Luck or Cunning?

And now I bring this book to a conclusion.  So many things requiring attention have happened since it was begun that I leave it in a very different shape to the one which it was originally intended to bear.  I have omitted much that I had meant to deal with, and have been tempted sometimes to introduce matter the connection of which with my subject is not immediately apparent.  Such however, as the book is, it must now go in the form into which it has grown almost more in spite of me than from malice prepense on my part.  I was afraid that it might thus set me at defiance, and in an early chapter expressed a doubt whether I should find it redound greatly to my advantage with men of science; in this concluding chapter I may say that doubt has deepened into something like certainty.  I regret this, but cannot help it.

Among the points with which it was most incumbent upon me to deal was that of vegetable intelligence.  A reader may well say that unless I give plants much the same sense of pleasure and pain, memory, power of will, and intelligent perception of the best way in which to employ their opportunities that I give to low animals, my argument falls to the ground.  If I declare organic modification to be mainly due to function, and hence in the closest correlation with mental change, I must give plants, as well as animals, a mind, and endow them with power to reflect and reason upon all that most concerns them.  Many who will feel little difficulty about admitting that animal modification is upon the whole mainly due to the secular cunning of the animals themselves will yet hesitate before they admit that plants also can have a reason and cunning of their own.

Unwillingness to concede this is based principally upon the error concerning intelligence to which I have already referred—­I mean to our regarding intelligence not so much as the power of understanding as that of being understood by ourselves.  Once admit that the evidence in favour of a plant’s knowing its own business depends more on the efficiency with which that business is conducted than either on our power of understanding how it can be conducted, or on any signs on the plant’s part of a capacity for understanding things that do not concern it, and there will be no further difficulty about supposing that in its own sphere a plant is just as intelligent as an animal, and keeps a sharp look-out upon its own interests, however indifferent it may seem to be to ours.  So strong has been the set of recent opinion in this direction that with botanists the foregoing now almost goes without saying, though few five years ago would have accepted it.

To no one of the several workers in this field are we more indebted for the change which has been brought about in this respect than to my late valued and lamented friend Mr. Alfred Tylor.  Mr. Tylor was not the discoverer of the protoplasmic continuity that exists in plants, but he was among the very first to welcome this discovery, and his experiments at Carshalton in the years 1883 and 1884 demonstrated that, whether there was protoplasmic continuity in plants or no, they were at any rate endowed with some measure of reason, forethought, and power of self-adaptation to varying surroundings.  It is not for me to give the details of these experiments.  I had the good fortune to see them more than once while they were in progress, and was present when they were made the subject of a paper read by Mr. Sydney B. J. Skertchly before the Linnean Society, Mr. Tylor being then too ill to read it himself.  The paper has since been edited by Mr. Skertchly, and published. {253a} Anything that should be said further about it will come best from Mr. Skertchly; it will be enough here if I give the resume of it prepared by Mr. Tylor himself.

In this Mr. Tylor said:- “The principles which underlie this paper are the individuality of plants, the necessity for some co-ordinating system to enable the parts to act in concert, and the probability that this also necessitates the admission that plants have a dim sort of intelligence.

“It is shown that a tree, for example, is something more than an aggregation of tissues, but is a complex being performing acts as a whole, and not merely responsive to the direct influence of light, &c.  The tree knows more than its branches, as the species know more than the individual, the community than the unit.

“Moreover, inasmuch as my experiments show that many plants and trees possess the power of adapting themselves to unfamiliar circumstances, such as, for instance, avoiding obstacles by bending aside before touching, or by altering the leaf arrangement, it seems probable that at least as much voluntary power must be accorded to such plants as to certain lowly organised animals.

“Finally, a connecting system by means of which combined movements take place is found in the threads of protoplasm which unite the various cells, and which I have now shown to exist even in the wood of trees.

“One of the important facts seems to be the universality of the upward curvature of the tips of growing branches of trees, and the power possessed by the tree to straighten its branches afterwards, so that new growth shall by similar means be able to obtain the necessary light and air.

“A house, to use a sanitary analogy, is functionally useless without it obtains a good supply of light and air.  The architect strives so to produce the house as to attain this end, and still leave the house comfortable.  But the house, though dependent upon, is not produced by, the light and air.  So a tree is functionally useless, and cannot even exist without a proper supply of light and air; but, whereas it has been the custom to ascribe the heliotropic and other motions to the direct influence of those agents, I would rather suggest that the movements are to some extent due to the desire of the plant to acquire its necessaries of life.”

The more I have reflected upon Mr. Tylor’s Carshalton experiments, the more convinced I am of their great value.  No one, indeed, ought to have doubted that plants were intelligent, but we all of us do much that we ought not to do, and Mr. Tylor supplied a demonstration which may be henceforth authoritatively appealed to.

I will take the present opportunity of insisting upon a suggestion which I made in “Alps and Sanctuaries” (New edition, pp. 152, 153), with which Mr. Tylor was much pleased, and which, at his request, I made the subject of a few words that I ventured to say at the Linnean Society’s rooms after his paper had been read.  “Admitting,” I said, “the common protoplasmic origin of animals and plants, and setting aside the notion that plants preceded animals, we are still faced by the problem why protoplasm should have developed into the organic life of the world, along two main lines, and only two—­the animal and the vegetable.  Why, if there was an early schism—­and this there clearly was—­should there not have been many subsequent ones of equal importance?  We see innumerable sub-divisions of animals and plants, but we see no other such great subdivision of organic life as that whereby it ranges itself, for the most part readily, as either animal or vegetable.  Why any subdivision?—­but if any, why not more than two great classes?”

The two main stems of the tree of life ought, one would think, to have been formed on the same principle as the boughs which represent genera, and the twigs which stand for species and varieties.  If specific differences arise mainly from differences of action taken in consequence of differences of opinion, then, so ultimately do generic; so, therefore, again, do differences between families; so therefore, by analogy, should that greatest of differences in virtue of which the world of life is mainly animal, or vegetable.  In this last case as much as in that of specific difference, we ought to find divergent form the embodiment and organic expression of divergent opinion.  Form is mind made manifest in flesh through action:  shades of mental difference being expressed in shades of physical difference, while broad fundamental differences of opinion are expressed in broad fundamental differences of bodily shape.

Or to put it thus:-

If form and habit be regarded as functionally interdependent, that is to say, if neither form nor habit can vary without corresponding variation in the other, and if habit and opinion concerning advantage are also functionally interdependent, it follows self-evidently that form and opinion concerning advantage (and hence form and cunning) will be functionally interdependent also, and that there can be no great modification of the one without corresponding modification of the other.  Let there, then, be a point in respect of which opinion might be early and easily divided—­a point in respect of which two courses involving different lines of action presented equally-balanced advantages—­and there would be an early subdivision of primordial life, according as the one view or the other was taken.

It is obvious that the pros and cons for either course must be supposed very nearly equal, otherwise the course which presented the fewest advantages would be attended with the probable gradual extinction of the organised beings that adopted it, but there being supposed two possible modes of action very evenly balanced as regards advantage and disadvantages, then the ultimate appearance of two corresponding forms of life is a sequitur from the admission that form varies as function, and function as opinion concerning advantage.  If there are three, four, five, or six such opinions tenable, we ought to have three, four, five, or six main subdivisions of life.  As things are, we have two only.  Can we, then, see a matter on which opinion was likely to be easily and early divided into two, and only two, main divisions—­no third course being conceivable?  If so, this should suggest itself as the probable source from which the two main forms of organic life have been derived.

I submit that we can see such a matter in the question whether it pays better to sit still and make the best of what comes in one’s way, or to go about in search of what one can find.  Of course we, as animals, naturally hold that it is better to go about in search of what we can find than to sit still and make the best of what comes; but there is still so much to be said on the other side, that many classes of animals have settled down into sessile habits, while a perhaps even larger number are, like spiders, habitual liers in wait rather than travellers in search of food.  I would ask my reader, therefore, to see the opinion that it is better to go in search of prey as formulated, and finding its organic expression, in animals; and the other—­that it is better to be ever on the look-out to make the best of what chance brings up to them—­in plants.  Some few intermediate forms still record to us the long struggle during which the schism was not yet complete, and the halting between two opinions which it might be expected that some organisms should exhibit.

“Neither class,” I said in “Alps and Sanctuaries,” “has been quite consistent.  Who ever is or can be?  Every extreme—­every opinion carried to its logical end—­will prove to be an absurdity.  Plants throw out roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind of locomotion; and, as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a tendril without regarding it as a melancholy and unprincipled compromise” (New edition, p. 153).

Having called attention to this view, and commended it to the consideration of my readers, I proceed to another which should not have been left to be touched upon only in a final chapter, and which, indeed, seems to require a book to itself—­I refer to the origin and nature of the feelings, which those who accept volition as having had a large share in organic modification must admit to have had a no less large share in the formation of volition.  Volition grows out of ideas, ideas from feelings.  What, then, is feeling, and the subsequent mental images or ideas?

The image of a stone formed in our minds is no representation of the object which has given rise to it.  Not only, as has been often remarked, is there no resemblance between the particular thought and the particular thing, but thoughts and things generally are too unlike to be compared.  An idea of a stone may be like an idea of another stone, or two stones may be like one another; but an idea of a stone is not like a stone; it cannot be thrown at anything, it occupies no room in space, has no specific gravity, and when we come to know more about stones, we find our ideas concerning them to be but rude, epitomised, and highly conventional renderings of the actual facts, mere hieroglyphics, in fact, or, as it were, counters or bank-notes, which serve to express and to convey commodities with which they have no pretence of analogy.

Indeed we daily find that, as the range of our perceptions becomes enlarged either by invention of new appliances or after use of old ones, we change our ideas though we have no reason to think that the thing about which we are thinking has changed.  In the case of a stone, for instance, the rude, unassisted, uneducated senses see it as above all things motionless, whereas assisted and trained ideas concerning it represent motion as its most essential characteristic; but the stone has not changed.  So, again, the uneducated idea represents it as above all things mindless, and is as little able to see mind in connection with it as it lately was to see motion; it will be no greater change of opinion than we have most of us undergone already if we come presently to see it as no less full of elementary mind than of elementary motion, but the stone will not have changed.

The fact that we modify our opinions suggests that our ideas are formed not so much in involuntary self-adjusting mimetic correspondence with the objects that we believe to give rise to them, as by what was in the outset voluntary, conventional arrangement in whatever way we found convenient, of sensation and perception-symbols, which had nothing whatever to do with the objects, and were simply caught hold of as the only things we could grasp.  It would seem as if, in the first instance, we must have arbitrarily attached some one of the few and vague sensations which we could alone at first command, to certain motions of outside things as echoed by our brain, and used them to think and feel the things with, so as to docket them, and recognise them with greater force, certainty, and clearness—­much as we use words to help us to docket and grasp our feelings and thoughts, or written characters to help us to docket and grasp our words.

If this view be taken we stand in much the same attitude towards our feelings as a dog may be supposed to do towards our own reading and writing.  The dog may be supposed to marvel at the wonderful instinctive faculty by which we can tell the price of the different railway stocks merely by looking at a sheet of paper; he supposes this power to be a part of our nature, to have come of itself by luck and not by cunning, but a little reflection will show that feeling is not more likely to have “come by nature” than reading and writing are.  Feeling is in all probability the result of the same kind of slow laborious development as that which has attended our more recent arts and our bodily organs; its development must be supposed to have followed the same lines as that of our other arts, and indeed of the body itself, which is the ars artium—­for growth of mind is throughout coincident with growth of organic resources, and organic resources grow with growing mind.

Feeling is the art the possession of which differentiates the civilised organic world from that of brute inorganic matter, but still it is an art; it is the outcome of a mind that is common both to organic and inorganic, and which the organic has alone cultivated.  It is not a part of mind itself; it is no more this than language and writing are parts of thought.  The organic world can alone feel, just as man can alone speak; but as speech is only the development of powers the germs of which are possessed by the lower animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment and development of powers the germs of which exist in inorganic substances.  It has all the characteristics of an art, and though it must probably rank as the oldest of those arts that are peculiar to the organic world, it is one which is still in process of development.  None of us, indeed, can feel well on more than a very few subjects, and many can hardly feel at all.

But, however this may be, our sensations and perceptions of material phenomena are attendant on the excitation of certain motions in the anterior parts of the brain.  Whenever certain motions are excited in this substance, certain sensations and ideas of resistance, extension, &c., are either concomitant, or ensue within a period too brief for our cognisance.  It is these sensations and ideas that we directly cognise, and it is to them that we have attached the idea of the particular kind of matter we happen to be thinking of.  As this idea is not like the thing itself, so neither is it like the motions in our brain on which it is attendant.  It is no more like these than, say, a stone is like the individual characters, written or spoken, that form the word “stone,” or than these last are, in sound, like the word “stone” itself, whereby the idea of a stone is so immediately and vividly presented to us.  True, this does not involve that our idea shall not resemble the object that gave rise to it, any more than the fact that a looking-glass bears no resemblance to the things reflected in it involves that the reflection shall not resemble the things reflected; the shifting nature, however, of our ideas and conceptions is enough to show that they must be symbolical, and conditioned by changes going on within ourselves as much as by those outside us; and if, going behind the ideas which suffice for daily use, we extend our inquiries in the direction of the reality underlying our conception, we find reason to think that the brain-motions which attend our conception correspond with exciting motions in the object that occasions it, and that these, rather than anything resembling our conception itself, should be regarded as the reality.

This leads to a third matter, on which I can only touch with extreme brevity.

Different modes of motion have long been known as the causes of our different colour perceptions, or at any rate as associated therewith, and of late years, more especially since the promulgation of Newlands’ {260a} law, it has been perceived that what we call the kinds or properties of matter are not less conditioned by motion than colour is.  The substance or essence of unconditioned matter, as apart from the relations between its various states (which we believe to be its various conditions of motion) must remain for ever unknown to us, for it is only the relations between the conditions of the underlying substance that we cognise at all, and where there are no conditions, there is nothing for us to seize, compare, and, hence, cognise; unconditioned matter must, therefore, be as inconceivable by us as unmattered condition; {261a} but though we can know nothing about matter as apart from its conditions or states, opinion has been for some time tending towards the belief that what we call the different states, or kinds, of matter are only our ways of mentally characterising and docketing our estimates of the different kinds of motion going on in this otherwise uncognisable substratum.

Our conception, then, concerning the nature of any matter depends solely upon its kind and degree of unrest, that is to say, on the characteristics of the vibrations that are going on within it.  The exterior object vibrating in a certain way imparts some of its vibrations to our brain—­but if the state of the thing itself depends upon its vibrations, it must be considered as to all intents and purposes the vibrations themselves—­plus, of course, the underlying substance that is vibrating.  If, for example, a pat of butter is a portion of the unknowable underlying substance in such-and-such a state of molecular disturbance, and it is only by alteration of the disturbance that the substance can be altered—­the disturbance of the substance is practically equivalent to the substance:  a pat of butter is such-and-such a disturbance of the unknowable underlying substance, and such-and-such a disturbance of the underlying substance is a pat of butter.  In communicating its vibrations, therefore, to our brain a substance does actually communicate what is, as far as we are concerned, a portion of itself.  Our perception of a thing and its attendant feeling are symbols attaching to an introduction within our brain of a feeble state of the thing itself.  Our recollection of it is occasioned by a feeble continuance of this feeble state in our brains, becoming less feeble through the accession of fresh but similar vibrations from without.  The molecular vibrations which make the thing an idea of which is conveyed to our minds, put within our brain a little feeble emanation from the thing itself—­if we come within their reach.  This being once put there, will remain as it were dust, till dusted out, or till it decay, or till it receive accession of new vibrations.

The vibrations from a pat of butter do, then, actually put butter into a man’s head.  This is one of the commonest of expressions, and would hardly be so common if it were not felt to have some foundation in fact.  At first the man does not know what feeling or complex of feelings to employ so as to docket the vibrations, any more than he knows what word to employ so as to docket the feelings, or with what written characters to docket his word; but he gets over this, and henceforward the vibrations of the exterior object (that is to say, the thing) never set up their characteristic disturbances, or, in other words, never come into his head, without the associated feeling presenting itself as readily as word and characters present themselves, on the presence of the feeling.  The more butter a man sees and handles, the more he gets butter on the brain—­till, though he can never get anything like enough to be strictly called butter, it only requires the slightest molecular disturbance with characteristics like those of butter to bring up a vivid and highly sympathetic idea of butter in the man’s mind.

If this view is adopted, our memory of a thing is our retention within the brain of a small leaven of the actual thing itself, or of what qua us is the thing that is remembered, and the ease with which habitual actions come to be performed is due to the power of the vibrations having been increased and modified by continual accession from without till they modify the molecular disturbances of the nervous system, and therefore its material substance, which we have already settled to be only our way of docketing molecular disturbances.  The same vibrations, therefore, form the substance remembered, introduce an infinitesimal dose of it within the brain, modify the substance remembering, and, in the course of time, create and further modify the mechanism of both the sensory and motor nerves.  Thought and thing are one.

I commend these two last speculations to the reader’s charitable consideration, as feeling that I am here travelling beyond the ground on which I can safely venture; nevertheless, as it may be some time before I have another opportunity of coming before the public, I have thought it, on the whole, better not to omit them, but to give them thus provisionally.  I believe they are both substantially true, but am by no means sure that I have expressed them either clearly or accurately; I cannot, however, further delay the issue of my book.

Returning to the point raised in my title, is luck, I would ask, or cunning, the more fitting matter to be insisted upon in connection with organic modification?  Do animals and plants grow into conformity with their surroundings because they and their fathers and mothers take pains, or because their uncles and aunts go away?  For the survival of the fittest is only the non-survival or going away of the unfittest—­in whose direct line the race is not continued, and who are therefore only uncles and aunts of the survivors.  I can quite understand its being a good thing for any race that its uncles and aunts should go away, but I do not believe the accumulation of lucky accidents could result in an eye, no matter how many uncles and aunts may have gone away during how many generations.

I would ask the reader to bear in mind the views concerning life and death expressed in an early chapter.  They seem to me not, indeed, to take away any very considerable part of the sting from death; this should not be attempted or desired, for with the sting of death the sweets of life are inseparably bound up so that neither can be weakened without damaging the other.  Weaken the fear of death, and the love of life would be weakened.  Strengthen it, and we should cling to life even more tenaciously than we do.  But though death must always remain as a shock and change of habits from which we must naturally shrink—­still it is not the utter end of our being, which, until lately, it must have seemed to those who have been unable to accept the grosser view of the resurrection with which we were familiarised in childhood.  We too now know that though worms destroy this body, yet in our flesh shall we so far see God as to be still in Him and of Him—­biding our time for a resurrection in a new and more glorious body; and, moreover, that we shall be to the full as conscious of this as we are at present of much that concerns us as closely as anything can concern us.

The thread of life cannot be shorn between successive generations, except upon grounds which will in equity involve its being shorn between consecutive seconds, and fractions of seconds.  On the other hand, it cannot be left unshorn between consecutive seconds without necessitating that it should be left unshorn also beyond the grave, as well as in successive generations.  Death is as salient a feature in what we call our life as birth was, but it is no more than this.  As a salient feature, it is a convenient epoch for the drawing of a defining line, by the help of which we may better grasp the conception of life, and think it more effectually, but it is a facon de parler only; it is, as I said in “Life and Habit,” {264a} “the most inexorable of all conventions,” but our idea of it has no correspondence with eternal underlying realities.

Finally, we must have evolution; consent is too spontaneous, instinctive, and universal among those most able to form an opinion, to admit of further doubt about this.  We must also have mind and design.  The attempt to eliminate intelligence from among the main agencies of the universe has broken down too signally to be again ventured upon—­not until the recent rout has been forgotten.  Nevertheless the old, far-foreseeing Deus ex machina design as from a point outside the universe, which indeed it directs, but of which it is no part, is negatived by the facts of organism.  What, then, remains, but the view that I have again in this book endeavoured to uphold—­I mean, the supposition that the mind or cunning of which we see such abundant evidence all round us, is, like the kingdom of heaven, within us, and within all things at all times everywhere?  There is design, or cunning, but it is a cunning not despotically fashioning us from without as a potter fashions his clay, but inhering democratically within the body which is its highest outcome, as life inheres within an animal or plant.

All animals and plants are corporations, or forms of democracy, and may be studied by the light of these, as democracies, not infrequently, by that of animals and plants.  The solution of the difficult problem of reflex action, for example, is thus facilitated, by supposing it to be departmental in character; that is to say, by supposing it to be action of which the department that attends to it is alone cognisant, and which is not referred to the central government so long as things go normally.  As long, therefore, as this is the case, the central government is unconscious of what is going on, but its being thus unconscious is no argument that the department is unconscious also.

I know that contradiction in terms lurks within much that I have said, but the texture of the world is a warp and woof of contradiction in terms; of continuity in discontinuity, and discontinuity in continuity; of unity in diversity, and of diversity in unity.  As in the development of a fugue, where, when the subject and counter subject have been enounced, there must henceforth be nothing new, and yet all must be new, so throughout organic life—­ which is as a fugue developed to great length from a very simple subject—­everything is linked on to and grows out of that which comes next to it in order—­errors and omissions excepted.  It crosses and thwarts what comes next to it with difference that involves resemblance, and resemblance that involves difference, and there is no juxtaposition of things that differ too widely by omission of necessary links, or too sudden departure from recognised methods of procedure.

To conclude; bodily form may be almost regarded as idea and memory in a solidified state—­as an accumulation of things each one of them so tenuous as to be practically without material substance.  It is as a million pounds formed by accumulated millionths of farthings; more compendiously it arises normally from, and through, action.  Action arises normally from, and through, opinion.  Opinion, from, and through, hypothesis.  “Hypothesis,” as the derivation of the word itself shows, is singularly near akin to “underlying, and only in part knowable, substratum;” and what is this but “God” translated from the language of Moses into that of Mr. Herbert Spencer?  The conception of God is like nature—­it returns to us in another shape, no matter how often we may expel it.  Vulgarised as it has been by Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and others who shall be nameless, it has been like every other corruptio optimi—­pessimum:  used as a hieroglyph by the help of which we may better acknowledge the height and depth of our own ignorance, and at the same time express our sense that there is an unseen world with which we in some mysterious way come into contact, though the writs of our thoughts do not run within it—­used in this way, the idea and the word have been found enduringly convenient.  The theory that luck is the main means of organic modification is the most absolute denial of God which it is possible for the human mind to conceive—­while the view that God is in all His creatures, He in them and they in Him, is only expressed in other words by declaring that the main means of organic modification is, not luck, but cunning.