Luck or Cunning?

Mr. Herbert Spencer wrote to the Athenaeum (April 5, 1884), and quoted certain passages from the 1855 edition of his “Principles of Psychology,” “the meanings and implications” from which he contended were sufficiently clear.  The passages he quoted were as follows:-

Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive sequences are not determined by the experiences of the individual organism manifesting them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are determined by the experiences of the race of organisms forming its ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless successive generations have established these sequences as organic relations (p. 526).

The modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life are also bequeathed (p. 526).

That is to say, the tendencies to certain combinations of psychical changes have become organic (p. 527).

The doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by experience must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the connections established by the accumulated experiences of every individual, but to all those established by the accumulated experiences of every race (p. 529).

Here, then, we have one of the simpler forms of instinct which, under the requisite conditions, must necessarily be established by accumulated experiences (p. 547).

And manifestly, if the organisation of inner relations, in correspondence with outer relations, results from a continual registration of experiences, &c. (p. 551).

On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised memory; on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of incipient instinct (pp. 555-6).

Memory, then, pertains to all that class of psychical states which are in process of being organised.  It continues so long as the organising of them continues; and disappears when the organisation of them is complete.  In the advance of the correspondence, each more complex class of phenomena which the organism acquires the power of recognising is responded to at first irregularly and uncertainly; and there is then a weak remembrance of the relations.  By multiplication of experiences this remembrance becomes stronger, and the response more certain.  By further multiplication of experiences the internal relations are at last automatically organised in correspondence with the external ones; and so conscious memory passes into unconscious or organic memory.  At the same time, a new and still more complex order of experiences is thus rendered appreciable; the relations they present occupy the memory in place of the simpler one; they become gradually organised; and, like the previous ones, are succeeded by others more complex still (p. 563).

Just as we saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions which we call instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into correspondence with outer relations; so the establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the same principle (p. 579).

In a book published a few weeks before Mr. Spencer’s letter appeared {29a} I had said that though Mr. Spencer at times closely approached Professor Hering and “Life and Habit,” he had nevertheless nowhere shown that he considered memory and heredity to be parts of the same story and parcel of one another.  In his letter to the Athenaeum, indeed, he does not profess to have upheld this view, except “by implications;” nor yet, though in the course of the six or seven years that had elapsed since “Life and Habit” was published I had brought out more than one book to support my earlier one, had he said anything during those years to lead me to suppose that I was trespassing upon ground already taken by himself.  Nor, again, had he said anything which enabled me to appeal to his authority—­which I should have been only too glad to do; at last, however, he wrote, as I have said, to the Athenaeum a letter which, indeed, made no express claim, and nowhere mentioned myself, but “the meanings and implications” from which were this time as clear as could be desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering and myself to stand aside.

The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. Spencer, or any others that can be found in his works, show that he regarded heredity in all its manifestations as a mode of memory.  I submit that this conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer’s writings, and that even the passages in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible till read by the light of Professor Hering’s address and of “Life and Habit.”

True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as “the experience of the race,” “accumulated experiences,” and others like them, but he did not explain—­and it was here the difficulty lay—­ how a race could have any experience at all.  We know what we mean when we say that an individual has had experience; we mean that he is the same person now (in the common use of the words), on the occasion of some present action, as the one who performed a like action at some past time or times, and that he remembers how he acted before, so as to be able to turn his past action to account, gaining in proficiency through practice.  Continued personality and memory are the elements that constitute experience; where these are present there may, and commonly will, be experience; where they are absent the word “experience” cannot properly be used.

Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many.  We now see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no means the whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is the race that is one, and the individual many.  We all admit and understand this readily enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the Athenaeum above referred to.  In the then state of our ideas a race was only a succession of individuals, each one of them new persons, and as such incapable of profiting by the experience of its predecessors except in the very limited number of cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, was possible.  The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between each successive generation, and the importance of the physical and psychical connection between parents and offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost sight of.  It seems strange how this could ever have been allowed to come about, but it should be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise troublesome questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible for what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody else is on many grounds the most convenient.  Every now and then, however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued personality side of the connection between successive generations is as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes—­some of which are not unimportant—­are obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which the more commonly needed conception has overgrown the other.

Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted every hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to speak, in stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our mental storehouse, while the other was so seldom asked for that it became not worth while to keep it.  By-and-by it was found so troublesome to send out for it, and so hard to come by even then, that people left off selling it at all, and if any one wanted it he must think it out at home as best he could; this was troublesome, so by common consent the world decided no longer to busy itself with the continued personality of successive generations—­which was all very well until it also decided to busy itself with the theory of descent with modification.  On the introduction of a foe so inimical to many of our pre-existing ideas the balance of power among them was upset, and a readjustment became necessary, which is still far from having attained the next settlement that seems likely to be reasonably permanent.

To change the illustration, the ordinary view is true for seven places of decimals, and this commonly is enough; occasions, however, have now arisen when the error caused by neglect of the omitted places is appreciably disturbing, and we must have three or four more.  Mr. Spencer showed no more signs of seeing that he must supply these, and make personal identity continue between successive generations before talking about inherited (as opposed to post-natal and educational) experience, than others had done before him; the race with him, as with every one else till recently, was not one long individual living indeed in pulsations, so to speak, but no more losing continued personality by living in successive generations, than an individual loses it by living in consecutive days; a race was simply a succession of individuals, each one of which was held to be an entirely new person, and was regarded exclusively, or very nearly so, from this point of view.

When I wrote “Life and Habit” I knew that the words “experience of the race” sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines and newspapers, but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I should have given their source.  To me they conveyed no meaning, and vexed me as an attempt to make me take stones instead of bread, and to palm off an illustration upon me as though it were an explanation.  When I had worked the matter out in my own way, I saw that the illustration, with certain additions, would become an explanation, but I saw also that neither he who had adduced it nor any one else could have seen how right he was, till much had been said which had not, so far as 1 knew, been said yet, and which undoubtedly would have been said if people had seen their way to saying it.

“What is this talk,” I wrote, “which is made about the experience of the race, as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows nothing about him?  If a man eats his dinner it nourishes him and not his neighbour; if he learns a difficult art it is he that can do it and not his neighbour” (“Life and Habit,” p. 49).

When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the son was fed when the father ate before he begot him.

“Is there any way,” I continued, “of showing that this experience of the race about which so much is said without the least attempt to show in what way it may, or does, become the experience of the individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, who repeats on a great many different occasions, and in slightly different ways, certain performances with which he has already become exceedingly familiar?”

I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the expression in question, that it was fallacious till this was done.  When I first began to write “Life and Habit” I did not believe it could be done, but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were, of my cu de sac, I saw the path which led straight to the point I had despaired of reaching—­I mean I saw that personality could not be broken as between generations, without also breaking it between the years, days, and moments of a man’s life.  What differentiates “Life and Habit” from the “Principles of Psychology” is the prominence given to continued personal identity, and hence to bona fide memory, as between successive generations; but surely this makes the two books differ widely.

Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost any direction, if the change is brought about gradually and in accordance with the rules of all development.  As in music we may take almost any possible discord with pleasing effect if we have prepared and resolved it rightly, so our ideas will outlive and outgrow almost any modification which is approached and quitted in such a way as to fuse the old and new harmoniously.  Words are to ideas what the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore it—­only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak, whereas ideas are unseen until they don the robe of words which reveals them to us; the words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit each other and stick to one another in our minds as soon as they are brought together, or the ideas will fly off, and leave the words void of that spirit by the aid of which alone they can become transmuted into physical action and shape material things with their own impress.  Whether a discord is too violent or no, depends on what we have been accustomed to, and on how widely the new differs from the old, but in no case can we fuse and assimilate more than a very little new at a time without exhausting our tempering power—­and hence presently our temper.

Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de minimis non curat lex,—­though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,—­yet too sudden a change in the manner in which our ideas are associated is as cataclysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are material convulsions, or too violent revolutions in politics.  This must always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, and the only lawful home of the miracle is in the microscopically small.  Here, indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and ever shall be, but we are deadened if they are required of us on a scale which is visible to the naked eye.  If we are told to work them our hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing.  If we are required to believe them—­which only means to fuse them with our other ideas—we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls.  If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to cease to work them is to die.  And by miracle I do not merely mean something new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension—­I mean something which violates every canon of thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing.  This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life and death.

Claude Bernard says, Rien ne nait, rien ne se cree, tout se continue.  La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune creation, elle est d’une eternelle continuation; {35a} but surely he is insisting upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another which is just as real, and just as important; he might have said, Rien ne se continue, tout nait, tout se cree.  La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune continuation.  Elle est d’une eternelle creation; for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and, indeed, the two stand or fall together.  True, discontinuity, where development is normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the difference between looking at distances on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have even the smallest change without a small partial corresponding discontinuity; on a small scale—­too small, indeed, for us to cognise—­these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our understanding goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out.  Creations, then, there must be, but they must be so small that practically they are no creations.  We must have a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms.  It comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by flying in the face of every rule that professors of the art of thinking have drawn up for our instruction.  These rules may be good enough as servants, but we have let them become the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy is made for man, not man for philosophy.  Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—­nor has confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption.  Truly St. Paul said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its own way both living and saving.

All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is miraculous.  It is the two in one, and at the same time one in two, which is only two and two making five put before us in another shape; yet this fusion—­so easy to think so long as it is not thought about, and so unthinkable if we try to think it—­is, as it were, the matrix from which our more thinkable thought is taken; it is the cloud gathering in the unseen world from which the waters of life descend in an impalpable dew.  Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into the seen again—­provided we do not look back, and provided also we do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time.  To think is to fuse and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed.  We can all feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can fuse ideas; or we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can feed; we know not which comes first, the food or the ideas, but we must not overtax our strength; the moment we do this we taste of death.

It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food fine before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large lumps will choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again, that that which is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas.  Food is very thoughtful:  through thought it comes, and back through thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and comprehension within our own system is mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross—­that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale.  Granted that no one can draw a clear line and define the limits within which a miracle is healthy working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he can prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute our food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and that at all times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass themselves, still we know as a general rule near enough, and find that the strongest can do but very little at a time, and, to return to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two such hitherto unassociated ideas as race and experience was a miracle beyond our strength.

Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter to the Athenaeum above referred to, we were not in the habit of thinking of any one as able to remember things that had happened before he had been born or thought of.  This notion will still strike many of my non-readers as harsh and strained; no such discord, therefore, should have been taken unprepared, and when taken it should have been resolved with pomp and circumstance.  Mr Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never either prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words “experience of the race” sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the result that his words were barren.  They were barren because they were incoherent; they were incoherent because they were approached and quitted too suddenly.  While we were realising “experience” our minds excluded “race,” inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea “race,” for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded experience.  We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien to one another, without having had those other ideas presented to us which would alone flux them.  The absence of these—­which indeed were not immediately ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them—­made nonsense of the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer’s pages, only to find that they had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we put down his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know what to do with his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly while he chastised us with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, according to our temperaments.

I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are one in principle—­the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas—­that is to say, into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as their neighbours do.

If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race are bona fide united by a common personality, and that in virtue of being so united each generation remembers (within, of course, the limits to which all memory is subject) what happened to it while still in the persons of its progenitors—­then his order to Professor Hering and myself should be immediately obeyed; but this was just what was at once most wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer.  Even in the passages given above—­passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself—­this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made it—­put continued personality and memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to be discovered “by implications,” and then such expressions as “accumulated experiences” and “experience of the race” become luminous; till this had been done they were Vox et praeterea nihil.

To sum up briefly.  The passages quoted by Mr. Spencer from his “Principles of Psychology” can hardly be called clear, even now that Professor Hering and others have thrown light upon them.  If, indeed, they had been clear Mr. Spencer would probably have seen what they necesitated, and found the way of meeting the difficulties of the case which occurred to Professor Hering and myself.  Till we wrote, very few writers had even suggested this.  The idea that offspring was only “an elongation or branch proceeding from its parents” had scintillated in the ingenious brain of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and in that of the designer of Jesse tree windows, but it had kindled no fire; it now turns out that Canon Kingsley had once called instinct inherited memory, {40a} but the idea, if born alive at all, died on the page on which it saw light:  Professor Ray Lankester, again called attention to Professor Hering’s address (Nature, July 13, 1876), but no discussion followed, and the matter dropped without having produced visible effect.  As for offspring remembering in any legitimate sense of the words what it had done, and what had happened to it, before it was born, no such notion was understood to have been gravely mooted till very recently.  I doubt whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes would accept this even now, when it is put thus undisguisedly; but this is what Professor Hering and I mean, and it is the only thing that should be meant, by those who speak of instinct as inherited memory.  Mr Spencer cannot maintain that these two startling novelties went without saying “by implication” from the use of such expressions as “accumulated experiences” or “experience of the race.”