Luck or Cunning?

I shall perhaps best promote the acceptance of the two main points on which I have been insisting for some years past, I mean, the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic development, by treating them as if they had something of that physical life with which they are so closely connected.  Ideas are like plants and animals in this respect also, as in so many others, that they are more fully understood when their relations to other ideas of their time, and the history of their development are known and borne in mind.  By development I do not merely mean their growth in the minds of those who first advanced them, but that larger development which consists in their subsequent good or evil fortunes—­in their reception, favourable or otherwise, by those to whom they were presented.  This is to an idea what its surroundings are to an organism, and throws much the same light upon it that knowledge of the conditions under which an organism lives throws upon the organism itself.  I shall, therefore, begin this new work with a few remarks about its predecessors.

I am aware that what I may say on this head is likely to prove more interesting to future students of the literature of descent than to my immediate public, but any book that desires to see out a literary three-score years and ten must offer something to future generations as well as to its own.  It is a condition of its survival that it shall do this, and herein lies one of the author’s chief difficulties.  If books only lived as long as men and women, we should know better how to grow them; as matters stand, however, the author lives for one or two generations, whom he comes in the end to understand fairly well, while the book, if reasonable pains have been taken with it, should live more or less usefully for a dozen.  About the greater number of these generations the author is in the dark; but come what may, some of them are sure to have arrived at conclusions diametrically opposed to our own upon every subject connected with art, science, philosophy, and religion; it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased, it can only be at the cost of repelling some present readers.  Unwilling as I am to do this, I still hold it the lesser of two evils; I will be as brief, however, as the interests of the opinions I am supporting will allow.

In “Life and Habit” I contended that heredity was a mode of memory.  I endeavoured to show that all hereditary traits, whether of mind or body, are inherited in virtue of, and as a manifestation of, the same power whereby we are able to remember intelligently what we did half an hour, yesterday, or a twelvemonth since, and this in no figurative but in a perfectly real sense.  If life be compared to an equation of a hundred unknown quantities, I followed Professor Hering of Prague in reducing it to one of ninety-nine only, by showing two of the supposed unknown quantities to be so closely allied that they should count as one.  I maintained that instinct was inherited memory, and this without admitting more exceptions and qualifying clauses than arise, as it were, by way of harmonics from every proposition, and must be neglected if thought and language are to be possible.

I showed that if the view for which I was contending was taken, many facts which, though familiar, were still without explanation or connection with our other ideas, would remain no longer isolated, but be seen at once as joined with the mainland of our most assured convictions.  Among the things thus brought more comfortably home to us was the principle underlying longevity.  It became apparent why some living beings should live longer than others, and how any race must be treated whose longevity it is desired to increase.  Hitherto we had known that an elephant was a long-lived animal and a fly short-lived, but we could give no reason why the one should live longer than the other; that is to say, it did not follow in immediate coherence with, or as intimately associated with, any familiar principle that an animal which is late in the full development of its reproductive system will tend to live longer than one which reproduces early.  If the theory of “Life and Habit” be admitted, the fact of a slow-growing animal being in general longer lived than a quick developer is seen to be connected with, and to follow as a matter of course from, the fact of our being able to remember anything at all, and all the well-known traits of memory, as observed where we can best take note of them, are perceived to be reproduced with singular fidelity in the development of an animal from its embryonic stages to maturity.

Take this view, and the very general sterility of hybrids from being a CRUX of the theory of descent becomes a stronghold of defence.  It appears as part of the same story as the benefit derived from judicious, and the mischief from injudicious, crossing; and this, in its turn, is seen as part of the same story, as the good we get from change of air and scene when we are overworked.  I will not amplify; but reversion to long-lost, or feral, characteristics, the phenomena of old age, the fact of the reproductive system being generally the last to arrive at maturity—­few further developments occurring in any organism after this has been attained—­the sterility of many animals in confinement, the development in both males and females under certain circumstances of the characteristics of the opposite sex, the latency of memory, the unconsciousness with which we grow, and indeed perform all familiar actions, these points, though hitherto, most of them, so apparently inexplicable that no one even attempted to explain them, became at once intelligible, if the contentions of “Life and Habit” were admitted.

Before I had finished writing this book I fell in with Professor Mivart’s “Genesis of Species,” and for the first time understood the distinction between the Lamarckian and Charles-Darwinian systems of evolution.  This had not, so far as I then knew, been as yet made clear to us by any of our more prominent writers upon the subject of descent with modification; the distinction was unknown to the general public, and indeed is only now beginning to be widely understood.  While reading Mr. Mivart’s book, however, I became aware that I was being faced by two facts, each incontrovertible, but each, if its leading exponents were to be trusted, incompatible with the other.

On the one hand there was descent; we could not read Mr. Darwin’s books and doubt that all, both animals and plants, were descended from a common source.  On the other, there was design; we could not read Paley and refuse to admit that design, intelligence, adaptation of means to ends, must have had a large share in the development of the life we saw around us; it seemed indisputable that the minds and bodies of all living beings must have come to be what they are through a wise ordering and administering of their estates.  We could not, therefore, dispense either with descent or with design, and yet it seemed impossible to keep both, for those who offered us descent stuck to it that we could have no design, and those, again, who spoke so wisely and so well about design would not for a moment hear of descent with modification.

Each, moreover, had a strong case.  Who could reflect upon rudimentary organs, and grant Paley the kind of design that alone would content him?  And yet who could examine the foot or the eye, and grant Mr. Darwin his denial of forethought and plan?

For that Mr. Darwin did deny skill and contrivance in connection with the greatly preponderating part of organic developments cannot be and is not now disputed.  In the first chapter of “Evolution Old and New” I brought forward passages to show how completely he and his followers deny design, but will here quote one of the latest of the many that have appeared to the same effect since “Evolution Old and New” was published; it is by Mr. Romanes, and runs as follows:-

“It is the very essence of the Darwinian hypothesis that it only seeks to explain the apparently purposive variations, or variations of an adaptive kind.” {17a}

The words “apparently purposive” show that those organs in animals and plants which at first sight seem to have been designed with a view to the work they have to do—­that is to say, with a view to future function—­had not, according to Mr. Darwin, in reality any connection with, or inception in, effort; effort involves purpose and design; they had therefore no inception in design, however much they might present the appearance of being designed; the appearance was delusive; Mr. Romanes correctly declares it to be “the very essence” of Mr. Darwin’s system to attempt an explanation of these seemingly purposive variations which shall be compatible with their having arisen without being in any way connected with intelligence or design.

As it is indisputable that Mr. Darwin denied design, so neither can it be doubted that Paley denied descent with modification.  What, then, were the wrong entries in these two sets of accounts, on the detection and removal of which they would be found to balance as they ought?

Paley’s weakest place, as already implied, is in the matter of rudimentary organs; the almost universal presence in the higher organisms of useless, and sometimes even troublesome, organs is fatal to the kind of design he is trying to uphold; granted that there is design, still it cannot be so final and far-foreseeing as he wishes to make it out.  Mr. Darwin’s weak place, on the other hand, lies, firstly, in the supposition that because rudimentary organs imply no purpose now, they could never in time past have done so—­that because they had clearly not been designed with an eye to all circumstances and all time, they never, therefore, could have been designed with an eye to any time or any circumstances; and, secondly, in maintaining that “accidental,” “fortuitous,” “spontaneous” variations could be accumulated at all except under conditions that have never been fulfilled yet, and never will be; in other words, his weak place lay in the contention (for it comes to this) that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily wealth, more than of wealth of any other kind, unless sustained experience, watchfulness, and good sense preside over the accumulation.  In “Life and Habit,” following Mr. Mivart, and, as I now find, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I showed (pp. 279-281) how impossible it was for variations to accumulate unless they were for the most part underlain by a sustained general principle; but this subject will be touched upon more fully later on.

The accumulation of accidental variations which owed nothing to mind either in their inception, or their accumulation, the pitchforking, in fact, of mind out of the universe, or at any rate its exclusion from all share worth talking about in the process of organic development, this was the pill Mr. Darwin had given us to swallow; but so thickly had he gilded it with descent with modification, that we did as we were told, swallowed it without a murmur, were lavish in our expressions of gratitude, and, for some twenty years or so, through the mouths of our leading biologists, ordered design peremptorily out of court, if she so much as dared to show herself.  Indeed, we have even given life pensions to some of the most notable of these biologists, I suppose in order to reward them for having hoodwinked us so much to our satisfaction.

Happily the old saying, Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, still holds true, and the reaction that has been gaining force for some time will doubtless ere long brush aside the cobwebs with which those who have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin’s reputation as a philosopher still try to fog our outlook.  Professor Mivart was, as I have said, among the first to awaken us to Mr. Darwin’s denial of design, and to the absurdity involved therein.  He well showed how incredible Mr Darwin’s system was found to be, as soon as it was fully realised, but there he rather left us.  He seemed to say that we must have our descent and our design too, but he did not show how we were to manage this with rudimentary organs still staring us in the face.  His work rather led up to the clearer statement of the difficulty than either put it before us in so many words, or tried to remove it.  Nevertheless there can be no doubt that the “Genesis of Species” gave Natural Selection what will prove sooner or later to be its death-blow, in spite of the persistence with which many still declare that it has received no hurt, and the sixth edition of the” Origin of Species,” published in the following year, bore abundant traces of the fray.  Moreover, though Mr. Mivart gave us no overt aid, he pointed to the source from which help might come, by expressly saying that his most important objection to Neo-Darwinism had no force against Lamarck.

To Lamarck, therefore, I naturally turned, and soon saw that the theory on which I had been insisting in” Life and Habit” was in reality an easy corollary on his system, though one which he does not appear to have caught sight of.  I saw also that his denial of design was only, so to speak, skin deep, and that his system was in reality teleological, inasmuch as, to use Isidore Geoffroy’s words, it makes the organism design itself.  In making variations depend on changed actions, and these, again, on changed views of life, efforts, and designs, in consequence of changed conditions of life, he in effect makes effort, intention, will, all of which involve design (or at any rate which taken together involve it), underlie progress in organic development.  True, he did not know he was a teleologist, but he was none the less a teleologist for this.  He was an unconscious teleologist, and as such perhaps more absolutely an upholder of teleology than Paley himself; but this is neither here nor there; our concern is not with what people think about themselves, but with what their reasoning makes it evident that they really hold.

How strange the irony that hides us from ourselves!  When Isidore Geoffroy said that according to Lamarck organisms designed themselves, {20a} and endorsed this, as to a great extent he did, he still does not appear to have seen that either he or Lamarck were in reality reintroducing design into organism; he does not appear to have seen this more than Lamarck himself had seen it, but, on the contrary, like Lamarck, remained under the impression that he was opposing teleology or purposiveness.

Of course in one sense he did oppose it; so do we all, if the word design be taken to intend a very far-foreseeing of minute details, a riding out to meet trouble long before it comes, a provision on academic principles for contingencies that are little likely to arise.  We can see no evidence of any such design as this in nature, and much everywhere that makes against it.  There is no such improvidence as over providence, and whatever theories we may form about the origin and development of the universe, we may be sure that it is not the work of one who is unable to understand how anything can possibly go right unless he sees to it himself.  Nature works departmentally and by way of leaving details to subordinates.  But though those who see nature thus do indeed deny design of the prescient-from-all-eternity order, they in no way impugn a method which is far more in accord with all that we commonly think of as design.  A design which is as incredible as that a ewe should give birth to a lion becomes of a piece with all that we observe most frequently if it be regarded rather as an aggregation of many small steps than as a single large one.  This principle is very simple, but it seems rather difficult to understand.  It has taken several generations before people would admit it as regards organism even after it was pointed out to them, and those who saw it as regards organism still failed to understand it as regards design; an inexorable “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther” barred them from fruition of the harvest they should have been the first to reap.  The very men who most insisted that specific difference was the accumulation of differences so minute as to be often hardly, if at all, perceptible, could not see that the striking and baffling phenomena of design in connection with organism admitted of exactly the same solution as the riddle of organic development, and should be seen not as a result reached per saltum, but as an accumulation of small steps or leaps in a given direction.  It was as though those who had insisted on the derivation of all forms of the steam-engine from the common kettle, and who saw that this stands in much the same relations to the engines, we will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development, and were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and even at times successful.

From Lamarck I went on to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin—­better men both of them than Lamarck, and treated by him much as he has himself been treated by those who have come after him—­and found that the system of these three writers, if considered rightly, and if the corollary that heredity is only a mode of memory were added, would get us out of our dilemma as regards descent and design, and enable us to keep both.  We could do this by making the design manifested in organism more like the only design of which we know anything, and therefore the only design of which we ought to speak—­I mean our own.

Our own design is tentative, and neither very far-foreseeing nor very retrospective; it is a little of both, but much of neither; it is like a comet with a little light in front of the nucleus and a good deal more behind it, which ere long, however, fades away into the darkness; it is of a kind that, though a little wise before the event, is apt to be much wiser after it, and to profit even by mischance so long as the disaster is not an overwhelming one; nevertheless, though it is so interwoven with luck, there is no doubt about its being design; why, then, should the design which must have attended organic development be other than this?  If the thing that has been is the thing that also shall be, must not the thing which is be that which also has been?  Was there anything in the phenomena of organic life to militate against such a view of design as this?  Not only was there nothing, but this view made things plain, as the connecting of heredity and memory had already done, which till now had been without explanation.  Rudimentary organs were no longer a hindrance to our acceptance of design, they became weighty arguments in its favour.

I therefore wrote “Evolution Old and New,” with the object partly of backing up “Life and Habit,” and showing the easy rider it admitted, partly to show how superior the old view of descent had been to Mr. Darwin’s, and partly to reintroduce design into organism.  I wrote “Life and Habit” to show that our mental and bodily acquisitions were mainly stores of memory:  I wrote “Evolution Old and New” to add that the memory must be a mindful and designing memory.

I followed up these two books with “Unconscious Memory,” the main object of which was to show how Professor Hering of Prague had treated the connection between memory and heredity; to show, again, how substantial was the difference between Von Hartmann and myself in spite of some little superficial resemblance; to put forward a suggestion as regards the physics of memory, and to meet the most plausible objection which I have yet seen brought against “Life and Habit.”

Since writing these three books I have published nothing on the connection between heredity and memory, except a few pages of remarks on Mr. Romanes’ “Mental Evolution in Animals” in my book, {23a} from which I will draw whatever seems to be more properly placed here.  I have collected many facts that make my case stronger, but am precluded from publishing them by the reflection that it is strong enough already.  I have said enough in “Life and Habit” to satisfy any who wish to be satisfied, and those who wish to be dissatisfied would probably fail to see the force of what I said, no matter how long and seriously I held forth to them; I believe, therefore, that I shall do well to keep my facts for my own private reading and for that of my executors.

I once saw a copy of “Life and Habit” on Mr. Bogue’s counter, and was told by the very obliging shopman that a customer had just written something in it which I might like to see.  I said of course I should like to see, and immediately taking the book read the following—­which it occurs to me that I am not justified in publishing.  What was written ran thus:-

“As a reminder of our pleasant hours on the broad Atlantic, will Mr. —­ please accept this book (which I think contains more truth, and less evidence of it, than any other I have met with) from his friend —­ ?”

I presume the gentleman had met with the Bible—­a work which lays itself open to a somewhat similar comment.  I was gratified, however, at what I had read, and take this opportunity of thanking the writer, an American, for having liked my book.  It was so plain he had been relieved at not finding the case smothered to death in the weight of its own evidences, that I resolved not to forget the lesson his words had taught me.

The only writer in connection with “Life and Habit” to whom I am anxious to reply is Mr. Herbert Spencer, but before doing this I will conclude the present chapter with a consideration of some general complaints that have been so often brought against me that it may be worth while to notice them.

These general criticisms have resolved themselves mainly into two.

Firstly, it is said that I ought not to write about biology on the ground of my past career, which my critics declare to have been purely literary.  I wish I might indulge a reasonable hope of one day becoming a literary man; the expression is not a good one, but there is no other in such common use, and this must excuse it; if a man can be properly called literary, he must have acquired the habit of reading accurately, thinking attentively, and expressing himself clearly.  He must have endeavoured in all sorts of ways to enlarge the range of his sympathies so as to be able to put himself easily en rapport with those whom he is studying, and those whom he is addressing.  If he cannot speak with tongues himself, he is the interpreter of those who can—­without whom they might as well be silent.  I wish I could see more signs of literary culture among my scientific opponents; I should find their books much more easy and agreeable reading if I could; and then they tell me to satirise the follies and abuses of the age, just as if it was not this that I was doing in writing about themselves.

What, I wonder, would they say if I were to declare that they ought not to write books at all, on the ground that their past career has been too purely scientific to entitle them to a hearing?  They would reply with justice that I should not bring vague general condemnations, but should quote examples of their bad writing.  I imagine that I have done this more than once as regards a good many of them, and I dare say I may do it again in the course of this book; but though I must own to thinking that the greater number of our scientific men write abominably, I should not bring this against them if I believed them to be doing their best to help us; many such men we happily have, and doubtless always shall have, but they are not those who push to the fore, and it is these last who are most angry with me for writing on the subjects I have chosen.  They constantly tell me that I am not a man of science; no one knows this better than I do, and I am quite used to being told it, but I am not used to being confronted with the mistakes that I have made in matters of fact, and trust that this experience is one which I may continue to spare no pains in trying to avoid.

Nevertheless I again freely grant that I am not a man of science.  I have never said I was.  I was educated for the Church.  I was once inside the Linnean Society’s rooms, but have no present wish to go there again; though not a man of science, however, I have never affected indifference to the facts and arguments which men of science have made it their business to lay before us; on the contrary, I have given the greater part of my time to their consideration for several years past.  I should not, however, say this unless led to do so by regard to the interests of theories which I believe to be as nearly important as any theories can be which do not directly involve money or bodily convenience.

The second complaint against me is to the effect that I have made no original experiments, but have taken all my facts at second hand.  This is true, but I do not see what it has to do with the question.  If the facts are sound, how can it matter whether A or B collected them?  If Professor Huxley, for example, has made a series of valuable original observations (not that I know of his having done so), why am I to make them over again?  What are fact-collectors worth if the fact co-ordinators may not rely upon them?  It seems to me that no one need do more than go to the best sources for his facts, and tell his readers where he got them.  If I had had occasion for more facts I daresay I should have taken the necessary steps to get hold of them, but there was no difficulty on this score; every text-book supplied me with all, and more than all, I wanted; my complaint was that the facts which Mr. Darwin supplied would not bear the construction he tried to put upon them; I tried, therefore, to make them bear another which seemed at once more sound and more commodious; rightly or wrongly I set up as a builder, not as a burner of bricks, and the complaint so often brought against me of not having made experiments is about as reasonable as complaint against an architect on the score of his not having quarried with his own hands a single one of the stones which he has used in building.  Let my opponents show that the facts which they and I use in common are unsound, or that I have misapplied them, and I will gladly learn my mistake, but this has hardly, to my knowledge, been attempted.  To me it seems that the chief difference between myself and some of my opponents lies in this, that I take my facts from them with acknowledgment, and they take their theories from me—­ without.

One word more and I have done.  I should like to say that I do not return to the connection between memory and heredity under the impression that I shall do myself much good by doing so.  My own share in the matter was very small.  The theory that heredity is only a mode of memory is not mine, but Professor Hering’s.  He wrote in 1870, and I not till 1877.  I should be only too glad if he would take his theory and follow it up himself; assuredly he could do so much better than I can; but with the exception of his one not lengthy address published some fifteen or sixteen years ago he has said nothing upon the subject, so far at least as I have been able to ascertain; I tried hard to draw him in 1880, but could get nothing out of him.  If, again, any of our more influential writers, not a few of whom evidently think on this matter much as I do, would eschew ambiguities and tell us what they mean in plain language, I would let the matter rest in their abler hands, but of this there does not seem much chance at present.

I wish there was, for in spite of the interest I have felt in working the theory out and the information I have been able to collect while doing so, I must confess that I have found it somewhat of a white elephant.  It has got me into the hottest of hot water, made a literary Ishmael of me, lost me friends whom I have been sorry to lose, cost me a good deal of money, done everything to me, in fact, which a good theory ought not to do.  Still, as it seems to have taken up with me, and no one else is inclined to treat it fairly, I shall continue to report its developments from time to time as long as life and health are spared me.  Moreover, Ishmaels are not without their uses, and they are not a drug in the market just now.

I may now go on to Mr. Spencer.