Luck or Cunning?

The position, then, stands thus.  Common sense gave the inch of admitting some parts of the body to be less living than others, and philosophy took the ell of declaring the body to be almost all of it stone dead.  This is serious; still if it were all, for a quiet life, we might put up with it.  Unfortunately we know only too well that it will not be all.  Our bodies, which seemed so living and now prove so dead, have served us such a trick that we can have no confidence in anything connected with them.  As with skin and bones to-day, so with protoplasm to-morrow.  Protoplasm is mainly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out, we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic components.  Science has not, I believe, settled all the components of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there; she has settled what it is in great part, and there is no trusting her not to settle the rest at any moment, even if she has not already done so.  As soon as this has been done we shall be told that nine-tenths of the protoplasm of which we are composed must go the way of our non-protoplasmic parts, and that the only really living part of us is the something with a new name that runs the protoplasm that runs the flesh and bones that run the organs —

Why stop here?  Why not add “which run the tools and properties which are as essential to our life and health as much that is actually incorporate with us?” The same breach which has let the non-living effect a lodgment within the body must, in all equity, let the organic character—­bodiliness, so to speak—­pass out beyond its limits and effect a lodgment in our temporary and extra-corporeal limbs.  What, on the protoplasmic theory, the skin and bones are, that the hammer and spade are also; they differ in the degree of closeness and permanence with which they are associated with protoplasm, but both bones and hammers are alike non-living things which protoplasm uses for its own purposes and keeps closer or less close at hand as custom and convenience may determine.

According to this view, the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are tools of the first degree; they are not living, but they are in such close and constant contact with that which really lives, that an aroma of life attaches to them.  Some of these, however, such as horns, hooves, and tusks, are so little permeated by protoplasm that they cannot rank much higher than the tools of the second degree, which come next to them in order.

These tools of the second degree are either picked up ready-made, or are manufactured directly by the body, as being torn or bitten into shape, or as stones picked up to throw at prey or at an enemy.

Tools of the third degree are made by the instrumentality of tools of the second and first degrees; as, for example, chipped flint, arrow-heads, &c.

Tools of the fourth degree are made by those of the third, second, and first.  They consist of the simpler compound instruments that yet require to be worked by hand, as hammers, spades, and even hand flour-mills.

Tools of the fifth degree are made by the help of those of the fourth, third, second, and first.  They are compounded of many tools, worked, it may be, by steam or water and requiring no constant contact with the body.

But each one of these tools of the fifth degree was made in the first instance by the sole instrumentality of the four preceding kinds of tool.  They must all be linked on to protoplasm, which is the one original tool-maker, but which can only make the tools that are more remote from itself by the help of those that are nearer, that is to say, it can only work when it has suitable tools to work with, and when it is allowed to use them in its own way.  There can be no direct communication between protoplasm and a steam-engine; there may be and often is direct communication between machines of even the fifth order and those of the first, as when an engine-man turns a cock, or repairs something with his own hands if he has nothing better to work with.  But put a hammer, for example, to a piece of protoplasm, and the protoplasm will no more know what to do with it than we should be able to saw a piece of wood in two without a saw.  Even protoplasm from the hand of a carpenter who has been handling hammers all his life would be hopelessly put off its stroke if not allowed to work in its usual way but put bare up against a hammer; it would make a slimy mess and then dry up; still there can be no doubt (so at least those who uphold protoplasm as the one living substance would say) that the closer a machine can be got to protoplasm and the more permanent the connection, the more living it appears to be, or at any rate the more does it appear to be endowed with spontaneous and reasoning energy, so long, of course, as the closeness is of a kind which protoplasm understands and is familiar with.  This, they say, is why we do not like using any implement or tool with gloves on, for these impose a barrier between the tool and its true connection with protoplasm by means of the nervous system.  For the same reason we put gloves on when we box so as to bar the connection.

That which we handle most unglovedly is our food, which we handle with our stomachs rather than with our hands.  Our hands are so thickly encased with skin that protoplasm can hold but small conversation with what they contain, unless it be held for a long time in the closed fist, and even so the converse is impeded as in a strange language; the inside of our mouths is more naked, and our stomachs are more naked still; it is here that protoplasm brings its fullest powers of suasion to bear on those whom it would proselytise and receive as it were into its own communion—­whom it would convert and bring into a condition of mind in which they shall see things as it sees them itself, and, as we commonly say, “agree with” it, instead of standing out stiffly for their own opinion.  We call this digesting our food; more properly we should call it being digested by our food, which reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests us, till it comes to understand us and encourage us by assuring us that we were perfectly right all the time, no matter what any one might have said, or say, to the contrary.  Having thus recanted all its own past heresies, it sets to work to convert everything that comes near it and seems in the least likely to be converted.  Eating is a mode of love; it is an effort after a closer union; so we say we love roast beef.  A French lady told me once that she adored veal; and a nurse tells her child that she would like to eat it.  Even he who caresses a dog or horse pro tanto both weds and eats it.  Strange how close the analogy between love and hunger; in each case the effort is after closer union and possession; in each case the outcome is reproduction (for nutrition is the most complete of reproductions), and in each case there are residua.  But to return.

I have shown above that one consequence of the attempt so vigorously made a few years ago to establish protoplasm as the one living substance, is the making it clear that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body and the simpler extra-corporeal tools or organs must run on all fours in the matter of livingness and non-livingness.  If the protoplasmic parts of the body are held living in virtue of their being used by something that really lives, then so, though in a less degree, must tools and machines.  If, on the other hand, tools and machines are held non-living inasmuch as they only owe what little appearance of life they may present when in actual use to something else that lives, and have no life of their own—­so, though in a less degree, must the non-protoplasmic parts of the body.  Allow an overflowing aroma of life to vivify the horny skin under the heel, and from this there will be a spilling which will vivify the boot in wear.  Deny an aroma of life to the boot in wear, and it must ere long be denied to ninety-nine per cent. of the body; and if the body is not alive while it can walk and talk, what in the name of all that is unreasonable can be held to be so?

That the essential identity of bodily organs and tools is no ingenious paradoxical way of putting things is evident from the fact that we speak of bodily organs at all.  Organ means tool.  There is nothing which reveals our most genuine opinions to us so unerringly as our habitual and unguarded expressions, and in the case under consideration so completely do we instinctively recognise the underlying identity of tools and limbs, that scientific men use the word “organ” for any part of the body that discharges a function, practically to the exclusion of any other term.  Of course, however, the above contention as to the essential identity of tools and organs does not involve a denial of their obvious superficial differences—­differences so many and so great as to justify our classing them in distinct categories so long as we have regard to the daily purposes of life without looking at remoter ones.

If the above be admitted, we can reply to those who in an earlier chapter objected to our saying that if Mr. Darwin denied design in the eye he should deny it in the burglar’s jemmy also.  For if bodily and non-bodily organs are essentially one in kind, being each of them both living and non-living, and each of them only a higher development of principles already admitted and largely acted on in the other, then the method of procedure observable in the evolution of the organs whose history is within our ken should throw light upon the evolution of that whose history goes back into so dim a past that we can only know it by way of inference.  In the absence of any show of reason to the contrary we should argue from the known to the unknown, and presume that even as our non-bodily organs originated and were developed through gradual accumulation of design, effort, and contrivance guided by experience, so also must our bodily organs have been, in spite of the fact that the contrivance has been, as it were, denuded of external evidences in the course of long time.  This at least is the most obvious inference to draw; the burden of proof should rest not with those who uphold function as the most important means of organic modification, but with those who impugn it; it is hardly necessary, however, to say that Mr. Darwin never attempted to impugn by way of argument the conclusions either of his grandfather or of Lamarck.  He waved them both aside in one or two short semi-contemptuous sentences, and said no more about them—­not, at least, until late in life he wrote his “Erasmus Darwin,” and even then his remarks were purely biographical; he did not say one syllable by way of refutation, or even of explanation.

I am free to confess that, overwhelming as is the evidence brought forward by Mr. Spencer in the articles already referred to, as showing that accidental variations, unguided by the helm of any main general principle which should as it were keep their heads straight, could never accumulate with the results supposed by Mr. Darwin; and overwhelming, again, as is the consideration that Mr. Spencer’s most crushing argument was allowed by Mr. Darwin to go without reply, still the considerations arising from the discoveries of the last forty years or so in connection with protoplasm, seem to me almost more overwhelming still.  This evidence proceeds on different lines from that adduced by Mr. Spencer, but it points to the same conclusion, namely, that though luck will avail much if backed by cunning and experience, it is unavailing for any permanent result without them.  There is an irony which seems almost always to attend on those who maintain that protoplasm is the only living substance which ere long points their conclusions the opposite way to that which they desire—­in the very last direction, indeed, in which they of all people in the world would willingly see them pointed.

It may be asked why I should have so strong an objection to seeing protoplasm as the only living substance, when I find this view so useful to me as tending to substantiate design—­which I admit that I have as much and as seriously at heart as I can allow myself to have any matter which, after all, can so little affect daily conduct; I reply that it is no part of my business to inquire whether this or that makes for my pet theories or against them; my concern is to inquire whether or no it is borne out by facts, and I find the opinion that protoplasm is the one living substance unstable, inasmuch as it is an attempt to make a halt where no halt can be made.  This is enough; but, furthermore, the fact that the protoplasmic parts of the body are more living than the non-protoplasmic—­which I cannot deny, without denying that it is any longer convenient to think of life and death at all—­will answer my purpose to the full as well or better.

I pointed out another consequence, which, again, was cruelly the reverse of what the promoters of the protoplasm movement might be supposed anxious to arrive at—­in a series of articles which appeared in the Examiner during the summer of 1879, and showed that if protoplasm were held to be the sole seat of life, then this unity in the substance vivifying all, both animals and plants, must be held as uniting them into a single corporation or body—­especially when their community of descent is borne in mind—­more effectually than any merely superficial separation into individuals can be held to disunite them, and that thus protoplasm must be seen as the life of the world—­as a vast body corporate, never dying till the earth itself shall pass away.  This came practically to saying that protoplasm was God Almighty, who, of all the forms open to Him, had chosen this singularly unattractive one as the channel through which to make Himself manifest in the flesh by taking our nature upon Him, and animating us with His own Spirit.  Our biologists, in fact, were fast nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and material, but who could not be made to square with pantheistic notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic world; and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed at the grotesqueness of the position in which they must ere long have found themselves, for in the autumn of 1879 the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the leading reviews and magazines have known protoplasm no more.  About the same time bathybius, which at one time bade fair to supplant it upon the throne of popularity, died suddenly, as I am told, at Norwich, under circumstances which did not transpire, nor has its name, so far as I am aware, been ever again mentioned.

So much for the conclusions in regard to the larger aspect of life taken as a whole which must follow from confining life to protoplasm; but there is another aspect—­that, namely, which regards the individual.  The inevitable consequences of confining life to the protoplasmic parts of the body were just as unexpected and unwelcome here as they had been with regard to life at large; for, as I have already pointed out, there is no drawing the line at protoplasm and resting at this point; nor yet at the next halting-point beyond; nor at the one beyond that.  How often is this process to be repeated? and in what can it end but in the rehabilitation of the soul as an ethereal, spiritual, vital principle, apart from matter, which, nevertheless, it animates, vivifying the clay of our bodies?  No one who has followed the course either of biology or psychology during this century, and more especially during the last five-and-twenty years, will tolerate the reintroduction of the soul as something apart from the substratum in which both feeling and action must be held to inhere.  The notion of matter being ever changed except by other matter in another state is so shocking to the intellectual conscience that it may be dismissed without discussion; yet if bathybius had not been promptly dealt with, it must have become apparent even to the British public that there were indeed but few steps from protoplasm, as the only living substance, to vital principle.  Our biologists therefore stifled bathybius, perhaps with justice, certainly with prudence, and left protoplasm to its fate.

Any one who reads Professor Allman’s address above referred to with due care will see that he was uneasy about protoplasm, even at the time of its greatest popularity.  Professor Allman never says outright that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are no more alive than chairs and tables are.  He said what involved this as an inevitable consequence, and there can be no doubt that this is what he wanted to convey, but he never insisted on it with the outspokenness and emphasis with which so startling a paradox should alone be offered us for acceptance; nor is it easy to believe that his reluctance to express his conclusion totidem verbis was not due to a sense that it might ere long prove more convenient not to have done so.  When I advocated the theory of the livingness, or quasi-livingness of machines, in the chapters of “Erewhon” of which all else that I have written on biological subjects is a development, I took care that people should see the position in its extreme form; the non-livingness of bodily organs is to the full as startling a paradox as the livingness of non-bodily ones, and we have a right to expect the fullest explicitness from those who advance it.  Of course it must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim any appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in actual use.  In “Erewhon” I did not think it necessary to insist on this, and did not, indeed, yet fully know what I was driving at.

The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to the assertion that any part of the body is non-living may be observed in the writings of the other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to; I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single passage in which they declare even the osseous parts of a bone to be non-living, though this conclusion was the raison d’etre of all they were saying and followed as an obvious inference.  The reader will probably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can only have been due to a feeling that the ground was one on which it behoved them to walk circumspectly; they probably felt, after a vague, ill-defined fashion, that the more they reduced the body to mechanism the more they laid it open to an opponent to raise mechanism to the body, but, however this may be, they dropped protoplasm, as I have said, in some haste with the autumn of 1879.