Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification Part 4

I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed. For in the preface to Hermann Muller's "Fertilisation of Flowers," {63a} which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin's death, I find him saying:- "Design in nature has for a long time deeply interested many men, and though the subject must now be looked at from a somewhat different point of view from what was formerly the case, it is not on that account rendered less interesting." This is mused forth as a general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing: the writer of the letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore's Almanac could not be more guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.

I cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I should; but I a.s.sume with confidence that whether there is design in organism or no, there is at any rate design in this pa.s.sage of Mr. Darwin's. This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and, moreover, it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin think it worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It has no fitness in its connection with Hermann Muller's book, for what little Hermann Muller says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why, then, should Mr. Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest attaching to design in organism? Neither has the pa.s.sage any connection with the rest of the preface. There is not another word about design, and even here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which could be disputed.

The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin wanted to hedge.

He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a burglar's jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again, and that though, as I insisted in "Evolution Old and New,"

and "Unconscious Memory," it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it, as "was formerly the case," it was not on that account any the less--design, as well as interesting.

I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly.

Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr.

Darwin's manner.

In pa.s.sing I will give another example of Mr Darwin's manner when he did not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann's "Studies in the Theory of Descent," published in 1881.

"Several distinguished naturalists," says Mr. Darwin, "maintain with much confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility"--or towards BEING ABLE TO BE PERFECTED.

I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor Weismann's book. There was a little something here and there, but not much.

It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr.

Romanes' latest contribution to biology--I mean his theory of physiological selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in Nature just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since the foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written. I admit to feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not appear earlier; as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable of further embryonic change, and this must be my excuse for saying less about Mr. Romanes' theory than I might perhaps otherwise do. I cordially, however, agree with the Times, which says that "Mr. George Romanes appears to be the biological investigator on whom the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most conspicuously descended" (August 16, 1886). Mr. Romanes is just the person whom the late Mr. Darwin would select to carry on his work, and Mr.

Darwin was just the kind of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would find himself instinctively attracted.

The Times continues--"The position which Mr. Romanes takes up is the result of his perception shared by many evolutionists, that the theory of natural selection is not really a theory of the origin of species. . . ." What, then, becomes of Mr. Darwin's most famous work, which was written expressly to establish natural selection as the main means of organic modification? "The new factor which Mr.

Romanes suggests," continues the Times, "is that at a certain stage of development of varieties in a state of nature a change takes place in their reproductive systems, rendering those which differ in some particulars mutually infertile, and thus the formation of new permanent species takes place without the swamping effect of free intercrossing. . . . How his theory can be properly termed one of selection he fails to make clear. If correct, it is a law or principle of operation rather than a process of selection. It has been objected to Mr. Romanes' theory that it is the re-statement of a fact. This objection is less important than the lack of facts in support of the theory." The Times, however, implies it as its opinion that the required facts will be forthcoming by and by, and that when they have been found Mr. Romanes' suggestion will const.i.tute "the most important addition to the theory of evolution since the publication of the 'Origin of Species.'" Considering that the Times has just implied the main thesis of the "Origin of Species" to be one which does not stand examination, this is rather a doubtful compliment.

Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the Times appears to perceive that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do not appear to see that though the expression natural selection must be always more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which is open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly fortuitous is chimerical as well as metaphorical. Both writers speak of natural selection as though there could not possibly be any selection in the course of nature, or natural survival, of any but accidental variations. Thus Mr.

Romanes says: {66a} "The swamping effect of free inter-crossing upon an individual variation const.i.tutes perhaps the most formidable difficulty with which THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION is beset."

And the writer of the article in the Times above referred to says: "In truth THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION presents many facts and results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of accounting for the existence of species." The a.s.sertion made in each case is true if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous variations is intended, but it does not hold good if the selection is supposed to be made from variations under which there lies a general principle of wide and abiding application. It is not likely that a man of Mr. Romanes' antecedents should not be perfectly awake to considerations so obvious as the foregoing, and I am afraid I am inclined to consider his whole suggestion as only an attempt upon the part of the wearer of Mr. Darwin's mantle to carry on Mr.

Darwin's work in Mr. Darwin's spirit.

I have seen Professor Hering's theory adopted recently more unreservedly by Dr. Creighton in his "Ill.u.s.trations of Unconscious Memory in Disease." {67a} Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering's address, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen him lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and organ has an individual memory. In "Life and Habit" I expressed a hope that the opinions it upheld would be found useful by medical men, and am therefore the more glad to see that this has proved to be the case. I may perhaps be pardoned if I quote the pa.s.sage in" Life and Habit" to which I am referring. It runs:-

"Mutatis mutandis, the above would seem to hold as truly about medicine as about politics. We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so much more" (of course I mean "about their own business") "than we do, that they cannot understand us;--but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what, therefore, they are most likely to expect; we can see that they get this as far as it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them, only bearing in mind that they will rebel equally against too sudden a change of treatment and no change at all" (p. 305).

Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which-- though I did not notice his saying so--he would doubtless see as a mode of cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same advantages as this, and requiring the same precautions against abuse; he would not, however, I am sure, deny that there could be no fertility of good results if too wide a cross were attempted, so that I may claim the weight of his authority as supporting both the theory of an unconscious memory in general, and the particular application of it to medicine which I had ventured to suggest.

"Has the word 'memory,'" he asks, "a real application to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only in a figure of speech?"

"If I had thought," he continues later, "that unconscious memory was no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed cla.s.s of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things that we all understand.

"For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain cla.s.s of maladies according to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description and not a figurative." (p. 2.)

As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards "alterative action" as "habit-breaking action."

As regards the organism's being guided throughout its development to maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that "Professor Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication." "I should prefer to say," he adds, "the acme of organic implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in their form or structure to show for the marvellous potentialities within them.

"I now come to the application of these considerations to the doctrine of unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of organic implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness. Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is potential memory, consciousness is actual memory."

I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as I should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to turn to Dr. Creighton's book, I will proceed to the subject indicated in my t.i.tle.

CHAPTER V--Statement of the Question at Issue

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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.sign 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 acc.u.mulated 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 c.u.mulatively 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 relinquis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s, 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 a.s.sumes 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.

CHAPTER VI--Statement of the Question at Issue (continued)

So much for the older view; and now for the more modern opinion.

According to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, and ostensibly, I am afraid I should add, a great majority of our most prominent biologists, the view taken by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is not a sound one. Some organisms, indeed, are so admirably adapted to their surroundings, and some organs discharge their functions with so much appearance of provision, that we are apt to think they must owe their development to sense of need and consequent contrivance, but this opinion is fantastic; the appearance of design is delusive; what we are tempted to see as an acc.u.mulated outcome of desire and cunning, we should regard as mainly an acc.u.mulated outcome of good luck.