The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

Clergymen and Chickens

[Extract from a lecture On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of Heredity delivered by Butler at the Working Men’s College, Great Ormond Street, on Saturday, 2nd December, 1882.]

Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg which egg can become a chicken in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a twelvemonth, while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs but give birth to a baby which will take three-and-twenty years before it can become another clergyman?  Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and hatched?  Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed?  The present arrangement is not convenient, it is not cheap, it is not free from danger, it is not only not perfect but is so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes, or as the cuckoo perhaps observes it.

The explanation usually given is that it is a law of nature that children should be born as they are, but this is like the parched pea which St. Anthony set before the devil when he came to supper with him and of which the devil said that it was good as far as it went.  We want more; we want to know with what familiar set of facts we are to connect the one in question which, though in our midst, at present dwells apart as a mysterious stranger of whose belongings, reason for coming amongst us, antecedents, and so forth, we believe ourselves to be ignorant, though we know him by sight and name and have a fair idea what sort of man he is to deal with.

We say it is a phenomenon of heredity that chickens should be laid as eggs in the first instance and clergymen born as babies, but, beyond the fact that we know heredity extremely well to look at and to do business with, we say that we know nothing about it.  I have for some years maintained this to be a mistake and have urged, in company with Professor Hering, of Prague, and others, that the connection between memory and heredity is so close that there is no reason for regarding the two as generically different, though for convenience sake it may be well to specify them by different names.  If I can persuade you that this is so, I believe I shall be able to make you understand why it is that chickens are hatched as eggs and clergymen born as babies.

When I say I can make you understand why this is so, I only mean that I can answer the first “why” that any one is likely to ask about it, and perhaps a “why” or two behind this.  Then I must stop.  This is all that is ever meant by those who say they can tell us why a thing is so and so.  No one professes to be able to reach back to the last “why” that any one can ask, and to answer it.  Fortunately for philosophers, people generally become fatigued after they have heard the answer to two or three “whys” and are glad enough to let the matter drop.  If, however, any one will insist on pushing question behind question long enough, he will compel us to admit that we come to the end of our knowledge which is based ultimately upon ignorance.  To get knowledge out of ignorance seems almost as hopeless a task as to get something out of any number of nothings, but this in practice is what we have to do and the less fuss we make over it the better.

When, therefore, we say that we know “why” a thing is so and so, we mean that we know its immediate antecedents and connections, and find them familiar to us.  I say that the immediate antecedent of, and the phenomenon most closely connected with, heredity is memory.  I do not profess to show why anything can remember at all, I only maintain that whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.