Letter to Thomas William Gale Butler February 18th, 1876.

MY DEAR NAMESAKE . . .

My present literary business is a little essay some 25 or 30 pp. long, which is still all in the rough and I don’t know how it will shape, but the gist of it is somewhat as follows:-

1.  Actions which we have acquired with difficulty and now perform almost unconsciously—­as in playing a difficult piece of music, reading, talking, walking and the multitude of actions which escape our notice inside other actions, etc.—­all this worked out with some detail, say, four or five pages.

General deduction that we never do anything in this unconscious or semi-conscious manner unless we know how to do it exceedingly well and have had long practice.

Also that consciousness is a vanishing quantity and that as soon as we know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of it—­ consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty—­and hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it when we do not know of our knowledge.

2.  Whatever we do in this way is all one and the same in kind—­the difference being only in degree.  Playing [almost?] unconsciously—­ writing, more unconsciously (as to each letter)—­reading, very unconsciously—­talking, still more unconsciously (it is almost impossible for us to notice the action of our tongue in every letter)—­walking, much the same—­breathing, still to a certain extent within our own control—­heart’s beating, perceivable but beyond our control—­digestion, unperceivable and beyond our control, digestion being the oldest of the . . . habits.

3.  A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and has only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of considerations, in the same way as a man who goes into the City to buy Great Northern A Shares . . .  It is only unconscious of these operations because it has done them a very large number of times already.  A man may do a thing by a fluke once, but to say that a foetus can perform so difficult an operation as the growth of a pair of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how to do it, and without ever having done it before, is to contradict all human experience.  Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before.  Its unconsciousness (or speedy loss of memory) is simply the result of over-knowledge, not of under-knowledge.  It knows so well and has done it so often that its power of self-analysis is gone.  If it knew what it was doing, or was conscious of its own act in oxidising its blood after birth, I should suspect that it had not done it so often before; as it is I am confident that it must have done it more often—much more often—­than any act which we perform consciously during our whole lives.

4.  When, then, did it do it?  Clearly when last it was an impregnate ovum or some still lower form of life which resulted in that impregnate ovum.

5.  How is it, then, that it has not gained perceptible experience?  Simply because a single repetition makes little or no difference; but go back 20,000 repetitions and you will find that it has gained in experience and modified its performance very materially.

6.  But how about the identity?  What is identity?  Identity of matter?  Surely no.  There is no identity of matter between me as I now am, and me as an impregnate ovum.  Continuity of existence?  Then there is identity between me as an impregnate ovum and my father and mother as impregnate ova.  Drop out my father’s and mother’s lives between the dates of their being impregnate ova and the moment when I became an impregnate ovum.  See the ova only and consider the second ovum as the first two ova’s means not of reproducing themselves but of continuing themselves—­repeating themselves—­the intermediate lives being nothing but, as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye to the place where it will grow its next tuber.

7.  Given a single creature capable of reproducing itself and it must go on reproducing itself for ever, for it would not reproduce itself, unless it reproduced a creature that was going to reproduce itself, and so on ad infinitum.

Then comes Descent with Modification.  Similarity tempered with dissimilarity, and dissimilarity tempered with similarity—­a contradiction in terms, like almost everything else that is true or useful or indeed intelligible at all.  In each case of what we call descent, it is still the first reproducing creature identically the same—­doing what it has done before—­only with such modifications as the struggle for existence and natural selection have induced.  No matter how highly it has been developed, it can never be other than the primordial cell and must always begin as the primordial cell and repeat its last performance most nearly, but also, more or less, all its previous performances.

A begets A’ which is A with the additional experience of a dash.  A’ begets A’’ which is A with the additional experiences of A’ and A’’; and so on to A(n) but you can never eliminate the A.

8.  Let A(n) stand for a man.  He begins as the primordial cell—­ being verily nothing but the primordial cell which goes on splitting itself up for ever, but gaining continually in experience.  Put him in the same position as he was in before and he will do as he did before.  First he will do his tadpoles by rote, so to speak, on his head, from long practice; then he does his fish trick; then he grows arms and legs, all unconsciously from the inveteracy of the habit, till he comes to doing his man, and this lesson he has not yet learnt so thoroughly.  Some part of it, as the breathing and oxidisation business, he is well up to, inasmuch as they form part of previous roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, the power of speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble—­for he is very stupid—­a regular dunce in fact.  Then comes his newer and more complex environment, and this puzzles him—­arrests his attention—­whereon consciousness springs into existence, as a spark from a horse’s hoof.

To be continued—­I see it will have to be more than 30 pp.  It is still foggy in parts, but I must clear it a little.  It will go on to show that we are all one animal and that death (which was at first voluntary, and has only come to be disliked because those who did not dislike it committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only phases of the ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies daily.

Always very truly yours,
S. Butler.