Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Boyle, and their successors, until
the chemical law of multiple proportions enabled Dalton to confer upon
it an entirely new significance. In our day there are secessions from
the theory, but it still stands firm. Loschmidt, Stoney, and Sir
William Thomson have sought to determine the sizes of the atoms, or
rather to fix the limits between which their sizes lie; while the
discourses of Williamson and Maxwell delivered in Bradford in 1873
illustrate the present hold of the doctrine upon the foremost
scientific minds. In fact, it may be doubted whether, wanting this
fundamental conception, a theory of the material universe is capable
of scientific statement.
5.
Ninety years subsequent to Gassendi the doctrine of bodily
instruments, as it may be called, assumed immense importance in the
hands of Bishop Butler, who, in his famous 'Analogy of Religion,'
developed, from his own point of view, and with consummate sagacity, a
similar idea. The Bishop still influences many superior minds; and it
will repay us to dwell for a moment on his views. He draws the
sharpest distinction between our real selves and our bodily
instruments. He does not, as far as I remember, use the word soul,
possibly because the term was so hackneyed in his day, as it had been
for many generations previously. But he speaks of 'living powers,'
'perceiving or percipient powers,' 'moving agents,' 'ourselves,' in
the same sense as we should employ the term soul. He dwells upon the
fact that limbs may be removed, and mortal diseases assail the body,
the mind, almost up to the moment of death, remaining clear. He
refers to sleep and to swoon, where the 'living powers' are suspended
but not destroyed. He considers it quite as easy to conceive of
existence out of our bodies as in them; that we may animate a
succession of bodies, the dissolution of all of them having no more
tendency to dissolve our real selves, or 'deprive us of living
faculties--the faculties of perception and action--than the
dissolution of any foreign matter which we are capable of receiving
impressions from, or making use of for the common occasions of life.'
This is the key of the Bishop's position: 'our organised bodies are
no more a part of ourselves than any other matter around us.' In proof
of this he calls attention to the use of glasses, which 'prepare
objects' for the 'percipient power' exactly as the eye does. The eye
itself is no more percipient than the glass; is quite as much the
instrument of the true self, and also as foreign to the true self, as
the glass is. 'And if we see with our eyes only in the same manner as
we do with glasses, the like may justly be concluded from analogy of
all our senses.'
Lucretius, as you are aware, reached a precisely opposite conclusion:
and it certainly would be interesting, if not profitable, to us all,
to hear what he would or could urge in opposition to the reasoning of
the Bishop. As a brief discussion of the point will enable us to see
the bearings of an important question, I will here permit a disciple
of Lucretius to try the strength of the Bishop's position, and then
allow the Bishop to retaliate, with the view of rolling back, if he
can, the difficulty upon Lucretius.
The argument might proceed in this fashion:
'Subjected to the test of mental presentation (Vorstellung), your
views, most honoured prelate, would offer to many minds a great, if
not an insuperable, difficulty. You speak of "living powers,"
"percipient or perceiving powers," and "ourselves;" but can you form a
mental picture of any of these, apart from the organism through which
it is supposed to act? Test yourself honestly, and see whether you
possess any faculty that would enable you to form such a conception.
The true self has a local habitation in each of us; thus localised,
must it not possess a form? If so, what form? Have you ever for a
moment realised it? When a leg is amputated the body is divided into
two parts; is the true self in both of them or in one? Thomas Aquinas
might say in both; but not you, for you appeal to the consciousness
associated with one of the two parts, to prove that the other is
foreign matter. Is consciousness, then, a necessary element of the
true self? If so, what do you say to the case of the whole body being
deprived of consciousness? If not, then on what grounds do you deny
any portion of the true self to the severed limb? It seems very
singular that from the beginning to the end of your admirable book
(and no one admires its sober strength more than I do), you never once
mention the brain or nervous system. You begin at one end of the
body, and show that its parts may be removed without prejudice to the
perceiving power. What if you begin at the other end, and remove,
instead of the leg, the brain? The body, as before, is divided into
two parts; but both are now in the same predicament, and neither can
be appealed to to prove that the other is foreign matter. Or, instead
of going so far as to remove the brain itself, let a certain portion
of its bony covering be removed, and let a rhythmic series of
pressures and relaxations of pressure be applied to the soft
substance. At every pressure "the faculties of perception and of
action" vanish; at every relaxation of pressure they are restored.
Where, during the intervals of pressure, is the perceiving power? I
once had the discharge of a large Leyden battery passed unexpectedly
through me: I felt nothing, but was simply blotted out of conscious
existence for a sensible interval. Where was my true self during that
interval? Men who have recovered from lightning-stroke have been much
longer in the same state; and indeed in cases of ordinary concussion
of the brain, days may elapse during which no experience is registered
in consciousness. Where is the man himself during the period of
insensibility? You may say that I beg the question when I assume the
man to have been unconscious, that he was really conscious all the
time, and has simply forgotten what had occurred to him. In reply to
this, I can only say that no one need shrink from the worst tortures
that superstition ever invented, if only so felt and so remembered. I
do not think your theory of instruments goes at all to the bottom of
the matter. A telegraph-operator has his instruments, by means of
which he converses with the world; our bodies possess a nervous
system, which plays a similar part between the perceiving power and
external things. Cut the wires of the operator, break his battery,
demagnetise his needle; by this means you certainly sever his
connection with the world; but, inasmuch as these are real
instruments, their destruction does not touch the man who uses them.
The operator survives, and he knows that he survives. What is there,
I would ask, in the human system that answers to this conscious
survival of the operator when the battery of the brain is so disturbed
as to produce insensibility, or when it is destroyed altogether?
'Another consideration, which you may regard as slight, presses upon
me with some force. The brain may change from health to disease, and
through such a change the most exemplary man may be converted into a
debauchee or a murderer. My very noble and approved good master had,
as you know, threatenings of lewdness introduced into his brain by his
jealous wife's philter; and sooner than permit himself to run even the
risk of yielding to these base promptings he slew himself. How could
the hand of Lucretius have been thus turned against himself if the
real Lucretius remained as before? Can the brain or can it not act in
this distempered way without the intervention of the immortal reason?
If it can, then it is a prime mover which requires only healthy
regulation to render it reasonably self-acting, and there is no
apparent need of your immortal reason at all. If it cannot, then the
immortal reason, by its mischievous activity in operating upon a
broken instrument, must have the credit of committing every imaginable
extravagance and crime.
I think, if you will allow me to say so, that the gravest consequences
are likely to flow from your estimate of the body. To regard the
brain as you would a staff or an eyeglass--to shut your eyes to all
its mystery, to the perfect correlation of its condition and our
consciousness, to the fact that a slight excess or defect of blood in
it produces the very swoon to which you refer, and that in relation to
it our meat, and drink, and air, and exercise, have a perfectly
transcendental value and significance--to forget all this does, I
think, open a way to innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may
possibly, in some cases, initiate and foster that very disease, and
consequent mental ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious
organ would have avoided.'
I can imagine the Bishop thoughtful after hearing this argument. He
was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the consideration of a
point of this kind. After due reflection, and having strengthened
himself by that honest contemplation of the facts which was habitual
with him, and which includes the desire to give even adverse
reasonings their due weight, I can suppose the Bishop to proceed thus:
'You will remember that in the "Analogy of Religion," of which you
have so kindly spoken, I did not profess to prove anything absolutely,
and that I over and over again acknowledged and insisted on the
smallness of our knowledge, or rather the depth of our ignorance, as
regards the whole system of the universe. My object was to show my
deistical friends, who set forth so eloquently the beauty and
beneficence of Nature and the Ruler thereof, while they had nothing
but scorn for the so-called absurdities of the Christian scheme, that
they were in no better condition than we were, and that, for every
difficulty found upon our side, quite as great a difficulty was to be
found upon theirs. I will now, with your permission, adopt a similar
line of argument. You are a Lucretian, and from the combination and
separation of insensate atoms deduce all terrestrial things, including
organic forms and their phenomena. Let me tell you in the first
instance how far I am prepared to go with you. I admit that you can
build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force; that the
diamond, amethyst, and snow-star are truly wonderful structures which
are thus produced. I will go farther and acknowledge that even a tree
or flower might in this way be organised. Nay, if you can show me an
animal without sensation, I will concede to you that it also might be
put together by the suitable play of molecular force.
'Thus far our way is clear, but now comes my difficulty. Your atoms
are individually without sensation, much more are they without
intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this
problem. Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your
dead carbon atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus
atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the
brain is formed. Imagine them separate and sensationless; observe
them running together and forming all imaginable combinations. This,
as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you
see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical act,
and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and
emotion are to rise? Are you likely to extract Homer out of the
rattling of dice, or the Differential Calculus out of the clash of
billiard-balls? I am not all bereft of this Vorstellungs-Kraft of
which you speak, nor am I, like so many of my brethren, a mere vacuum
as regards scientific knowledge. I can follow a particle of musk
until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can follow the waves of sound
until their tremors reach the water of the labyrinth, and set the
otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion; I can also visualise the waves
of aether as they cross the eye and hit the retina. Nay more, I am
able to pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted at the
periphery, and to see in idea the very molecules of the brain thrown
into tremors. My insight is not baffled by these physical processes.
What baffles and bewilders me is the notion that from those physical
tremors things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, thought,
and emotion can be derived. You may say, or think, that this issue of
consciousness from the clash of atoms is not more incongruous than the
flash of light from the union of oxygen and hydrogen. But I beg to
say that it is. For such incongruity as the flash possesses is that
which I now force upon your attention. The 'flash' is an affair of
consciousness, the objective counterpart of which is a vibration. It
is a flash only by your interpretation. You are the cause of the
apparent incongruity; and you are the thing that puzzles me. I need
not remind you that the great Leibnitz felt the difficulty which I
feel; and that to get rid of this monstrous deduction of life from
death he displaced your atoms by his monads, which were more or less
perfect mirrors of the universe, and out of the summation and
integration of which he supposed all the phenomena of life--sentient,
intellectual, and emotional--to arise.
'Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to admit, is quite as
great as mine. You cannot satisfy the human understanding in its
demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the
phenomena of consciousness. This is a rock on which Materialism must
inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of
life. What is the moral, my Lucretian? You and I are not likely to
indulge in ill-temper in the discussion of these great topics, where
we see so much room for honest differences of opinion. But there are
people of less wit or more bigotry (I say it with humility), on both
sides, who are ever ready to mingle anger and vituperation with such
discussions. There are, for example, writers of note and influence at
the present day, who are not ashamed publicly to assume the "deep
personal sin" of a great logician to be the cause of his unbelief in a
theologic dogma. [Footnote: This is the aspect under which the late
Editor of the 'Dublin Review' presented to his readers the memory of
John Stuart Mill. I can only say, that I would as soon take my chance
in the other world, in the company of the 'unbeliever,' as in that of
his Jesuit detractor. In Dr. Ward we have an example of a wholesome
and vigorous nature, soured and perverted by a poisonous creed.] 'And
there are others who hold that we, who cherish our noble Bible,
wrought as it has been into the constitution of our forefathers, and
by inheritance into us, must necessarily be hypocritical and
insincere. Let us disavow and discountenance such people, cherishing
the unswerving faith that what is good and true in both our arguments
will be preserved for the benefit of humanity, while all that is bad
or false will disappear.'
I hold the Bishop's reasoning to be unanswerable, and his liberality
to be worthy of imitation.
It is worth remarking that in one respect the Bishop was a product of
his age. Long previous to his day the nature of the soul had been so
favourite and general a topic of discussion, that, when the students
of the Italian Universities wished to know the leanings of a new
Professor, they at once requested him to lecture upon the soul. About
the time of Bishop Butler the question was not only agitated but
extended. It was seen by the clear-witted men who entered this arena,
that many of their best arguments applied equally to brutes and men.
The Bishop's arguments were of this character. He saw it, admitted
it, took the consequence, and boldly embraced the whole animal world
in his scheme of immortality.
6.
Bishop Butler accepted with unwavering trust the chronology of the Old
Testament, describing it as confirmed by the natural and civil history
of the world, collected from common historians, from the state of the
earth, and from the late inventions of arts and sciences.' These words
mark progress; and they must seem somewhat hoary to the Bishop's
successors of today. It is hardly necessary to inform you that since
his time the domain of the naturalist has been immensely extended--the
whole science of geology, with its astounding revelations regarding
the life of the ancient earth, having been created. The rigidity of
old conceptions has been relaxed, the public mind being rendered
gradually tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, nor for
sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for aeons embracing
untold millions of years, this earth has been the theatre of life and
death. The riddle of the rocks has been read by the geologist and
palaeontologist, from sub-Cambrian depths to the deposits thickening
over the sea-bottoms of today. And upon the leaves of that stone book
are, as you know, stamped the characters, plainer and surer than those
formed by the ink of history, which carry the mind back into abysses
of past time, compared with which the periods which satisfied Bishop
Butler cease to have a visual angle.
The lode of discovery once struck, those petrified forms in which life
was at one time active, increased to multitudes and demanded
classification. They were grouped in genera, species, and varieties,
according to the degree of similarity subsisting between them. Thus
confusion was avoided, each object being found in the pigeon-hole
appropriated to it and to its fellows of similar morphological or
physiological character. The general fact soon became evident that
none but the simplest forms of life lie lowest down; that, as we climb
higher among the superimposed strata, more perfect forms appear. The
change, however, from form to form was not continuous, but by
steps--some small, some great. 'A section,' says Mr. Huxley, 'a
hundred feet thick will exhibit at different heights a dozen species
of Ammonite, none of which passes beyond the particular zone of
limestone, or clay, into the zone below it, or into that above it.' In
the presence of such facts it was not possible to avoid the question:
Have these forms, showing, though in broken stages, and with many
irregularities, this unmistakable general advance, being subjected to
no continuous law of growth or variation? Had our education been
purely scientific, or had it been sufficiently detached from
influences which, however ennobling in another domain, have always
proved hindrances and delusions when introduced as factors into the
domain of physics, the scientific mind never could have swerved from
the search for a law of growth, or allowed itself to accept the
anthropomorphism which regarded each successive stratum as a kind of
mechanic's bench for the manufacture of new species out of all
relation to the old.
Biassed, however, by their previous education, the great majority of
naturalists invoked a special creative act to account for the
appearance of each new group of organisms. Doubtless numbers of them
were clearheaded enough to see that this was no explanation at
all--that, in point of fact, it was an attempt, by the introduction of
a greater difficulty, to account for a less. But, having nothing to
offer in the way of explanation, they for the most part held their
peace. Still the thoughts of reflecting men naturally and necessarily
simmered round the question. De Maillet, a contemporary of Newton,
has been brought into notice by Professor Huxley as one who 'had a
notion of the modifiability of living forms.' The late Sir Benjamin
Brodie, a man of highly philosophic mind, often drew my attention to
the fact that, as early as 1794, Charles Darwin's grandfather was
the pioneer of Charles Darwin. [Footnote: Zoonomia,' vol. i.
pp.500-510.] In 1801, and in subsequent years, the celebrated Lamarck,
who, through the vigorous exposition of his views by the author of the
'Vestiges of Creation,' rendered the public mind perfectly familiar
with the idea of evolution, endeavoured to show the development of
species out of changes of habit and external condition. In 1813 Dr.
Wells, the founder of our present theory of Dew, read before the Royal
Society a paper in which, to use the words of Mr. Darwin, 'he
distinctly recognises the principle of natural selection; and this is
the first recognition that has been indicated.' The thoroughness and
skill with which Wells pursued his work, and the obvious independence
of his character, rendered him long ago a favourite with me; and it
gave me the liveliest pleasure to alight upon this additional
testimony to his penetration. Professor Grant, Mr. Patrick Matthew,
von Buch, the author of the 'Vestiges,' D'Halloy, and others, by the
enunciation of opinions more or less clear and correct, showed that
the question had been fermenting long prior to the year 1858, when Mr.
Darwin and Mr. Wallace simultaneously, but independently, placed their
closely concurrent views before the Linnean Society. [Footnote: In
1855 Mr. Herbert Spencer ('Principles of Psychology,' 2nd edit.
vol. i. p. 465) expressed 'the belief that life under all its forms has
arisen by an unbroken evolution, and through the instrumentality of
what are called natural causes.' This was my belief also at that
time.]
These papers were followed in 1859 by the publication of the first
edition of the 'Origin of Species.' All great things come slowly to
the birth. Copernicus, as I informed you, pondered his great work for
thirty-three years. Newton for nearly twenty years kept the idea of
Gravitation before his mind; for twenty years also he dwelt upon his
discovery of Fluxions, and doubtless would have continued to make it
the object of his private thought, had he not found Leibnitz upon his
track. Darwin for two-and-twenty years pondered the problem of the
origin of species, and doubtless he would have continued to do so had
he not found Wallace upon his track. [Footnote: The behaviour of Mr.
Wallace in relation to this subject has been dignified in the highest
degree.] A concentrated, but full and powerful, epitome of his
labours was the consequence. The book was by no means an easy one;
and probably not one in every score of those who then attacked it, had
read its pages through, or were competent to grasp their significance
if they had. I do not say this merely to discredit them: for there
were in those days some really eminent scientific men, entirely raised
above the heat of popular prejudice, and willing to accept any
conclusion that science had to offer, provided it was duly backed by
fact and argument, who entirely mistook Mr. Darwin's views. In fact,
the work needed an expounder, and it found one in Mr. Huxley. I know
nothing more admirable in the way of scientific exposition than those
early articles of his on the origin of species. He swept the curve of
discussion through the really significant points of the subject,
enriched his exposition with profound original remarks and
reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an argument
which a less compact mind would have spread over pages. But there is
one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it,
however luminous, can convey; and that is the impression of the vast
amount of labour, both of observation and of thought, implied in its
production. Let us glance at its principles.