Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification Part 6

Since the foregoing and several of the succeeding chapters were written, Mr. Herbert Spencer has made his position at once more clear and more widely understood by his articles "The Factors of Organic Evolution" which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for April and May, 1886. The present appears the fittest place in which to intercalate remarks concerning them.

Mr. Spencer asks whether those are right who regard Mr. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection as by itself sufficient to account for organic evolution.

"On critically examining the evidence" (modern writers never examine evidence, they always "critically," or "carefully," or "patiently,"

examine it), he writes, we shall find reason to think that it by no means explains all that has to be explained. Omitting for the present any consideration of a factor which may be considered primordial, it may be contended that one of the factors alleged by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck must be recognised as a co-operator.

Unless that increase of a part resulting from extra activity, and that decrease of it resulting from inactivity, are transmissible to descendants, we are without a key to many phenomena of organic evolution. UTTERLY INADEQUATE TO EXPLAIN THE MAJOR PART OF THE FACTS AS IS THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE INHERITANCE OF FUNCTIONALLY PRODUCED MODIFICATIONS, yet there is a minor part of the facts very extensive though less, which must be ascribed to this cause."

(Italics mine.)

Mr. Spencer does not here say expressly that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck considered inheritance of functionally produced modifications to be the sole explanation of the facts of organic life; modern writers on evolution for the most part avoid saying anything expressly; this nevertheless is the conclusion which the reader naturally draws--and was doubtless intended to draw--from Mr.

Spencer's words. He gathers that these writers put forward an "utterly inadequate" theory, which cannot for a moment be entertained in the form in which they left it, but which, nevertheless, contains contributions to the formation of a just opinion which of late years have been too much neglected.

This inference would be, as Mr. Spencer ought to know, a mistaken one. Erasmus Darwin, who was the first to depend mainly on functionally produced modifications, attributes, if not as much importance to variations induced either by what we must call chance, or by causes having no connection with use and disuse, as Mr.

Spencer does, still so nearly as much that there is little to choose between them. Mr. Spencer's words show that he attributes, if not half, still not far off half the modification that has actually been produced, to use and disuse. Erasmus Darwin does not say whether he considers use and disuse to have brought about more than half or less than half; he only says that animal and vegetable modification is "in part produced" by the exertions of the animals and vegetables themselves; the impression I have derived is, that just as Mr.

Spencer considers rather less than half to be due to use and disuse, so Erasmus Darwin considers decidedly more than half--so much more, in fact, than half as to make function unquestionably the factor most proper to be insisted on if only one can be given. Further than this he did not go. I will quote enough of Dr. Erasmus Darwin's own words to put his position beyond doubt. He writes:-

"Thirdly, when we enumerate the great changes produced in the species of animals before their nativity, as, for example, when the offspring reproduces the effects produced upon the parent by accident or culture, or the changes produced by the mixture of species, as in mules; or the changes produced probably by exuberance of nourishment supplied to the foetus, as in monstrous births with additional limbs; many of these enormities are propagated and continued as a variety at least, if not as a new species of animal.

I have seen a breed of cats with an additional claw on every foot; of poultry also with an additional claw and with wings to their feet; and of others without rumps. Mr. Buffon" (who, by the way, surely, was no more "Mr. Buffon" than Lord Salisbury is "Mr.

Salisbury") "mentions a breed of dogs without tails which are common at Rome and Naples--which he supposes to have been produced by a custom long established of cutting their tails close off." {102a}

Here not one of the causes of variation adduced is connected with use and disuse, or effort, volition, and purpose; the manner, moreover, in which they are brought forward is not that of one who shows signs of recalcitrancy about admitting other causes of modification as well as use and disuse; indeed, a little lower down he almost appears to a.s.sign the subordinate place to functionally produced modifications, for he says--"Fifthly, from their first rudiments or primordium to the termination of their lives, all animals undergo perpetual transformations; WHICH ARE IN PART PRODUCED by their own exertions in consequence of their desires and aversions, of their pleasures and their pains, or of irritations or of a.s.sociations; and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity."

I have quoted enough to show that Dr. Erasmus Darwin would have protested against the supposition that functionally produced modifications were an adequate explanation of all the phenomena of organic modification. He declares accident and the chances and changes of this mortal life to be potent and frequent causes of variations, which, being not infrequently inherited, result in the formation of varieties and even species, but considers these causes if taken alone as no less insufficient to account for observable facts than the theory of functionally produced modifications would be if not supplemented by inheritance of so-called fortuitous, or spontaneous variations. The difference between Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Mr. Spencer does not consist in the denial by the first, that a variety which happens, no matter how accidentally, to have varied in a way that enables it to comply more fully and readily with the conditions of its existence, is likely to live longer and leave more offspring than one less favoured; nor in the denial by the second of the inheritance and acc.u.mulation of functionally produced modifications; but in the amount of stress which they respectively lay on the relative importance of the two great factors of organic evolution, the existence of which they are alike ready to admit.

With Erasmus Darwin there is indeed luck, and luck has had a great deal to do with organic modification, but no amount of luck would have done unless cunning had known how to take advantage of it; whereas if cunning be given, a very little luck at a time will acc.u.mulate in the course of ages and become a mighty heap. Cunning, therefore, is the factor on which, having regard to the usage of language and the necessity for simplifying facts, he thinks it most proper to insist. Surely this is as near as may be the opinion which common consent ascribes to Mr. Spencer himself. It is certainly the one which, in supporting Erasmus Darwin's system as against his grandson's, I have always intended to support. With Charles Darwin, on the other hand, there is indeed cunning, effort, and consequent use and disuse; nor does he deny that these have produced some, and sometimes even an important, effect in modifying species, but he a.s.signs by far the most important role in the whole scheme to natural selection, which, as I have already shown, must, with him, be regarded as a synonym for luck pure and simple. This, for reasons well shown by Mr. Spencer in the articles under consideration, is so untenable that it seems only possible to account for its having been advanced at all by supposing Mr.

Darwin's judgment to have been perverted by some one or more of the many causes that might tend to warp them. What the chief of those causes may have been I shall presently point out.

Buffon erred rather on the side of ignoring functionally produced modifications than of insisting on them. The main agency with him is the direct action of the environment upon the organism. This, no doubt, is a flaw in Buffon's immortal work, but it is one which Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck easily corrected; nor can we doubt that Buffon would have readily accepted their amendment if it had been suggested to him. Buffon did infinitely more in the way of discovering and establis.h.i.+ng the theory of descent with modification than any one has ever done either before or since. He was too much occupied with proving the fact of evolution at all, to dwell as fully as might have been wished upon the details of the process whereby the amoeba had become man, but we have already seen that he regarded inherited mutilation as the cause of establis.h.i.+ng a new breed of dogs, and this is at any rate not laying much stress on functionally produced modifications. Again, when writing of the dog, he speaks of variations arising "BY SOME CHANCE common enough with nature," {104a} and clearly does not contemplate function as the sole cause of modification. Practically, though I grant I should be less able to quote pa.s.sages in support of my opinion than I quite like, I do not doubt that his position was much the same as that of his successors, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

Lamarck is more vulnerable than either Erasmus Darwin or Buffon on the score of unwillingness to a.s.sign its full share to mere chance, but I do not for a moment believe his comparative reticence to have been caused by failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a fateful one. He saw that the cunning or functional side had been too much lost sight of, and therefore insisted on it, but he did not mean to say that there is no such thing as luck. "Let us suppose,"

he says, "that a gra.s.s growing in a low-lying meadow, gets carried BY SOME ACCIDENT to the brow of a neighbouring hill, where the soil is still damp enough for the plant to be able to exist." {105a} Or again--"With sufficient time, favourable conditions of life, successive changes in the condition of the globe, and the power of new surroundings and habits to modify the organs of living bodies, all animal and vegetable forms have been imperceptibly rendered such as we now see them." {105b} Who can doubt that accident is here regarded as a potent factor of evolution, as well as the design that is involved in the supposition that modification is, in the main, functionally induced? Again he writes, "As regards the circ.u.mstances that give rise to variation, the princ.i.p.al are climatic changes, different temperatures of any of a creature's environments, differences of abode, of habit, of the most frequent actions, and lastly of the means of obtaining food, self-defence, reproduction," &c. {105c} I will not dwell on the small inconsistencies which may be found in the pa.s.sages quoted above; the reader will doubtless see them, and will also doubtless see that in spite of them there can be no doubt that Lamarck, while believing modification to be effected mainly by the survival in the struggle for existence of modifications which had been induced functionally, would not have hesitated to admit the survival of favourable variations due to mere accident as also a potent factor in inducing the results we see around us.

For the rest, Mr. Spencer's articles have relieved me from the necessity of going into the evidence which proves that such structures as a giraffe's neck, for example, cannot possibly have been produced by the acc.u.mulation of variations which had their origin mainly in accident. There is no occasion to add anything to what Mr. Spencer has said on this score, and I am satisfied that those who do not find his argument convince them would not be convinced by anything I might say; I shall, therefore, omit what I had written on this subject, and confine myself to giving the substance of Mr. Spencer's most telling argument against Mr.

Darwin's theory that accidental variations, if favourable, would acc.u.mulate and result in seemingly adaptive structures. Mr. Spencer well shows that luck or chance is insufficient as a motive-power, or helm, of evolution; but luck is only absence of design; if, then, absence of design is found to fail, it follows that there must have been design somewhere, nor can the design be more conveniently placed than in a.s.sociation with function.

Mr. Spencer contends that where life is so simple as to consist practically in the discharge of only one function, or where circ.u.mstances are such that some one function is supremely important (a state of things, by the way, more easily found in hypothesis than in nature--at least as continuing without modification for many successive seasons), then accidental variations, if favourable, would indeed acc.u.mulate and result in modification, without the aid of the transmission of functionally produced modification. This is true; it is also true, however, that only a very small number of species in comparison with those we see around us could thus arise, and that we should never have got plants and animals as embodiments of the two great fundamental principles on which it is alone possible that life can be conducted, {107a} and species of plants and animals as embodiments of the details involved in carrying out these two main principles.

If the earliest organism could have only varied favourably in one direction, the one possible favourable accidental variation would have acc.u.mulated so long as the organism continued to exist at all, inasmuch as this would be preserved whenever it happened to occur, while every other would be lost in the struggle of compet.i.tive forms; but even in the lowest forms of life there is more than one condition in respect of which the organism must be supposed sensitive, and there are as many directions in which variations may be favourable as there are conditions of the environment that affect the organism. We cannot conceive of a living form as having a power of adaptation limited to one direction only; the elasticity which admits of a not being "extreme to mark that which is done amiss" in one direction will commonly admit of it in as many directions as there are possible favourable modes of variation; the number of these, as has been just said, depends upon the number of the conditions of the environment that affect the organism, and these last, though in the long run and over considerable intervals of time tolerably constant, are over shorter intervals liable to frequent and great changes; so that there is nothing in Mr. Charles Darwin's system of modification through the natural survival of the lucky, to prevent gain in one direction one year from being lost irretrievably in the next, through the greater success of some in no way correlated variation, the fortunate possessors of which alone survive. This, in its turn, is as likely as not to disappear shortly through the arising of some difficulty in some entirely new direction, and so on; nor, if function be regarded as of small effect in determining organism, is there anything to ensure either that, even if ground be lost for a season or two in any one direction, it shall be recovered presently on resumption by the organism of the habits that called it into existence, or that it shall appear synchronously in a sufficient number of individuals to ensure its not being soon lost through gamogenesis.

How is progress ever to be made if races keep reversing, Penelope- like, in one generation all that they have been achieving in the preceding? And how, on Mr. Darwin's system, of which the acc.u.mulation of strokes of luck is the greatly preponderating feature, is a h.o.a.rd ever to be got together and conserved, no matter how often luck may have thrown good things in an organism's way?

Luck, or absence of design, may be sometimes almost said to throw good things in our way, or at any rate we may occasionally get more through having made no design than any design we should have been likely to have formed would have given us; but luck does not h.o.a.rd these good things for our use and make our wills for us, nor does it keep providing us with the same good gifts again and again, and no matter how often we reject them.

I had better, perhaps, give Mr. Spencer's own words as quoted by himself in his article in the Nineteenth Century for April, 1886.

He there wrote as follows, quoting from section 166 of his "Principles of Biology," which appeared in 1864:-

"Where the life is comparatively simple, or where surrounding circ.u.mstances render some one function supremely important, the survival of the fittest" (which means here the survival of the luckiest) "may readily bring about the appropriate structural change, without any aid from the transmission of functionally- acquired modifications" (into which effort and design have entered).

"But in proportion as the life grows complex--in proportion as a healthy existence cannot be secured by a large endowment of some one power, but demands many powers; in the same proportion do there arise obstacles to the increase of any particular power, by 'the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life'" (that is to say, through mere survival of the luckiest). "As fast as the faculties are multiplied, so fast does it become possible for the several members of a species to have various kinds of superiority over one another. While one saves its life by higher speed, another does the like by clearer vision, another by keener scent, another by quicker hearing, another by greater strength, another by unusual power of enduring cold or hunger, another by special sagacity, another by special timidity, another by special courage; and others by other bodily and mental attributes. Now it is unquestionably true that, other things equal, each of these attributes, giving its possessor an equal extra chance of life, is likely to be transmitted to posterity. But there seems no reason to believe it will be increased in subsequent generations by natural selection. That it may be thus increased, the animals not possessing more than average endowments of it must be more frequently killed off than individuals highly endowed with it; and this can only happen when the attribute is one of greater importance, for the time being, than most of the other attributes.

If those members of the species which have but ordinary shares of it, nevertheless survive by virtue of other superiorities which they severally possess, then it is not easy to see how this particular attribute can be developed by natural selection in subsequent generations." (For if some other superiority is a greater source of luck, then natural selection, or survival of the luckiest, will ensure that this other superiority be preserved at the expense of the one acquired in the earlier generation.) "The probability seems rather to be, that by gamogenesis, this extra endowment will, on the average, be diminished in posterity--just serving in the long run to compensate the deficient endowments of other individuals, whose special powers lie in other directions; and so to keep up the normal structure of the species. The working out of the process is here somewhat difficult to follow" (there is no difficulty as soon as it is perceived that Mr. Darwin's natural selection invariably means, or ought to mean, the survival of the luckiest, and that seasons and what they bring with them, though fairly constant on an average, yet individually vary so greatly that what is luck in one season is disaster in another); "but it appears to me that as fast as the number of bodily and mental faculties increases, and as fast as the maintenance of life comes to depend less on the amount of any one, and more on the combined action of all, so fast does the production of specialities of character by natural selection alone become difficult. Particularly does this seem to be so with a species so mult.i.tudinous in powers as mankind; and above all does it seem to be so with such of the human powers as have but minor shares in aiding the struggle for life--the aesthetic faculties, for example.

"Dwelling for a moment on this last ill.u.s.tration of the cla.s.s of difficulties described, let us ask how we are to interpret the development of the musical faculty; how came there that endowment of musical faculty which characterises modern Europeans at large, as compared with their remote ancestors? The monotonous chants of low savages cannot be said to show any melodic inspiration; and it is not evident that an individual savage who had a little more musical perception than the rest would derive any such advantage in the maintenance of life as would secure the spread of his superiority by inheritance of the variation," &c.

It should be observed that the pa.s.sage given in the last paragraph but one appeared in 1864, only five years after the first edition of the "Origin of Species," but, crus.h.i.+ng as it is, Mr. Darwin never answered it. He treated it as nonexistent--and this, doubtless from a business standpoint, was the best thing he could do. How far such a course was consistent with that single-hearted devotion to the interests of science for which Mr. Darwin developed such an abnormal reputation, is a point which I must leave to his many admirers to determine.

CHAPTER VIII--Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm

One would think the issue stated in the three preceding chapters was decided in the stating. This, as I have already implied, is probably the reason why those who have a vested interest in Mr.

Darwin's philosophical reputation have avoided stating it.

It may be said that, seeing the result is a joint one, inasmuch as both "res" and "me," or both luck and cunning, enter so largely into development, neither factor can claim pre-eminence to the exclusion of the other. But life is short and business long, and if we are to get the one into the other we must suppress details, and leave our words pregnant, as painters leave their touches when painting from nature. If one factor concerns us greatly more than the other, we should emphasize it, and let the other go without saying, by force of a.s.sociation. There is no fear of its being lost sight of; a.s.sociation is one of the few really liberal things in nature; by liberal, I mean precipitate and inaccurate; the power of words, as of pictures, and indeed the power to carry on life at all, vests in the fact that a.s.sociation does not stick to the letter of its bond, but will take the half for the whole without even looking closely at the coin given to make sure that it is not counterfeit. Through the haste and high pressure of business, errors arise continually, and these errors give us the shocks of which our consciousness is compounded. Our whole conscious life, therefore, grows out of memory and out of the power of a.s.sociation, in virtue of which not only does the right half pa.s.s for the whole, but the wrong half not infrequently pa.s.ses current for it also, without being challenged and found out till, as it were, the accounts come to be balanced, and it is found that they will not do so.

Variations are an organism's way of getting over an unexpected discrepancy between its resources as shown by the fly-leaves of its own cheques and the universe's pa.s.sbook; the universe is generally right, or would be upheld as right if the matter were to come before the not too incorruptible courts of nature, and in nine cases out of ten the organism has made the error in its own favour, so that it must now pay or die. It can only pay by altering its mode of life, and how long is it likely to be before a new departure in its mode of life comes out in its own person and in those of its family?

Granted it will at first come out in their appearance only, but there can be no change in appearance without some slight corresponding organic modification. In practice there is usually compromise in these matters. The universe, if it does not give an organism short shrift and eat it at once, will commonly abate something of its claim; it gets tricked out of an additional moiety by the organism; the organism really does pay something by way of changed habits; this results in variation, in virtue of which the accounts are cooked, cobbled, and pa.s.sed by a series of those miracles of inconsistency which was call compromises, and after this they cannot be reopened--not till next time.

Surely of the two factors which go to the making up of development, cunning is the one more proper to be insisted on as determining the physical and psychical well or ill being, and hence, ere long, the future form of the organism. We can hardly open a newspaper without seeing some sign of this; take, for example, the following extract from a letter in the Times of the day on which I am writing (February 8, 1886)-- "You may pa.s.s along a road which divides a settlement of Irish Celts from one of Germans. They all came to the country equally without money, and have had to fight their way in the forest, but the difference in their condition is very remarkable; on the German side there is comfort, thrift, peace, but on the other side the spectacle is very different." Few will deny that slight organic differences, corresponding to these differences of habit, are already perceptible; no Darwinian will deny that these differences are likely to be inherited, and, in the absence of intermarriage between the two colonies, to result in still more typical difference than that which exists at present. According to Mr. Darwin, the improved type of the more successful race would not be due mainly to transmitted perseverance in well-doing, but to the fact that if any member of the German colony "happened" to be born "ever so slightly," &c. Of course this last is true to a certain extent also; if any member of the German colony does "happen to be born," &c., then he will stand a better chance of surviving, and, if he marries a wife like himself, of transmitting his good qualities; but how about the happening? How is it that this is of such frequent occurrence in the one colony, and is so rare in the other?

Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis. True, but how and why? Through the race being favoured? In one sense, doubtless, it is true that no man can have anything except it be given him from above, but it must be from an above into the composition of which he himself largely enters. G.o.d gives us all things; but we are a part of G.o.d, and that part of Him, moreover, whose department it more especially is to look after ourselves. It cannot be through luck, for luck is blind, and does not pick out the same people year after year and generation after generation; shall we not rather say, then, that it is because mind, or cunning, is a great factor in the achievement of physical results, and because there is an abiding memory between successive generations, in virtue of which the cunning of an earlier one enures to the benefit of its successors?

It is one of the commonplaces of biology that the nature of the organism (which is mainly determined by ancestral antecedents) is greatly more important in determining its future than the conditions of its environment, provided, of course, that these are not too cruelly abnormal, so that good seed will do better on rather poor soil, than bad seed on rather good soil; this alone should be enough to show that cunning, or individual effort, is more important in determining organic results than luck is, and therefore that if either is to be insisted on to the exclusion of the other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is more correctly said to be the main means of the development of capital--Luck? or Cunning? Of course there must be something to be developed--and luck, that is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable, enters everywhere; but is it more convenient with our oldest and best-established ideas to say that luck is the main means of the development of capital, or that cunning is so? Can there be a moment's hesitation in admitting that if capital is found to have been developed largely, continuously, by many people, in many ways, over a long period of time, it can only have been by means of continued application, energy, effort, industry, and good sense? Granted there has been luck too; of course there has, but we let it go without saying, whereas we cannot let the skill or cunning go without saying, inasmuch as we feel the cunning to have been the essence of the whole matter.

Granted, again, that there is no test more fallacious on a small scale than that of immediate success. As applied to any particular individual, it breaks down completely. It is unfortunately no rare thing to see the good man striving against fate, and the fool born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Still on a large scale no test can be conceivably more reliable; a blockhead may succeed for a time, but a succession of many generations of blockheads does not go on steadily gaining ground, adding field to field and farm to farm, and becoming year by year more capable and prosperous. Given time-- of which there is no scant in the matter of organic development--and cunning will do more with ill luck than folly with good. People do not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of whist running, if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves. Cunning, if it can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere luck unaided by cunning, no matter what start luck may have had, if the race be a fairly long one. Growth is a kind of success which does indeed come to some organisms with less effort than to others, but it cannot be maintained and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, for, as a general rule, unless the variation has so much connection with the organism's past habits and ways of thought as to be in no proper sense of the word "fortuitous," the organism will not know what to do with it when it has got it, no matter how favourable it may be, and it is little likely to be handed down to descendants. Indeed the kind of people who get on best in the world--and what test to a Darwinian can be comparable to this?--commonly do insist on cunning rather than on luck, sometimes perhaps even unduly; speaking, at least, from experience, I have generally found myself more or less of a failure with those Darwinians to whom I have endeavoured to excuse my shortcomings on the score of luck.

It may be said that the contention that the nature of the organism does more towards determining its future than the conditions of its immediate environment do, is only another way of saying that the accidents which have happened to an organism in the persons of its ancestors throughout all time are more irresistible by it for good or ill than any of the more ordinary chances and changes of its own immediate life. I do not deny this; but these ancestral accidents were either turned to account, or neglected where they might have been taken advantage of; they thus pa.s.sed either into skill, or want of skill; so that whichever way the fact is stated the result is the same; and if simplicity of statement be regarded, there is no more convenient way of putting the matter than to say that though luck is mighty, cunning is mightier still. Organism commonly shows its cunning by practising what Horace preached, and treating itself as more plastic than its surroundings; those indeed who have had the greatest the first to admit that they had gained their ends more by reputation as moulders of circ.u.mstances have ever been shaping their actions and themselves to suit events, than by trying to shape events to suit themselves and their actions. Modification, like charity, begins at home.

But however this may be, there can be no doubt that cunning is in the long run mightier than luck as regards the acquisition of property, and what applies to property applies to organism also.

Property, as I have lately seen was said by Rosmini, is a kind of extension of the personality into the outside world. He might have said as truly that it is a kind of penetration of the outside world within the limits of the personality, or that it is at any rate a prophesying of, and essay after, the more living phase of matter in the direction of which it is tending. If approached from the dynamical or living side of the underlying substratum, it is the beginning of the comparatively stable equilibrium which we call brute matter; if from the statical side, that is to say, from that of brute matter, it is the beginning of that dynamical state which we a.s.sociate with life; it is the last of ego and first of non ego, or vice versa, as the case may be; it is the ground whereon the two meet and are neither wholly one nor wholly the other, but a whirling ma.s.s of contradictions such as attends all fusion.

What property is to a man's mind or soul that his body is also, only more so. The body is property carried to the bitter end, or property is the body carried to the bitter end, whichever the reader chooses; the expression "organic wealth" is not figurative; none other is so apt and accurate; so universally, indeed, is this recognised that the fact has found expression in our liturgy, which bids us pray for all those who are any wise afflicted "in mind, body, or estate;" no inference, therefore, can be more simple and legitimate than the one in accordance with which the laws that govern the development of wealth generally are supposed also to govern the particular form of health and wealth which comes most closely home to us--I mean that of our bodily implements or organs.

What is the stomach but a living sack, or purse of untanned leather, wherein we keep our means of subsistence? Food is money made easy; it is petty cash in its handiest and most reduced form; it is our way of a.s.similating our possessions and making them indeed our own.

What is the purse but a kind of abridged extra corporeal stomach wherein we keep the money which we convert by purchase into food, as we presently convert the food by digestion into flesh and blood?

And what living form is there which is without a purse or stomach, even though it have to job it by the meal as the amoeba does, and exchange it for some other article as soon as it has done eating?

How marvellously does the a.n.a.logy hold between the purse and the stomach alike as regards form and function; and I may say in pa.s.sing that, as usual, the organ which is the more remote from protoplasm is at once more special, more an object of our consciousness, and less an object of its own.

Talk of ego and non ego meeting, and of the hopelessness of avoiding contradiction in terms--talk of this, and look, in pa.s.sing, at the amoeba. It is itself qua maker of the stomach and being fed; it is not itself qua stomach and qua its using itself as a mere tool or implement to feed itself with. It is active and pa.s.sive, object and subject, ego and non ego--every kind of Irish bull, in fact, which a sound logician abhors--and it is only because it has persevered, as I said in "Life and Habit," in thus defying logic and arguing most virtuously in a most vicious circle, that it has come in the persons of some of its descendants to reason with sufficient soundness. And what the amoeba is man is also; man is only a great many amoebas, most of them dreadfully narrow-minded, going up and down the country with their goods and chattels like gipsies in a caravan; he is only a great many amoebas that have had much time and money spent on their education, and received large bequests of organised intelligence from those that have gone before them.

The most incorporate tool--we will say an eye, or a tooth, or the closed fist when used to strike--has still something of the non ego about it in so far as it is used; those organs, again, that are the most completely separate from the body, as the locomotive engine, must still from time to time kiss the soil of the human body, and be handled and thus crossed with man again if they would remain in working order. They cannot be cut adrift from the most living form of matter (I mean most living from our point of view), and remain absolutely without connection with it for any length of time, any more than a seal can live without coming up sometimes to breathe; and in so far as they become linked on to living beings they live.

Everything is living which is in close communion with, and interpermeated by, that something which we call mind or thought.

Giordano Bruno saw this long ago when he made an interlocutor in one of his dialogues say that a man's hat and cloak are alive when he is wearing them. "Thy boots and spurs live," he exclaims, "when thy feet carry them; thy hat lives when thy head is within it; and so the stable lives when it contains the horse or mule, or even yourself;" nor is it easy to see how this is to be refuted except at a cost which no one in his senses will offer.

It may be said that the life of clothes in wear and implements in use is no true life, inasmuch as it differs from flesh and blood life in too many and important respects; that we have made up our minds about not letting life outside the body too decisively to allow the question to be reopened; that if this be tolerated we shall have societies for the prevention of cruelty to chairs and tables, or cutting clothes amiss, or wearing them to tatters, or whatever other absurdity may occur to idle and unkind people; the whole discussion, therefore, should be ordered out of court at once.

I admit that this is much the most sensible position to take, but it can only be taken by those who turn the deafest of deaf ears to the teachings of science, and tolerate no going even for a moment below the surface of things. People who take this line must know how to put their foot down firmly in the matter of closing a discussion.

Some one may perhaps innocently say that some parts of the body are more living and vital than others, and those who stick to common sense may allow this, but if they do they must close the discussion on the spot; if they listen to another syllable they are lost; if they let the innocent interlocutor say so much as that a piece of well-nourished healthy brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail that wants cutting, or than the calcareous parts of a bone, the solvent will have been applied which will soon make an end of common sense ways of looking at the matter. Once even admit the use of the participle "dying," which involves degrees of death, and hence an entry of death in part into a living body, and common sense must either close the discussion at once, or ere long surrender at discretion.

Common sense can only carry weight in respect of matters with which every one is familiar, as forming part of the daily and hourly conduct of affairs; if we would keep our comfortable hard and fast lines, our rough and ready unspecialised ways of dealing with difficult questions, our impatience of what St. Paul calls "doubtful disputations," we must refuse to quit the ground on which the judgments of mankind have been so long and often given that they are not likely to be questioned. Common sense is not yet formulated in manners of science or philosophy, for only few consider them; few decisions, therefore, have been arrived at which all hold final.