Life and Habit Part 14

"Darwin justly mentions the greyhound as being equal to any natural species in the perfect co-ordination of its parts, 'all adapted for extreme fleetness and for running down weak prey.' Yet it is an artificial species (and not physiologically a species at all) formed by a long-continued selection under domestication; and there is no reason to suppose that any of the variations which have been selected to form it have been other than gradual and almost imperceptible.

Suppose that it has taken five hundred years to form the greyhound out of his wolf-like ancestor. This is a mere guess, but it gives the order of magnitude. Now, if so, how long would it take to obtain an elephant from a protozoon or even from a tadpole-like fish? Ought it not to take much more than a million times as long?" ("Genesis of Species," p. 155).

I should be very sorry to p.r.o.nounce any opinion upon the foregoing data; but a general impression is left upon my mind, that if the differences between an elephant and a tadpole-like fish have arisen from the acc.u.mulation of small variations that have had no direction given them by intelligence and sense of needs, then no time conceivable by man would suffice for their development. But grant "a little dose of reason and judgement," even to animals low down in the scale of nature, and grant this, not only during their later life, but during their embryological existence, and see with what infinitely greater precision of aim and with what increased speed the variations would arise. Evolution entirely unaided by inherent intelligence must be a very slow, if not quite inconceivable, process. Evolution helped by intelligence would still be slow, but not so desperately slow. One can conceive that there has been sufficient time for the second, but one cannot conceive it for the first.

I find from Mr. Mivart that objection has been taken to Mr. Darwin's views, on account of the great odds that exist against the appearance of any given variation at one and the same time, in a sufficient number of individuals, to prevent its being obliterated almost as soon as produced by the admixture of unvaried blood which would so greatly preponderate around it; and indeed the necessity for a nearly simultaneous and similar variation, or readiness so to vary on the part of many individuals, seems almost a postulate for evolution at all. On this subject Mr. Mivart writes:-

"The 'North British Review' (speaking of the supposition that species is changed by the survival of a few individuals in a century through a similar and favourable variation) says -

"'It is very difficult to see how this can be accomplished, even when the variation is eminently favourable indeed; and still more, when the advantage gained is very slight, as must generally be the case.

The advantage, whatever it may be, is utterly outbalanced by numerical inferiority. A million creatures are born; ten thousand survive to produce offspring. One of the million has twice as good a chance as any other of surviving, but the chances are fifty to one against the gifted individuals being one of the hundred survivors.

No doubt the chances are twice as great against any other individual, but this does not prevent their being enormously in favour of SOME average individual. However slight the advantage may be, if it is shared by half the individuals produced, it will probably be present in at least fifty-one of the survivors, and in a larger proportion of their offspring; but the chances are against the preservation of any one "sport" (i.e., sudden marked variation) in a numerous tribe. The vague use of an imperfectly-understood doctrine of chance, has led Darwinian supporters, first, to confuse the two cases above distinguished, and secondly, to imagine that a very slight balance in favour of some individual sport must lead to its perpetuation. All that can be said is that in the above example the favoured sport would be preserved once in fifty times. Let us consider what will be its influence on the main stock when preserved. It will breed and have a progeny of say 100; now this progeny will, on the whole, be intermediate between the average individual and the sport. The odds in favour of one of this generation of the new breed will be, say one and a half to one, as compared with the average individual; the odds in their favour will, therefore, be less than that of their parents; but owing to their greater number the chances are that about one and a half of them would survive. Unless these breed together--a most improbable event--their progeny would again approach the average individual; there would be 150 of them, and their superiority would be, say in the ratio of one and a quarter to one; the probability would now be that nearly two of them would survive, and have 200 children with an eighth superiority. Rather more than two of these would survive; but the superiority would again dwindle; until after a few generations it would no longer be observed, and would count for no more in the struggle for life than any of the hundred trifling advantages which occur in the ordinary organs.

"'An ill.u.s.tration will bring this conception home. Suppose a white man to have been wrecked on an island inhabited by negroes, and to have established himself in friendly relations with a powerful tribe, whose customs he has learnt. Suppose him to possess the physical strength, energy, and ability of a dominant white race, and let the food of the island suit his const.i.tution; grant him every advantage which we can conceive a white to possess over the native; concede that in the struggle for existence, his chance of a long life will be much superior to that of the native chiefs; yet from all these admissions there does not follow the conclusion, that after a limited or unlimited number of generations, the inhabitants of the island will be white. Our s.h.i.+pwrecked hero would probably become king; he would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence; he would have a great many wives and children . . . In the first generation there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes, much superior in average intelligence to the negroes. We might expect the throne for some generations to be occupied by a more or less yellow king; but can any one believe that the whole island will gradually acquire a white, or even a yellow population? . . . Darwin says, that in the struggle for life a grain may turn the balance in favour of a given structure, which will then be preserved. But one of the weights in the scale of nature is due to the number of a given tribe. Let there be 7000 A's and 7000 B's representing two varieties of a given animal, and let all the B's, in virtue of a slight difference of structure, have the better chance by one-thousandth part. We must allow that there is a slight probability that the descendants of B will supplant the descendants of A; but let there be 7001 A's against 7000 B's at first, and the chances are once more equal, while if there be 7002 A's to start, the odds would be laid on the A's. Thus they stand a greater chance of being killed; but, then, they can better afford to be killed. The grain will only turn the scales when these are very nicely balanced, and an advantage in numbers counts for weight, even as an advantage in structure. As the numbers of the favoured variety diminish, so must its relative advantages increase, if the chance of its existence is to surpa.s.s the chance of its extinction, until hardly any conceivable advantage would enable the descendants of a single pair to exterminate the descendants of many thousands, if they and their descendants are supposed to breed freely with the inferior variety, and so gradually lose their ascendancy,'" ("North British Review," June 1867, p. 286 "Genesis of Species," p. 64, and onwards).

Against this it should be remembered that there is always an antecedent probability that several specimens of a given variation would appear at one time and place. This would probably be the case even on Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, that the variations are fortuitous; if they are mainly guided by sense of need and intelligence, it would almost certainly be so, for all would have much the same idea as to their well-being, and the same cause which would lead one to vary in this direction would lead not a few others to do so at the same time, or to follow suit. Thus we see that many human ideas and inventions have been conceived independently but simultaneously. The chances, moreover, of specimens that have varied successfully, intermarrying, are, I think, greater than the reviewer above quoted from would admit. I believe that on the hypothesis that the variations are fortuitous, and certainly on the supposition that they are intelligent, they might be looked for in members of the same family, who would hence have a better chance of finding each other out.

Serious as is the difficulty advanced by the reviewer as against Mr.

Darwin's theory, it may be in great measure parried without departing from Mr. Darwin's own position, but the "little dose of judgement and reason" removes it, absolutely and entirely. As for the reviewer's s.h.i.+pwrecked hero, surely the reviewer must know that Mr. Darwin would no more expect an island of black men to be turned white, or even perceptibly whitened after a few generations, than the reviewer himself would do so. But if we turn from what "might" or what "would" happen to what "does" happen, we find that a few white families have nearly driven the Indian from the United States, the Australian natives from Australia, and the Maories from New Zealand.

True, these few families have been helped by immigration; but it will be admitted that this has only accelerated a result which would otherwise, none the less surely, have been effected.

There is all the difference between a sudden sport, or even a variety introduced from a foreign source, and the gradual, intelligent, and, in the main, steady, growth of a race towards ends always a little, but not much, in advance of what it can at present compa.s.s, until it has reached equilibrium with its surroundings. So far as Mr.

Darwin's variations are of the nature of "sport," i.e., rare, and owing to nothing that we can in the least a.s.sign to any known cause, the reviewer's objections carry much weight. Against the view here advocated, they are powerless.

I cannot here go into the difficulties of the geologic record, but they too will, I believe, be felt to be almost infinitely simplified by supposing the development of structure and instinct to be guided by intelligence and memory, which, even under unstable conditions, would be able to meet in some measure the demands made upon them.

When Mr. Mivart deals with evolution and ethics, I am afraid that I differ from him even more widely than I have done from Mr. Darwin.

He writes ("Genesis of Species," p. 234): "That 'natural selection'

could not have produced from the sensations of pleasure and pain experienced by brutes a higher degree of morality than was useful; therefore it could have produced any amount of 'beneficial habits,'

but not abhorrence of certain acts as impure and sinful."

Possibly "natural selection" may not be able to do much in the way of acc.u.mulating variations that do not arise; but that, according to the views supported in this volume, all that is highest and most beautiful in the soul, as well as in the body, could be, and has been, developed from beings lower than man, I do not greatly doubt.

Mr. Mivart and myself should probably differ as to what is and what is not beautiful. Thus he writes of "the n.o.ble virtue of a Marcus Aurelius" (p. 235), than whom, for my own part, I know few respectable figures in history to whom I am less attracted. I cannot but think that Mr. Mivart has taken his estimate of this emperor at second-hand, and without reference to the writings which happily enable us to form a fair estimate of his real character.

Take the opening paragraphs of the "Thoughts" of Marcus Aurelius, as translated by Mr. Long:-

"From the reputation and remembrance of my father [I learned] modesty and a manly character; from my mother, piety and beneficence, abstinence not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts. . .

. From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools, and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally . . . From Diognetus . . . [I learned] to have become intimate with philosophy, . . . and to have written dialogues in my youth, and to have desired a plank bed and skin, and whatever else of the kind belongs to the Greek discipline.

. . . From Rusticus I received the impression that my character required improvement and discipline;" and so on to the end of the chapter, near which, however, it is right to say that there appears a redeeming touch, in so far as that he thanks the G.o.ds that he could not write poetry, and that he had never occupied himself about the appearance of things in the heavens.

Or, again, opening Mr. Long's translation at random I find (p. 37):-

"As physicians have always their instruments and knives ready for cases which suddenly require their skill, so do thou have principles ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing everything, even the smallest, with a recollection of the bond that unites the divine and human to one another. For neither wilt thou do anything well which pertains to man without at the same time having a reference to things divine; nor the contrary."

Unhappy one! No wonder the Roman empire went to pieces soon after him. If I remember rightly, he established and subsidised professors.h.i.+ps in all parts of his dominions. Whereon the same befell the arts and literature of Rome as befell Italian painting after the Academic system had taken root at Bologna under the Caracci. Mr. Martin Tupper, again, is an amiable and well-meaning man, but we should hardly like to see him in Lord Beaconsfield's place. The Athenians poisoned Socrates; and Aristophanes--than whom few more profoundly religious men have ever been born--did not, so far as we can gather, think the worse of his countrymen on that account. It is not improbable that if they had poisoned Plato too, Aristophanes would have been well enough pleased; but I think he would have preferred either of these two men to Marcus Aurelius.

I know nothing about the loving but manly devotion of a St. Lewis, but I strongly suspect that Mr. Mivart has taken him, too, upon hearsay.

On the other hand, among dogs we find examples of every heroic quality, and of all that is most perfectly charming to us in man.

As for the possible development of the more brutal human natures from the more brutal instincts of the lower animals, those who read a horrible story told in a note, pp. 233, 234 of Mr. Mivart's "Genesis of Species," will feel no difficulty on that score. I must admit, however, that the telling of that story seems to me to be a mistake in a philosophical work, which should not, I think, unless under compulsion, deal either with the horrors of the French Revolution--or of the Spanish or Italian Inquisition.

For the rest of Mr. Mivart's objections, I must refer the reader to his own work. I have been unable to find a single one, which I do not believe to be easily met by the Lamarckian view, with the additions (if indeed they are additions, for I must own to no very profound knowledge of what Lamarck did or did not say), which I have in this volume proposed to make to it. At the same time I admit, that as against the Darwinian view, many of them seem quite unanswerable.

CHAPTER XV--CONCLUDING REMARKS

Here, then, I leave my case, though well aware that I have crossed the threshold only of my subject. My work is of a tentative character, put before the public as a sketch or design for a, possibly, further endeavour, in which I hope to derive a.s.sistance from the criticisms which this present volume may elicit. Such as it is, however, for the present I must leave it.

We have seen that we cannot do anything thoroughly till we can do it unconsciously, and that we cannot do anything unconsciously till we can do it thoroughly; this at first seems illogical; but logic and consistency are luxuries for the G.o.ds, and the lower animals, only.

Thus a boy cannot really know how to swim till he can swim, but he cannot swim till he knows how to swim. Conscious effort is but the process of rubbing off the rough corners from these two contradictory statements, till they eventually fit into one another so closely that it is impossible to disjoin them.

Whenever, therefore, we see any creature able to go through any complicated and difficult process with little or no effort--whether it be a bird building her nest, or a hen's egg making itself into a chicken, or an ovum turning itself into a baby--we may conclude that the creature has done the same thing on a very great number of past occasions.

We found the phenomena exhibited by heredity to be so like those of memory, and to be so utterly inexplicable on any other supposition, that it was easier to suppose them due to memory in spite of the fact that we cannot remember having recollected, than to believe that because we cannot so remember, therefore the phenomena cannot be due to memory.

We were thus led to consider "personal ident.i.ty," in order to see whether there was sufficient reason for denying that the experience, which we must have clearly gained somewhere, was gained by us when we were in the persons of our forefathers; we found, not without surprise, that unless we admitted that it might be so gained, in so far as that we once ACTUALLY WERE our remotest ancestor, we must change our ideas concerning personality altogether.

We therefore a.s.sumed that the phenomena of heredity, whether as regards instinct or structure were mainly due to memory of past experiences, acc.u.mulated and fused till they had become automatic, or quasi automatic, much in the same way as after a long life -

. . "Old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain."

After dealing with certain phenomena of memory, but more especially with its abeyance and revival, we inquired what the princ.i.p.al corresponding phenomena of life and species should be, on the hypothesis that they were mainly due to memory.

I think I may say that we found the hypothesis fit in with actual facts in a sufficiently satisfactory manner. We found not a few matters, as, for example, the sterility of hybrids, the phenomena of old age, and p.u.b.erty as generally near the end of development, explain themselves with more completeness than I have yet heard of their being explained on any other hypothesis.

We considered the most important difficulty in the way of instinct as hereditary habit, namely, the structure and instincts of neuter insects; these are very unlike those of their parents, and cannot apparently be transmitted to offspring by individuals of the previous generation, in whom such structure and instincts appeared, inasmuch as these creatures are sterile. I do not say that the difficulty is wholly removed, inasmuch as some obscurity must be admitted to remain as to the manner in which the structure of the larva is aborted; this obscurity is likely to remain till we know more of the early history of civilisation among bees than I can find that we know at present; but I believe the difficulty was reduced to such proportions as to make it little likely to be felt in comparison with that of attributing instinct to any other cause than inherited habit, or inherited habit modified by changed conditions.

We then inquired what was the great principle underlying variation, and answered, with Lamarck, that it must be "sense of need;" and though not without being haunted by suspicion of a vicious circle, and also well aware that we were not much nearer the origin of life than when we started, we still concluded that here was the truest origin of species, and hence of genera; and that the acc.u.mulation of variations, which in time amounted to specific and generic differences, was due to intelligence and memory on the part of the creature varying, rather than to the operation of what Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection." At the same time we admitted that the course of nature is very much as Mr. Darwin has represented it, in this respect, in so far as that there is a struggle for existence, and that the weaker must go to the wall. But we denied that this part of the course of nature would lead to much, if any, acc.u.mulation of variation, unless the variation was directed mainly by intelligent sense of need, with continued personality and memory.

We conclude, therefore, that the small, structureless, impregnate ovum from which we have each one of us sprung, has a potential recollection of all that has happened to each one of its ancestors prior to the period at which any such ancestor has issued from the bodies of its progenitors--provided, that is to say, a sufficiently deep, or sufficiently often-repeated, impression has been made to admit of its being remembered at all.

Each step of normal development will lead the impregnate ovum up to, and remind it of, its next ordinary course of action, in the same way as we, when we recite a well-known pa.s.sage, are led up to each successive sentence by the sentence which has immediately preceded it.

And for this reason, namely, that as it takes two people "to tell" a thing--a speaker and a comprehending listener, without which last, though much may have been said, there has been nothing told--so also it takes two people, as it were, to "remember" a thing--the creature remembering, and the surroundings of the creature at the time it last remembered. Hence, though the ovum immediately after impregnation is instinct with all the memories of both parents, not one of these memories can normally become active till both the ovum itself, and its surroundings, are sufficiently like what they respectively were, when the occurrence now to be remembered last took place. The memory will then immediately return, and the creature will do as it did on the last occasion that it was in like case as now. This ensures that similarity of order shall be preserved in all the stages of development, in successive generations.

Life, then, is faith founded upon experience, which experience is in its turn founded upon faith--or more simply, it is memory. Plants and animals only differ from one another because they remember different things; plants and animals only grow up in the shapes they a.s.sume because this shape is their memory, their idea concerning their own past history.

Hence the term "Natural History," as applied to the different plants and animals around us. For surely the study of natural history means only the study of plants and animals themselves, which, at the moment of using the words "Natural History," we a.s.sume to be the most important part of nature.

A living creature well supported by a ma.s.s of healthy ancestral memory is a young and growing creature, free from ache or pain, and thoroughly acquainted with its business so far, but with much yet to be reminded of. A creature which finds itself and its surroundings not so unlike those of its parents about the time of their begetting it, as to be compelled to recognise that it never yet was in any such position, is a creature in the heyday of life. A creature which begins to be aware of itself is one which is beginning to recognise that the situation is a new one.

It is the young and fair, then, who are the truly old and the truly experienced; it is they who alone have a trustworthy memory to guide them; they alone know things as they are, and it is from them that, as we grow older, we must study if we would still cling to truth.

The whole charm of youth lies in its advantage over age in respect of experience, and where this has for some reason failed, or been misapplied, the charm is broken. When we say that we are getting old, we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are suffering from inexperience, which drives us into doing things which we do not understand, and lands us, eventually, in the utter impotence of death. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of little children.