Luck or Cunning?

Of the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book—­ I mean the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic modification—­the second is both the more important and the one which stands most in need of support.  The substantial identity between heredity and memory is becoming generally admitted; as regards my second point, however, I cannot flatter myself that I have made much way against the formidable array of writers on the neo-Darwinian side; I shall therefore devote the rest of my book as far as possible to this subject only.  Natural selection (meaning by these words the preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable variations that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck and in no way arising out of function) has been, to use an Americanism than which I can find nothing apter, the biggest biological boom of the last quarter of a century; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should show some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification called in question.  Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen {70a} and Professor Ray Lankester {70b} in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause {70c} in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by myself; if they are not to be left in possession of the field the sooner they are met the better.

Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;—­whether luck or cunning is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development.  Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning.  They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the situation—­within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as organism retreats farther backwards from ourselves—­and persistent effort to turn it to account.  They made this the soul of all development whether of mind or body.

And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for better and worse.  They held that some organisms show more ready wit and savoir faire than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone through waters of misery which they have used as wells.

The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by “striking oil,” and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired.  No speculation, no commerce; “nothing venture, nothing have,” is as true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting that highly picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture do from time to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest and most dead-level organisms under the name of “sports;” but they would hold that even these occur most often and most happily to those that have persevered in well-doing for some generations.  Unto the organism that hath is given, and from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that even “sports” prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains the sheet anchor of the early evolutionists.  They believe, in fact, that more organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way.  The race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round organism that is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness.  Festina, but festina lente—­perhaps as involving so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—­is the motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va piano va lontano, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at any rate as the amoeba.

To repeat in other words.  All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings.  They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits.  They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity depends in great measure upon their failure to perceive that they are moulding themselves.  If a change is so great that they are seriously incommoded by its novelty, they are not likely to acquiesce in it kindly enough to grow to it, but they will make no difficulty about the miracle involved in accommodating themselves to a difference of only two or three per cent. {72a}

As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as fresh change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established, there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be accumulated in the course of generations—­provided, of course, always, that the modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive habits and physical development of the organism in their collective capacity.  Where the change is too great, or where an organ has been modified cumulatively in some one direction, until it has reached a development too seriously out of harmony with the habits of the organism taken collectively, then the organism holds itself excused from further effort, throws up the whole concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation and reconstruction of death.  It is only on the relinquishing of further effort that this death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on from change to change, altering and being altered—­that is to say, either killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or killing the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves.  There is a ceaseless higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle between these two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both have in no small part to re-enter into the womb from whence they came and be born again in some form which shall give greater satisfaction.

All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth.  Change is the common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and death are not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one another; in the highest life there is still much death, and in the most complete death there is still not a little life.  La vie, says Claud Bernard, {73a} c’est la mort:  he might have added, and perhaps did, et la mort ce n’est que la vie transformee.  Life and death are the extreme modes of something which is partly both and wholly neither; this something is common, ordinary change; solve any change and the mystery of life and death will be revealed; show why and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than what it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left in any other change.  One is not in its ultimate essence more miraculous that another; it may be more striking—­a greater congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but not more miraculous; all change is qua us absolutely incomprehensible and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its phenomena, be inquired into.

But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a dissolution, or a combination of the two.  Growth is the coming together of elements with quasi similar characteristics.  I understand it is believed to be the coming together of matter in certain states of motion with other matter in states so nearly similar that the rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the other—­making, rather than marring and undoing them.  Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is “the diapason closing full in man”; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba.  Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of complexity.  All pleasant changes are recreative; they are pro tanto births; all unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as such, pro tanto deaths, but we can no more exhaust either wholly of the other, than we can exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and pain lurk within one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as rest and unrest in one another.

There is no greater mystery in life than in death.  We talk as though the riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death is just as great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making five, the other is five splitting into two and two.  Solve either, and we have solved the other; they should be studied not apart, for they are never parted, but together, and they will tell more tales of one another than either will tell about itself.  If there is one thing which advancing knowledge makes clearer than another, it is that death is swallowed up in life, and life in death; so that if the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then indeed is our salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness there is neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures of speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as most convenient.  There is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but a being ever with the Lord only, in the eternal f??a, or going to and fro and heat and fray of the universe.  When we were young we thought the one certain thing was that we should one day come to die; now we know the one certain thing to be that we shall never wholly do so.  Non omnis moriar, says Horace, and “I die daily,” says St. Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death on this side of it, were each some strange thing which happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly called that of death, and who does not die daily and hourly?  Does any man in continuing to live from day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives from moment to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to moment also?  Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and more complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the most essential factor of his life, from the day that he became “he” at all?  When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are sounded, and so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer.  If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live or whether we die, whether we like it and know anything about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—­living always, dying always, and in the Lord always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is no respecter of persons.

Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and substance, are—­for the condition of every substance may be considered as the expression and outcome of its mind.  Where there is consciousness there is change; where there is no change there is no consciousness; may we not suspect that there is no change without a pro tanto consciousness however simple and unspecialised?  Change and motion are one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or motion), as the ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, and all feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited, to be the interaction of those states which for want of better terms we call mind and matter.  Action may be regarded as a kind of middle term between mind and matter; it is the throe of thought and thing, the quivering clash and union of body and soul; commonplace enough in practice; miraculous, as violating every canon on which thought and reason are founded, if we theorise about it, put it under the microscope, and vivisect it.  It is here, if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction in terms of combining with that which is without material substance and cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with matter, till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.

All body is more or less ensouled.  As it gets farther and farther from ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say to ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about it—­as though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power of being understood rather than of understanding.  We are intelligent, and no intelligence, so different from our own as to baffle our powers of comprehension deserves to be called intelligence at all.  The more a thing resembles ourselves, the more it thinks as we do—­and thus by implication tells us that we are right, the more intelligent we think it; and the less it thinks as we do, the greater fool it must be; if a substance does not succeed in making it clear that it understands our business, we conclude that it cannot have any business of its own, much less understand it, or indeed understand anything at all.  But letting this pass, so far as we are concerned, [Greek text]; we are body ensouled, and soul embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible for us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist either of soul without body, or body without soul.  Unmattered condition, therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned matter; and we must hold that all body with which we can be conceivably concerned is more or less ensouled, and all soul, in like manner, more or less embodied.  Strike either body or soul—­ that is to say, effect either a physical or a mental change, and the harmonics of the other sound.  So long as body is minded in a certain way—­so long, that is to say, as it feels, knows, remembers, concludes, and forecasts one set of things—­it will be in one form; if it assumes a new one, otherwise than by external violence, no matter how slight the change may be, it is only through having changed its mind, through having forgotten and died to some trains of thought, and having been correspondingly born anew by the adoption of new ones.  What it will adopt depends upon which of the various courses open to it it considers most to its advantage.

What it will think to its advantage depends mainly on the past habits of its race.  Its past and now invisible lives will influence its desires more powerfully than anything it may itself be able to add to the sum of its likes and dislikes; nevertheless, over and above preconceived opinion and the habits to which all are slaves, there is a small salary, or, as it were, agency commission, which each may have for himself, and spend according to his fancy; from this, indeed, income-tax must be deducted; still there remains a little margin of individual taste, and here, high up on this narrow, inaccessible ledge of our souls, from year to year a breed of not unprolific variations build where reason cannot reach them to despoil them; for de gustibus non est disputandum.

Here we are as far as we can go.  Fancy, which sometimes sways so much and is swayed by so little, and which sometimes, again, is so hard to sway, and moves so little when it is swayed; whose ways have a method of their own, but are not as our ways—­fancy, lies on the extreme borderland of the realm within which the writs of our thoughts run, and extends into that unseen world wherein they have no jurisdiction.  Fancy is as the mist upon the horizon which blends earth and sky; where, however, it approaches nearest to the earth and can be reckoned with, it is seen as melting into desire, and this as giving birth to design and effort.  As the net result and outcome of these last, living forms grow gradually but persistently into physical conformity with their own intentions, and become outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual faiths, or wants of faith, that have been most within them.  They thus very gradually, but none the less effectually, design themselves.

In effect, therefore, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck introduce uniformity into the moral and spiritual worlds as it was already beginning to be introduced into the physical.  According to both these writers development has ever been a matter of the same energy, effort, good sense, and perseverance, as tend to advancement of life now among ourselves.  In essence it is neither more nor less than this, as the rain-drop which denuded an ancient formation is of the same kind as that which is denuding a modern one, though its effect may vary in geometrical ratio with the effect it has produced already.  As we are extending reason to the lower animals, so we must extend a system of moral government by rewards and punishments no less surely; and if we admit that to some considerable extent man is man, and master of his fate, we should admit also that all organic forms which are saved at all have been in proportionate degree masters of their fate too, and have worked out, not only their own salvation, but their salvation according, in no small measure, to their own goodwill and pleasure, at times with a light heart, and at times in fear and trembling.  I do not say that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck saw all the foregoing as clearly as it is easy to see it now; what I have said, however, is only the natural development of their system.