connected with the animal life of the race are, of
course, the first to develop, and the first to become transmissible.
But the time may come when higher faculties will be also similarly
transmissible.
Taking the highest possible form of human thought,--a mathematical
concept,--and analyzing it, we find a whole volume is required for the
mere statement of the analysis. The flash of the thought took less than
a second; to write all the thinking it involved requires years. We take
it to pieces by bundles of concepts and bundles of experiences,--which
are changes in relations of compound states of consciousness. The
relations of those states of consciousness are resolvable into simpler
ones, and those into simpler, and at last we come down to mere
perceptions, and the perceptions are separated into ideas, and the ideas
into compound sensations, and the compound sensations into sensations
simple as those of the amœba, or the humblest protozoa.
Thus we can also trace up the history of any thought from the state
of mere animalcular sensation. The highest thought is resolvable into
infinite compounds of such sensations. Beyond that we cannot go. The
Universe may be sentient, but we don't know it. All we know is sensation
and combinations of sensations in the brain. The highest spiritual
sentiment is based upon the lowest animal sensations. But what is
sensation? No one can tell. On this subject very awful discoveries are
perhaps awaiting us.
Now heredity is the most wonderful thing of all things, because it is
utterly incomprehensible.
A mathematical calculation has established beyond all question the fact
that the number of ultimate units in a sperm-cell and germ-cell combined
is totally insufficient to account for the number of impressions and
tendencies transmitted--supposing a change in the ultimate units
possible. Therefore in order to have a working theory, we are obliged
to use the term polarity,--which only means physical tendency to
relationships. But the mystery of the transmission of the impulse
remains just as far away as ever.
Of course I can't agree with you as to the statement of culture from
outside, except in the poetical sense. Scientifically the culture
movement is internal,--the responses of innumerable dead to exterior
influence,--the weirdest resurrections of buried faculties.
As for evolution being caused by outer influences, I think the idea
leads to misconception of an intelligent power working and watching
things. We have no need of such a theory. Pain is the chief mental
factor. The elements of life are remarkable in being chemically
unstable,--astonishingly unstable, and the mere working of the
universal forces on such elements quite sufficiently accounts for all
changes. But the fact that there is no line between life and not-life,
no line between the animal and vegetable world, no line between the
visible and invisible, no assurance that matter has any existence
in itself--that is a very awful truth. It is otherwise incorrect to
think of evolution being caused by outer influences, because the inner
forces are the really direct ones,--answering to the outer. Moreover,
the thing evolved, and the power evolving, and the forces internal and
external,--the visible and the non-visible,--are (so far as human reason
permits us to judge) all one and the same. We know only phenomena; and
modern thought recognizes more and more the Indian thought that the
Supreme Brahma is only playing a chess game with himself. Absolutely
we know only forces--pure ghostliness. The individual substance is
but a force combination,--its changes are force combinations,--the
powers outside are but force combinations,--the universe is a force
combination--and we can know nothing more than vibrations.
Ever,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P. S. I forgot to notice your statement--"not through the physical fact
of nerve-tissue," etc.
All thinking--all, without exception--is alteration of nerve-substance;
either temporary motion or motion making by countless repetition
alterations that are permanent. Physiologically, "thought" is a very
complex vibration in nerve-tissue. There is no other meaning whatever
in science for "thought." For "thought" is a perception of relations
in preëxisting states of consciousness, and those are bundles of
sensations. What "sensation" is, no man knows. That is the dark spot in
the retina of consciousness. But there is no proof that sensation exists
apart from cell-substance.
To speak of an "ideal process" outside of vibration in nervous substance
is therefore like saying that 5 times 5 = 918. It is a total denial
of all science on the subject. An idea is a bundle of sensations, and
a sensation is coincident with a movement in cerebral cells. Without
the movement there is no sensation,--not at least in the brain. We do
not know the ultimate of sensation, but thoughts and ideas only mean
complex combinations of sensations impossible outside of nerve-substance
so far as we know.
Of course if you mean by culture from outside the transmission of
civilization from one race to another,--then there has been enormous
alteration of cerebral structure. Such alteration is even now going on
in Japan, and causes yearly hundreds of deaths.
The brain of the civilized man is 30 p.c. heavier than that of the
savage; and the brain of the 19th century much larger than that of the
16th (see Broca). A striking fact of evolution is brain-growth. The
early mammals were remarkable for the smallness of their brains. Man's
nervous structure is, of course, the most powerful of all. Cut out of
the body, it is found to weigh, as a total, double that of a horse. For
mind signifies motion, force,--the more powerful the mind the greater
the forces evolved. Perhaps the nervous system of a whale might weigh
more than that of a man as a total mass, but not nearly so much in
parts corresponding with mental differences. Nevertheless the changes
effected by progress in the brain are chiefly visible in the direction
of increasing complexity rather than in bulk. The study of brain-casts
promises to develop some interesting facts.