IMPOTENCE OF PALEY'S CONCLUSION. THE TELEOLOGY OF THE EVOLUTIONIST.
(FROM CHAPTER III. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)
If we conceive of ourselves as looking simultaneously upon a real foot,
and upon an admirably constructed artificial one, placed by the side of
it, the idea of design, and design by an intelligent living being with a
body and soul (without which, the use of the word design is delusive),
will present itself strongly to our minds in connection both with the
true foot and with the model; but we find another idea asserting itself
with even greater strength, namely, that the design of the true foot is
infinitely more intricate, and yet is carried into execution in far more
masterly manner than that of the model. We not only feel that there is a
wider difference between the ability, time, and care which have been
lavished on the real foot and upon the model, than there is between the
skill and the time taken to produce Westminster Abbey, and that bestowed
upon a gingerbread cake stuck with sugar plums so as to represent it, but
also that these two objects must have been manufactured on different
principles. We do not for a moment doubt that the real foot was
designed, but we are so astonished at the dexterity of the designer that
we are at a loss for some time to think who could have designed it, where
he can live, in what manner he studied, for how long, and by what
processes he carried out his design, when matured, into actual practice.
Until recently it was thought that there was no answer to many of these
questions, more especially to those which bear upon the mode of
manufacture. For the last hundred years, however, the importance of a
study has been recognised which does actually reveal to us in no small
degree the processes by which the human foot is manufactured, so that in
our endeavour to lay our hands upon the points of difference between the
kind of design with which the foot itself is designed, and the design of
the model, we turn naturally to the guidance of those who have made this
study their specialty; and a very wide difference does this study,
embryology, at once reveal to us.
Writing of the successive changes through which each embryo is forced to
pass, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes says that "none of these phases have any
adaptation to the future state of the animal, but are in positive
contradiction to it or are simply purposeless; whereas all show stamped
on them the unmistakable characters of _ancestral_ adaptation, and the
progressions of organic evolution. What does the fact imply? There is
not a single known example of a complex organism which is not developed
out of simpler forms. Before it can attain the complex structure which
distinguishes it, there must be an evolution of forms similar to those
which distinguish the structure of organisms lower in the series. On the
hypothesis of a plan which prearranged the organic world, nothing could
be more unworthy of a supreme intelligence than this inability to
construct an organism at once, without making several previous tentative
efforts, undoing to-day what was so carefully done yesterday, and
_repeating for centuries the same tentatives in the same succession_. Do
not let us blink this consideration. There is a traditional phrase much
in vogue among the anthropomorphists, which arose naturally enough from a
tendency to take human methods as an explanation of the Divine--a phrase
which becomes a sort of argument--'The Great Architect.' But if we are
to admit the human point of view, a glance at the facts of embryology
must produce very uncomfortable reflections. For what should we say to
an architect who was unable, or being able was obstinately unwilling, to
erect a palace except by first using his materials in the shape of a hut,
then pulling them down and rebuilding them as a cottage, then adding
story to story and room to room, _not_ with any reference to the ultimate
purposes of the palace, but wholly with reference to the way in which
houses were constructed in ancient times? What should we say to the
architect who could not form a museum out of bricks and mortar, but was
forced to begin as if going to construct a mansion, and after proceeding
some way in this direction, altered his plan into a palace, and that
again into a museum? Yet this is the sort of succession on which
organisms are constructed. The fact has long been familiar; how has it
been reconciled with infinite wisdom? Let the following passage answer
for a thousand:--'The embryo is nothing like the miniature of the adult.
For a long while the body in its entirety and in its details, presents
the strangest of spectacles. Day by day and hour by hour, the aspect of
the scene changes, and this instability is exhibited by the most
essential parts no less than by the accessory parts. One would say that
nature feels her way, and only reaches the goal after many times missing
the path' (on dirait que la nature tatonne et ne conduit son oeuvre a bon
fin, qu'apres s'etre souvent trompee)." {134a}
The above passage does not, I think, affect the evidence for design which
we adduced in the preceding chapter. {134b} However strange the process
of manufacture may appear, when the work comes to be turned out the
design is too manifest to be doubted.
If the reader were to come upon some lawyer's deed which dealt with
matters of such unspeakable intricacy that it baffled his imagination to
conceive how it could ever have been drafted, and if in spite of this he
were to find the intricacy of the provisions to be made, exceeded only by
the ease and simplicity with which the deed providing for them was found
to work in practice; and after this, if he were to discover that the
deed, by whomsoever drawn, had nevertheless been drafted upon principles
which at first seemed very foreign to any according to which he was in
the habit of drafting deeds himself, as for example, that the draftsman
had begun to draft a will as a marriage settlement, and so forth--yet an
observer would not, I take it, do either of two things. He would not in
the face of the result deny the design, making himself judge rather of
the method of procedure than of the achievement. Nor yet after insisting
in the manner of Paley, on the wonderful proofs of intention and on the
exquisite provisions which were to be found in every syllable--thus
leading us up to the highest pitch of expectation--would he present us
with such an impotent conclusion as that the designer, though a living
person and a true designer, was yet immaterial and intangible, a
something, in fact, which proves to be a nothing; an omniscient and
omnipotent vacuum.
Our observer would feel he need not have been at such pains to establish
his design if this was to be the upshot of his reasoning. He would
therefore admit the design, and by consequence the designer, but would
probably ask a little time for reflection before he ventured to say who,
or what, or where the designer was. Then gaining some insight into the
manner in which the deed had been drawn, he would conclude that the
draftsman was a specialist who had had long practice in this particular
kind of work, but who now worked almost as it might be said automatically
and without consciousness, and found it difficult to depart from a
habitual method of procedure.
We turn, then, on Paley, and say to him: "We have admitted your design
and your designer. Where is he? Show him to us. If you cannot show him
to us as flesh and blood, show him as flesh and sap; show him as a living
cell; show him as protoplasm. Lower than this we should not fairly go;
it is not in the bond or _nexus_ of our ideas that something utterly
inanimate and inorganic should scheme, design, contrive, and elaborate
structures which can make mistakes: it may elaborate low unerring things,
like crystals, but it cannot elaborate those which have the power to err.
Nevertheless, we will commit such abuse with our understandings as to
waive this point, and we will ask you to show him to us as air which, if
it cannot be seen yet can be felt, weighed, handled, transferred from
place to place, be judged by its effects, and so forth; or if this may
not be, give us half a grain of hydrogen, diffused through all space and
invested with some of the minor attributes of matter; or if you cannot do
this, give us an imponderable like electricity, or even the higher
mathematics, but give us something or throw off the mask and tell us
fairly out that it is your paid profession to hoodwink us on this matter
if you can, and that you are but doing your best to earn an honest
living."
We may fancy Paley as turning the tables upon us and as saying; "But you
too have admitted a designer--you too then must mean a designer with a
body and soul, who must be somewhere to be found in space, and who must
live in time. Where is this your designer? Can you show him more than I
can? Can you lay your finger on him and demonstrate him so that a child
shall see him and know him, and find what was heretofore an isolated idea
concerning him, combine itself instantaneously with the idea of the
designer, we will say, of the human foot, so that no power on earth shall
henceforth tear those two ideas asunder? Surely if you cannot do this,
you too are trifling with words, and abusing your own mind and that of
your reader. Where, then, is your designer of man? Who made him? And
where, again, is your designer of beasts and birds, of fishes and of
plants?"
Our answer is simple enough; it is that we can and do point to a living
tangible person with flesh, blood, eyes, nose, ears, organs, senses,
dimensions, who did of his own cunning after infinite proof of every kind
of hazard and experiment scheme out and fashion each organ of the human
body. This is the person whom we claim as the designer and artificer of
that body, and he is the one of all others the best fitted for the task
by his antecedents, and his practical knowledge of the requirements of
the case--for he is man himself.
Not man, the individual of any given generation, but man in the entirety
of his existence from the dawn of life onwards to the present moment. In
like manner we say that the designer of all organisms is so incorporate
with the organisms themselves--so lives, moves, and has its being in
those organisms, and is so one with them--they in it, and it in them--that
it is more consistent with reason and the common use of words to see the
designer of each living form in the living form itself, than to look for
its designer in some other place or person.
Thus we have a third alternative presented to us.
Mr. Charles Darwin and his followers deny design, as having any
appreciable share in the formation of organism at all.
Paley and the theologians insist on design, but upon a designer outside
the universe and the organism.
The third opinion is that suggested in the first instance and carried out
to a very high degree of development by Buffon. It was improved, and
indeed, made almost perfect by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, but too much neglected
by him after he had put it forward. It was borrowed, as I think we may
say with some confidence, from Dr. Darwin by Lamarck, and was followed up
by him ardently thenceforth, during the remainder of his life, though
somewhat less perfectly comprehended by him than it had been by Dr.
Darwin. It is that the design which has designed organisms, has resided
within, and been embodied in, the organisms themselves.
FAILURE OF THE FIRST EVOLUTIONISTS TO SEE THEIR POSITION AS TELEOLOGICAL.
(CHAPTER IV. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)
It follows from the doctrine of Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, if not
from that of Buffon himself, that the majority of organs are as purposive
to the evolutionist as to the theologian, and far more intelligibly so.
Circumstances, however, prevented these writers from acknowledging this
fact to the world, and perhaps even to themselves. Their _crux_ was, as
it still is to so many evolutionists, the presence of rudimentary organs,
and the processes of embryological development. They would not admit
that rudimentary and therefore useless organs were designed by a Creator
to take their place once and for ever as part of a scheme whose main idea
was, that every animal structure was to serve some useful end in
connection with its possessor.
This was the doctrine of final causes as then commonly held; in the face
of rudimentary organs it was absurd. Buffon was above all things else a
plain matter of fact thinker, who refused to go far beyond the obvious.
Like all other profound writers, he was, if I may say so, profoundly
superficial. He felt that the aim of research does not consist in the
knowing this or that, but in the easing of the desire to know or
understand more completely--in the peace of mind which passeth all
understanding. His was the perfection of a healthy mental organism by
which over effort is felt to be as vicious and contemptible as indolence.
He knew this too well to know the grounds of his knowledge, but we
smaller people who know it less completely, can see that such felicitous
instinctive tempering together of the two great contradictory principles,
love of effort and love of ease, has underlain every healthy step of all
healthy growth, whether of vegetable or animal, from the earliest
conceivable time to the present moment. Nothing is worth looking at
which is seen either too obviously or with too much difficulty. Nothing
is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly easily, and some
little deficiency of effort is more pardonable than any very perceptible
excess, for virtue has ever erred on the side of self-indulgence rather
than of asceticism.
According to Buffon, then--as also according to Dr. Darwin, who was just
such another practical and genial thinker, and who was distinctly a pupil
of Buffon, though a most intelligent and original one--if an organ after
a reasonable amount of inspection appeared to be useless, it was to be
called useless without more ado, and theories were to be ordered out of
court if they were troublesome. In like manner, if animals breed freely
_inter se_ before our eyes, as for example the horse and ass, the fact
was to be noted, but no animals were to be classed as capable of
interbreeding until they had asserted their right to such classification
by breeding with tolerable certainty. If, again, an animal looked as if
it felt, that is to say, if it moved about pretty quickly or made a
noise, it must be held to feel; if it did neither of these things it did
not look as if it felt, and therefore it must be said not to feel. _De
non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est lex_ was one of the chief
axioms of their philosophy; no writers have had a greater horror of
mystery or of ideas that have not become so mastered as to be, or to have
been, superficial. Lamarck was one of those men of whom I believe it has
been said that they have brain upon the brain. He had his theory that an
animal could not feel unless it had a nervous system, and at least a
spinal marrow--and that it could not think at all without a brain--all
his facts, therefore, have to be made to square with this. With Buffon
and Dr. Darwin we feel safe that however wrong they may sometimes be,
their conclusions have always been arrived at on that fairly superficial
view of things in which, as I have elsewhere said, our nature alone
permits us to be comforted.
To these writers, then, the doctrine of final causes for rudimentary
organs was a piece of mystification and an absurdity; no less fatal to
any such doctrine were the processes of embryological development. It
was plain that the commonly received teleology must be given up; but the
idea of design or purpose was so associated in their minds with
theological design that they avoided it altogether. They seem to have
forgotten that an internal purpose is as much purpose as an external one;
hence, unfortunately, though their whole theory of development is
intensely purposive, it is the fact rather than the name of teleology
which has hitherto been insisted upon, even by the greatest writers on
evolution--the name having been most persistently denied even by those
who were most insisting on the thing itself.
It is easy to understand the difficulty felt by the fathers of evolution
when we remember how much had to be seen before the facts could lie well
before them. It was necessary to attain, firstly, to a perception of the
unity of person between parents and offspring in successive generations;
secondly, it must be seen that an organism's memory (within the
limitations to which all memory is subject) goes back for generations
beyond its birth, to the first beginnings in fact, of which we know
anything whatever; thirdly, the latency of that memory, as of memory
generally, till the associated ideas are reproduced, must be brought to
bear upon the facts of heredity; and lastly, the unconsciousness with
which habitual actions come to be performed, must be assigned as the
explanation of the unconsciousness with which we grow and discharge most
of our natural functions.
Buffon was too busy with the fact that animals descended with
modification at all, to go beyond the development and illustration of
this great truth. I doubt whether he ever saw more than the first, and
that dimly, of the four considerations above stated.
Dr. Darwin was the first to point out the first two considerations; he
did so with some clearness, but can hardly be said to have understood
their full importance: the two latter ideas do not appear to have
occurred to him.
Lamarck had little if any perception of any one of the four. When,
however, they are firmly seized and brought into their due bearings one
upon another, the facts of heredity become as simple as those of a man
making a tobacco pipe, and rudimentary organs are seen to be essentially
of the same character as the little rudimentary protuberance at the
bottom of the pipe to which I referred in 'Erewhon.' {141}
These organs are now no longer useful, but they once were so, and were
therefore once purposive, though not so now. They are the expressions of
a bygone usefulness; sayings, as it were, about which there was at one
time infinite wrangling, as to what both the meaning and the expression
should best be, so that they then had living significance in the mouths
of those who used them, though they have become such mere shibboleths and
cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more of their meaning than we
do of Julius Caesar in the month of July. They continue to be reproduced
through the force of habit, and through indisposition to get out of any
familiar groove of action until it becomes too unpleasant for us to
remain in it any longer. It has long been felt that embryology and
rudimentary structures indicated community of descent. Dr. Darwin and
Lamarck insisted on this, as have all subsequent writers on evolution;
but the explanation why and how the structures come to be
repeated--namely, that they are simply examples of the force of habit--can
only be perceived intelligently by those who admit such unity between
parents and offspring as that the self-development of the latter can be
properly called habitual (as being a repetition of an act by one and the
same individual), and can only be fully sympathised with by those who
recognise that if habit be admitted as the key to the fact at all, the
unconscious manner in which the habit comes to be repeated is only of a
piece with all our other observations concerning habit. For the fuller
development of the foregoing, I must refer the reader to my work "Life
and Habit."
The purposiveness, which even Dr. Darwin (and Lamarck still less) seems
never to have quite recognised in spite of their having insisted so much
on what amounts to the same thing, now comes into full view. It is seen
that the organs external to the body, and those internal to it, are the
second as much as the first, things which we have made for our own
convenience, and with a prevision that we shall have need of them; the
main difference between the manufacture of these two classes of organs
being, that we have made the one kind so often that we can no longer
follow the processes whereby we make them, while the others are new
things which we must make introspectively or not at all, and which are
not yet so incorporate with our vitality as that we should think they
grow instead of being manufactured. The manufacture of the tool, and the
manufacture of the living organ prove therefore to be but two species of
the same genus, which, though widely differentiated, have descended as it
were from one common filament of desire and inventive faculty. The
greater or less complexity of the organs goes for very little. It is
only a question of the amount of intelligence and voluntary
self-adaptation which we must admit, and this must be settled rather by
an appeal to what we find in organism, and observe concerning it, than by
what we may have imagined _a priori_.
Given a small speck of jelly with some power of slightly varying its
actions in accordance with slightly varying circumstances and
desires--given such a jelly-speck with a power of assimilating other
matter, and thus of reproducing itself, given also that it should be
possessed of a memory and a reproductive system, and we can show how the
whole animal world can have descended it may be from an _amoeba_ without
interference from without, and how every organ in every creature is
designed at first roughly and tentatively but finally fashioned with the
most consummate perfection, by the creature which has had need of that
organ, which best knew what it wanted, and was never satisfied till it
had got that which was the best suited to its varying circumstances in
their entirety. We can even show how, if it becomes worth the
Ethiopian's while to try and change his skin, or the leopard's to change
his spots, they can assuredly change them within a not unreasonable time
and adapt their covering to their own will and convenience, and to that
of none other; thus what is commonly conceived of as direct creation by
God is moved back to a time and space inconceivable in their remoteness,
while the aim and design so obvious in nature are shown to be still at
work around us, growing ever busier and busier, and advancing from day to
day both in knowledge and power.
It was reserved for Mr. Charles Darwin and for those who have too rashly
followed him to deny purpose as having had any share in the development
of animal and vegetable organs; to see no evidence of design in those
wonderful provisions which have been the marvel and delight of observers
in all ages. The one who has drawn our attention more than perhaps any
other living writer to those very marvels of co-adaptation, is the
foremost to maintain that they are the result not of desire and design,
either within the creature or without it, but of blind chance, working no
whither, and due but to the accumulation of innumerable lucky accidents.
"There are men," writes Professor Tyndal in the _Nineteenth Century_ for
last November, {144} "and by no means the minority, who, however wealthy
in regard to facts, can never rise into the region of principles; and
they are sometimes intolerant of those that can. They are formed to plod
meritoriously on in the lower levels of thought; unpossessed of the
pinions necessary to reach the heights, they cannot realise the mental
act--the act of inspiration it might well be called--by which a man of
genius, after long pondering and proving, reaches a theoretic conception
which unravels and illuminates the tangle of centuries of observation and
experiment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, who, at the
present moment, stand in this relation to Mr. Darwin."
The more rhapsodical parts of the above must go for what they are worth,
but I should be sorry to think that what remains conveyed a censure which
might fall justly on myself. As I read the earlier part of the passage I
confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very different
from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older men and
also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had
"unravelled and illuminated" a tangled skein, but believed him, on the
contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in
great part, if not wholly, plain. With the older writers, I had felt as
though in the hands of men who wished to understand themselves and to
make their reader understand them with the smallest possible exertion.
The older men, if not in full daylight, at any rate saw in what quarter
of the sky the dawn was breaking, and were looking steadily towards it.
It is not they who have put their hands over their own eyes and ours, and
who are crying out that there is no light, but chance and blindness
everywhere.
THE TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. (CHAPTER V. OF EVOLUTION, OLD
AND NEW.)
I have stated the foregoing in what I take to be an extreme logical
development, in order that the reader may more easily perceive the
consequences of those premises which I am endeavouring to re-establish.
But it must not be supposed that an animal or plant has ever conceived
the idea of some organ widely different from any it was yet possessed of,
and has set itself to design it in detail and grow towards it.
The small jelly-speck, which we call the amoeba, has no organs save what
it can extemporise as occasion arises. If it wants to get at anything,
it thrusts out part of its jelly, which thus serves it as an arm or hand:
when the arm has served its purpose, it is absorbed into the rest of the
jelly, and has now to do the duty of a stomach by helping to wrap up what
it has just purveyed. The small round jelly-speck spreads itself out and
envelops its food, so that the whole creature is now a stomach, and
nothing but a stomach. Having digested its food, it again becomes a
jelly-speck, and is again ready to turn part of itself into hand or foot
as its next convenience may dictate. It is not to be believed that such
a creature as this, which is probably just sensitive to light and nothing
more, should be able to form any conception of an eye and set itself to
work to grow one, any more than it is believable that he who first
observed the magnifying power of a dew-drop, or even he who first
constructed a rude lens, should have had any idea in his mind of Lord
Rosse's telescope with all its parts and appliances. Nothing could be
well conceived more foreign to experience and common sense. Animals and
plants have travelled to their present forms as a man has travelled to
any one of his own most complicated inventions. Slowly, step by step,
through many blunders and mischances which have worked together for good
to those that have persevered in elasticity. They have travelled as man
has travelled, with but little perception of a want till there was also
some perception of a power, and with but little perception of a power
till there was a dim sense of want; want stimulating power, and power
stimulating want; and both so based upon each other that no one can say
which is the true foundation, but rather that they must be both baseless
and, as it were, meteoric in mid air. They have seen very little ahead
of a present power or need, and have been then most moral, when most
inclined to pierce a little into futurity, but also when most obstinately
declining to pierce too far, and busy mainly with the present. They have
been so far blindfolded that they could see but for a few steps in front
of them, yet so far free to see that those steps were taken with aim and
definitely, and not in the dark.
"Plus il a su," says Buffon, speaking of man, "plus il a pu, mais aussi
moins il a fait, moins il a su." This holds good wherever life holds
good. Wherever there is life there is a moral government of rewards and
punishments understood by the amoeba neither better nor worse than by
man. The history of organic development is the history of a moral
struggle.
As for the origin of a creature able to feel want and power and as to
what want and power spring from, we know nothing as yet, nor does it seem
worth while to go into this question until an understanding has been come
to as to whether the interaction of want and power in some low form or
forms of life which could assimilate matter, reproduce themselves, vary
their actions, and be capable of remembering, will or will not suffice to
explain the development of the varied organs and desires which we see in
the higher vertebrates and man. When this question has been settled,
then it will be time to push our inquiries farther back.
But given such a low form of life as here postulated, and there is no
force in Paley's pretended objection to the Darwinism of his time.
"Give our philosopher," he says, "appetencies; give him a portion of
living irritable matter (a nerve or the clipping of a nerve) to work
upon; give also to his incipient or progressive forms the power of
propagating their like in every stage of their alteration; and if he is
to be believed, he could replenish the world with all the vegetable and
animal productions which we now see in it." {148}
After meeting this theory with answers which need not detain us, he
continues:--
"The senses of animals appear to me quite incapable of receiving the
explanation of their origin which this theory affords. Including under
the word 'sense' the organ and the perception, we have no account of
either. How will our philosopher get at vision or make an eye? Or,
suppose the eye formed, would the perception follow? The same of the
other senses. And this objection holds its force, ascribe what you will
to the hand of time, to the power of habit, to changes too slow to be
observed by man, or brought within any comparison which he is able to
make of past things with the present. Concede what you please to these
arbitrary and unattested superstitions, how will they help you? Here is
no inception. No laws, no course, no powers of nature which prevail at
present, nor any analogous to these would give commencement to a new
sense; and it is in vain to inquire how that might proceed which would
never _begin_."
In answer to this, let us suppose that some inhabitants of another world
were to see a modern philosopher so using a microscope that they should
believe it to be a part of the philosopher's own person, which he could
cut off from and join again to himself at pleasure, and suppose there
were a controversy as to how this microscope had originated, and that one
party maintained the man had made it little by little because he wanted
it, while the other declared this to be absurd and impossible; I ask,
would this latter party be justified in arguing that microscopes could
never have been perfected by degrees through the preservation of and
accumulation of small successive improvements inasmuch as men could not
have begun to want to use microscopes until they had had a microscope
which should show them that such an instrument would be useful to them,
and that hence there is nothing to account for the _beginning_ of
microscopes, which might indeed make some progress when once originated,
but which could never originate?
It might be pointed out to such a reasoner, firstly, that as regards any
acquired power the various stages in the acquisition of which he might be
supposed able to remember, he would find that logic notwithstanding, the
wish did originate the power, and yet was originated by it, both coming
up gradually out of something which was not recognisable as either power
or wish, and advancing through vain beating of the air, to a vague
effort, and from this to definite effort with failure, and from this to
definite effort with success, and from this to success with little
consciousness of effort, and from this to success with such complete
absence of effort that he now acts unconsciously and without power of
introspection, and that, do what he will, he can rarely or never draw a
sharp dividing line whereat anything shall be said to begin, though none
less certain that there has been a continuity in discontinuity, and a
discontinuity in continuity between it and certain other past things;
moreover, that his opponents postulated so much beginning of the
microscope as that there should be a dew-drop, even as our evolutionists
start with a sense of touch, of which sense all the others are
modifications, so that not one of them, but is resolvable into touch by
more or less easy stages; and secondly, that the question is one of fact
and of the more evident deductions therefrom, and should not be carried
back to those remote beginnings where the nature of the facts is so
purely a matter of conjecture and inference.
No plant or animal, then, according to our view, would be able to
conceive more than a very slight improvement on its organisation at a
given time, so clearly as to make the efforts towards it that would
result in growth of the required modification; nor would these efforts be
made with any far-sighted perception of what next and next and after, but
only of what next; while many of the happiest thoughts would come like
all other happy thoughts--thoughtlessly; by a chain of reasoning too
swift and subtle for conscious analysis by the individual. Some of these
modifications would be noticeable, but the majority would involve no more
noticeable difference that can be detected between the length of the
shortest day, and that of the shortest but one.
Thus a bird whose toes were not webbed, but who had under force of
circumstances little by little in the course of many generations learned
to swim, either from having lived near a lake, and having learnt the art
owing to its fishing habits, or from wading about in shallow pools by the
sea-side at low water and finding itself sometimes a little out of its
depth and just managing to scramble over the intermediate yard or so
between it and safety--such a bird did not probably conceive the idea of
swimming on the water and set itself to learn to do so, and then conceive
the idea of webbed feet and set itself to get webbed feet. The bird
found itself in some small difficulty, out of which it either saw, or at
any rate found that it could extricate itself by striking out vigorously
with its feet and extending its toes as far as ever it could; it thus
began to learn the art of swimming and conceived the idea of swimming
synchronously, or nearly so; or perhaps wishing to get over a yard or two
of deep water, and trying to do so without being at the trouble of rising
to fly, it would splash and struggle its way over the water, and thus
practically swim, though without much perception of what it had been
doing. Finding that no harm had come to it, the bird would do the same
again and again; it would thus presently lose fear, and would be able to
act more calmly; then it would begin to find out that it could swim a
little, and if its food lay much in the water so that it would be of
great advantage to it to be able to alight and rest without being forced
to return to land, it would begin to make a practice of swimming. It
would now discover that it could swim the more easily according as its
feet presented a more extended surface to the water; it would therefore
keep its toes extended wherever it swam, and as far as in it lay, would
make the most of whatever skin was already at the base of its toes. After
many generations it would become web-footed, if doing as above described
should have been found continuously convenient, so that the bird should
have continuously used the skin about its toes as much as possible in
this direction.
For there is a margin in every organic structure (and perhaps more than
we imagine in things inorganic also), which will admit of references, as
it were, side notes, and glosses upon the original text. It is on this
margin that we may err or wander--the greatness of a mistake depending
rather upon the extent of the departure from the original text, than on
the direction that the departure takes. A little error on the bad side
is more pardonable, and less likely to hurt the organism than a too great
departure upon the right one. This is a fundamental proposition in any
true system of ethics, the question what is too much or too sudden being
decided by much the same higgling as settles the price of butter in a
country market, and being as invisible as the link which connects the
last moment of desire with the first of power and performance, and with
the material result achieved.
It is on this margin that the fulcrum is to be found, whereby we obtain
the little purchase over our structure, that enables us to achieve great
results if we use it steadily, with judgment, and with neither too little
effort nor too much. It is by employing this that those who have a fancy
to move their ears or toes without moving other organs learn to do so.
There is a man at the Agricultural Hall now {153a} playing the violin
with his toes, and playing it, as I am told, sufficiently well. The eye
of the sailor, the wrist of the conjuror, the toe of the professional
medium, are all found capable of development to an astonishing degree,
even in a single lifetime; but in every case success has been attained by
the simple process of making the best of whatever power a man has had at
any given time, and by being on the look-out to take advantage of
accident, and even of misfortune. If a man would learn to paint, he must
not theorise concerning art, nor think much what he would do beforehand,
but he must do _something_--whatever under the circumstances will come
handiest and easiest to him; and he must do that something as well as he
can. This will presently open the door for something else, and a way
will show itself which no conceivable amount of searching would have
discovered, but which yet could never have been discovered by sitting
still and taking no pains at all. "Dans l'animal," says Buffon, "il y a
moins de jugement que de sentiment." {153b}
It may appear as though this were blowing hot and cold with the same
breath, inasmuch as I am insisting that important modifications of
structure have been always purposive; and at the same time am denying
that the creature modified has had any far-seeing purpose in the greater
part of all those actions which have at length modified both structure
and instinct. Thus I say that a bird learns to swim without having any
purpose of learning to swim before it set itself to make those movements
which have resulted in its being able to do so. At the same time I
maintain that it has only learned to swim by trying to swim, and this
involves the very purpose which I have just denied. The reconciliation
of these two apparently irreconcilable contentions must be found in the
consideration that the bird was not the less trying to swim, merely
because it did not know the name we have chosen to give to the art which
it was trying to master, nor yet how great were the resources of that
art. A person, who knew all about swimming, if from some bank he could
watch our supposed bird's first attempt to scramble over a short space of
deep water, would at once declare that the bird was trying to swim--if
not actually swimming. Provided then that there is a very little
perception of, and prescience concerning, the means whereby the next
desired end may be attained, it matters not how little in advance that
end may be of present desire or faculties; it is still reached through
purpose, and must be called purposive. Again, no matter how many of
these small steps be taken, nor how absolute was the want of purpose or
prescience concerning any but the one being actually taken at any given
moment, this does not bar the result from having been arrived at through
design and purpose. If each one of the small steps is purposive the
result is purposive, though there was never purpose extended over more
than one, two, or perhaps at most three steps at a time.
Returning to the art of painting for an example, are we to say that the
proficiency which such a student as was supposed above will certainly
attain, is not due to design, merely because it was not until he had
already become three parts excellent that he knew the full purport of all
that he had been doing? When he began he had but vague notions of what
he would do. He had a wish to learn to represent nature, but the line
into which he has settled down has probably proved very different from
that which he proposed to himself originally. Because he has taken
advantage of his accidents, is it, therefore, one whit the less true that
his success is the result of his desires and his design? The _Times_
pointed out some time ago that the theory which now associates meteors
and comets in the most unmistakable manner, was suggested by one
accident, and confirmed by another. But the writer added well that "such
accidents happen only to the zealous student of nature's secrets." In
the same way the bird that is taking to the habit of swimming, and of
making the most of whatever skin it already has between its toes, will
have doubtless to thank accidents for no small part of its progress; but
they will be such accidents as could never have happened to or been taken
advantage of by any creature which was not zealously trying to make the
most of itself--and between such accidents as this, and design, the line
is hard to draw; for if we go deep enough we shall find that most of our
design resolves itself into as it were a shaking of the bag to see what
will come out that will suit our purpose, and yet at the same time that
most of our shaking of the bag resolves itself into a design that the bag
shall contain only such and such things, or thereabouts.
Again, the fact that animals are no longer conscious of design and
purpose in much that they do, but act unreflectingly, and as we sometimes
say concerning ourselves "automatically" or "mechanically"--that they
have no idea whatever of the steps, whereby they have travelled to their
present state, and show no sign of doubt about what must have been at one
time the subject of all manner of doubts, difficulties, and
discussions--that whatever sign of reflection they now exhibit is to be
found only in case of some novel feature or difficulty presenting itself;
these facts do not bar that the results achieved should be attributed to
an inception in reason, design and purpose, no matter how rapidly and as
we call it instinctively, the creatures may now act.
For if we look closely at such an invention as the steam engine in its
latest and most complicated developments, about which there can be no
dispute but that they are achievements of reason, purpose and design, we
shall find them present us with examples of all those features the
presence of which in the handiwork of animals is too often held to bar
reason and purpose from having had any share therein.
Assuredly such men as the Marquis of Worcester and Captain Savery had
very imperfect ideas as to the upshot of their own action. The simplest
steam engine now in use in England is probably a marvel of ingenuity as
compared with the highest development which appeared possible to these
two great men, while our newest and most highly complicated engines would
seem to them more like living beings than machines. Many, again, of the
steps leading to the present development have been due to action which
had but little heed of the steam engine, being the inventions of
attendants whose desire was to save themselves the trouble of turning
this or that cock, and who were indifferent to any other end than their
own immediate convenience. No step in fact along the whole route was
ever taken with much perception of what would be the next step after the
one being taken at any given moment.
Nor do we find that an engine made after any old and well-known pattern
is now made with much more consciousness of design than we can suppose a
bird's nest to be built with. The greater number of the parts of any
such engine, are made by the gross as it were like screw and nuts, which
are turned out by machinery and in respect of which the labour of design
is now no more felt than is the design of him who first invented the
wheel. It is only when circumstances require any modification in the
article to be manufactured that thought and design will come into play
again; but I take it few will deny that if circumstances compel a bird
either to give up a nest three-parts built altogether, or to make some
trifling deviation from its ordinary practice, it will in nine cases out
of ten make such deviation as shall show that it had thought the matter
over, and had on the whole concluded to take such and such a course, that
is to say, that it had reasoned and had acted with such purpose as its
reason had dictated.
And I imagine that this is the utmost that any one can claim even for
man's own boasted powers. Set the man who has been accustomed to make
engines of one type, to make engines of another type without any
intermediate course of training or instruction, and he will make no
better figure with his engines than a thrush would do if commanded by her
mate to make a nest like a blackbird. It is vain then to contend that
the ease and certainty with which an action is performed, even though it
may have now become matter of such fixed habit that it cannot be suddenly
and seriously modified without rendering the whole performance abortive,
is any argument against that action having been an achievement of design
and reason in respect of each one of the steps that have led to it; and
if in respect of each one of the steps then as regards the entire action;
for we see our own most reasoned actions become no less easy, unerring,
automatic, and unconscious, than the actions which we call instinctive
when they have been repeated a sufficient number of times.
* * * * *
If the foregoing be granted, and it be admitted that the unconsciousness
and seeming automatism with which any action may be performed is no bar
to its having a foundation in memory, reason, and at one time consciously
recognised effort--and this I believe to be the chief addition which I
have ventured to make to the theory of Buffon and Dr. Erasmus Darwin--then
the wideness of the difference between the Darwinism of eighty years ago
and the Darwinism of to-day becomes immediately apparent, and it also
becomes apparent, how important and interesting is the issue which is
raised between them.
According to the older Darwinism the lungs are just as purposive as the
corkscrew. They, no less than the corkscrew, are a piece of mechanism
designed and gradually improved upon and perfected by an intelligent
creature for the gratification of its own needs. True there are many
important differences between mechanism which is part of the body, and
mechanism which is no such part, but the differences are such as do not
affect the fact that in each case the result, whether, for example, lungs
or corkscrew, is due to desire, invention, and design.
And now I will ask one more question, which may seem, perhaps, to have
but little importance, but which I find personally interesting. I have
been told by a reviewer, of whom upon the whole I have little reason to
complain, that the theory I put forward in "Life and Habit," and which I
am now again insisting on, is pessimism--pure and simple. I have a very
vague idea what pessimism means, but I should be sorry to believe that I
am a pessimist. Which, I would ask, is the pessimist? He who sees love
of beauty, design, steadfastness of purpose, intelligence, courage, and
every quality to which success has assigned the name of "worth" as having
drawn the pattern of every leaf and organ now and in all past time, or he
who sees nothing in the world of nature but a chapter of accidents and of
forces interacting blindly?