Mr. Spencer would not--at least one cannot think he would--have been able to effect the revolution which will henceforth doubtless be connected with Mr. Darwin"s name. He had been insisting on evolution for some years before the "Origin of Species" came out, but he might as well have preached to the winds, for all the visible effect that had been produced. On the appearance of Mr. Darwin"s book the effect was instantaneous; it was like the change in the condition of a patient when the right medicine has been hit on after all sorts of things have been tried and failed. Granted that it was comparatively easy for Mr. Darwin, as having been born into the household of one of the prophets of evolution, to arrive at conclusions about the fixity of species which, if not so born, he might never have reached at all; this does not make it any easier for him to have got others to agree with him. Any one, again, may have money left him, or run up against it, or have it run up against him, as it does against some people, but it is only a very sensible person who does not lose it. Moreover, once begin to go behind achievement and there is an end of everything. Did the world give much heed to or believe in evolution before Mr. Darwin"s time?
Certainly not. Did we begin to attend and be persuaded soon after Mr. Darwin began to write? Certainly yes. Did we ere long go over en ma.s.se? a.s.suredly. If, as I said in "Life and Habit," any one asks who taught the world to believe in evolution, the answer to the end of time must be that it was Mr. Darwin. And yet the more his work is looked at, the more marvellous does its success become. It seems as if some organisms can do anything with anything. Beethoven picked his teeth with the snuffers, and seems to have picked them sufficiently to his satisfaction. So Mr. Darwin with one of the worst styles imaginable did all that the clearest, tersest writer could have done. Strange, that such a master of cunning (in the sense of my t.i.tle) should have been the apostle of luck, and one so terribly unlucky as Lamarck, of cunning, but such is the irony of nature. Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said, "That fruit is ripe," and shook it into his lap.
With this Mr. Darwin"s best friends ought to be content; his admirers are not well advised in representing him as endowed with all sorts of qualities which he was very far from possessing. Thus it is pretended that he was one of those men who were ever on the watch for new ideas, ever ready to give a helping hand to those who were trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands. No conception can be more wantonly inexact. I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was "ever ready," &c. So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people"s feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are in the habit of washing poor people"s feet. I can understand Mr.
Darwin"s not having taken any public notice, for example, of "Life and Habit," for though I did not attack him in force in that book, it was abundantly clear that an attack could not be long delayed, and a man may be pardoned for not doing anything to advertise the works of his opponents; but there is no excuse for his never having referred to Professor Hering"s work either in "Nature," when Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to it (July 13, 1876), or in some one of his subsequent books. If his att.i.tude towards those who worked in the same field as himself had been the generous one which his admirers pretend, he would have certainly come forward, not necessarily as adopting Professor Hering"s theory, but still as helping it to obtain a hearing.
His not having done so is of a piece with his silence about Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck in the early editions of the "Origin of Species," and with the meagre reference to them which is alone found in the later ones. It is of a piece also with the silence which Mr.
Darwin invariably maintained when he saw his position irretrievably damaged, as, for example, by Mr. Spencer"s objection already referred to, and by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin in the North British Review (June 1867). Science, after all, should form a kingdom which is more or less not of this world. The ideal scientist should know neither self nor friend nor foe--he should be able to hob-n.o.b with those whom he most vehemently attacks, and to fly at the scientific throat of those to whom he is personally most attached; he should be neither grateful for a favourable review nor displeased at a hostile one; his literary and scientific life should be something as far apart as possible from his social; it is thus, at least, alone that any one will be able to keep his eye single for facts, and their legitimate inferences. We have seen Professor Mivart lately taken to task by Mr. Romanes for having said {248a} that Mr. Darwin was singularly sensitive to criticism, and made it impossible for Professor Mivart to continue friendly personal relations with him after he had ventured to maintain his own opinion. I see no reason to question Professor Mivart"s accuracy, and find what he has said to agree alike with my own personal experience of Mr. Darwin, and with all the light that his works throw upon his character.
The most substantial apology that can be made for his attempt to claim the theory of descent with modification is to be found in the practice of Lamarck, Mr. Patrick Matthew, the author of the "Vestiges of Creation," and Mr. Herbert Spencer, and, again, in the total absence of complaint which this practice met with. If Lamarck might write the "Philosophie Zoologique" without, so far as I remember, one word of reference to Buffon, and without being complained of, why might not Mr. Darwin write the "Origin of Species" without more than a pa.s.sing allusion to Lamarck? Mr.
Patrick Matthew, again, though writing what is obviously a resume of the evolutionary theories of his time, makes no mention of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, or Buffon. I have not the original edition of the "Vestiges of Creation" before me, but feel sure I am justified in saying that it claimed to be a more or less Minerva-like work, that sprang full armed from the brain of Mr. Chambers himself. This at least is how it was received by the public; and, however violent the opposition it met with, I cannot find that its author was blamed for not having made adequate mention of Lamarck. When Mr. Spencer wrote his first essay on evolution in the Leader (March 20, 1852) he did indeed begin his argument, "Those who cavalierly reject the doctrine of Lamarck," &c., so that his essay purports to be written in support of Lamarck; but when he republished his article in 1858, the reference to Lamarck was cut out.
I make no doubt that it was the bad example set him by the writers named in the preceding paragraph which betrayed Mr. Darwin into doing as they did, but being more conscientious than they, he could not bring himself to do it without having satisfied himself that he had got hold of a more or less distinctive feature, and this, of course, made matters worse. The distinctive feature was not due to any deep-laid plan for pitchforking mind out of the universe, or as part of a scheme of materialistic philosophy, though it has since been made to play an important part in the attempt to further this; Mr. Darwin was perfectly innocent of any intention of getting rid of mind, and did not, probably, care the toss of sixpence whether the universe was instinct with mind or no--what he did care about was carrying off the palm in the matter of descent with modification, and the distinctive feature was an adjunct with which his nervous, sensitive, Gladstonian nature would not allow him to dispense.
And why, it may be asked, should not the palm be given to Mr. Darwin if he wanted it, and was at so much pains to get it? Why, if science is a kingdom not of this world, make so much fuss about settling who is ent.i.tled to what? At best such questions are of a sorry personal nature, that can have little bearing upon facts, and it is these that alone should concern us. The answer is, that if the question is so merely personal and unimportant, Mr. Darwin may as well yield as Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck; Mr. Darwin"s admirers find no difficulty in appreciating the importance of a personal element as far as he is concerned; let them not wonder, then, if others, while anxious to give him the laurels to which he is ent.i.tled, are somewhat indignant at the attempt to crown him with leaves that have been filched from the brows of the great dead who went before him. Palmam qui meruit ferat. The instinct which tells us that no man in the scientific or literary world should claim more than his due is an old and, I imagine, a wholesome one, and if a scientific self-denying ordinance is demanded, we may reply with justice, Que messieurs les Charles-Darwinies commencent. Mr. Darwin will have a crown sufficient for any ordinary brow remaining in the achievement of having done more than any other writer, living or dead, to popularise evolution. This much may be ungrudgingly conceded to him, but more than this those who have his scientific position most at heart will be well advised if they cease henceforth to demand.
CHAPTER XIX--Conclusion
And now I bring this book to a conclusion. So many things requiring attention have happened since it was begun that I leave it in a very different shape to the one which it was originally intended to bear.
I have omitted much that I had meant to deal with, and have been tempted sometimes to introduce matter the connection of which with my subject is not immediately apparent. Such however, as the book is, it must now go in the form into which it has grown almost more in spite of me than from malice prepense on my part. I was afraid that it might thus set me at defiance, and in an early chapter expressed a doubt whether I should find it redound greatly to my advantage with men of science; in this concluding chapter I may say that doubt has deepened into something like certainty. I regret this, but cannot help it.
Among the points with which it was most inc.u.mbent upon me to deal was that of vegetable intelligence. A reader may well say that unless I give plants much the same sense of pleasure and pain, memory, power of will, and intelligent perception of the best way in which to employ their opportunities that I give to low animals, my argument falls to the ground. If I declare organic modification to be mainly due to function, and hence in the closest correlation with mental change, I must give plants, as well as animals, a mind, and endow them with power to reflect and reason upon all that most concerns them. Many who will feel little difficulty about admitting that animal modification is upon the whole mainly due to the secular cunning of the animals themselves will yet hesitate before they admit that plants also can have a reason and cunning of their own.
Unwillingness to concede this is based princ.i.p.ally upon the error concerning intelligence to which I have already referred--I mean to our regarding intelligence not so much as the power of understanding as that of being understood by ourselves. Once admit that the evidence in favour of a plant"s knowing its own business depends more on the efficiency with which that business is conducted than either on our power of understanding how it can be conducted, or on any signs on the plant"s part of a capacity for understanding things that do not concern it, and there will be no further difficulty about supposing that in its own sphere a plant is just as intelligent as an animal, and keeps a sharp look-out upon its own interests, however indifferent it may seem to be to ours. So strong has been the set of recent opinion in this direction that with botanists the foregoing now almost goes without saying, though few five years ago would have accepted it.
To no one of the several workers in this field are we more indebted for the change which has been brought about in this respect than to my late valued and lamented friend Mr. Alfred Tylor. Mr. Tylor was not the discoverer of the protoplasmic continuity that exists in plants, but he was among the very first to welcome this discovery, and his experiments at Carshalton in the years 1883 and 1884 demonstrated that, whether there was protoplasmic continuity in plants or no, they were at any rate endowed with some measure of reason, forethought, and power of self-adaptation to varying surroundings. It is not for me to give the details of these experiments. I had the good fortune to see them more than once while they were in progress, and was present when they were made the subject of a paper read by Mr. Sydney B. J. Skertchly before the Linnean Society, Mr. Tylor being then too ill to read it himself.
The paper has since been edited by Mr. Skertchly, and published.
{253a} Anything that should be said further about it will come best from Mr. Skertchly; it will be enough here if I give the resume of it prepared by Mr. Tylor himself.
In this Mr. Tylor said:- "The principles which underlie this paper are the individuality of plants, the necessity for some co- ordinating system to enable the parts to act in concert, and the probability that this also necessitates the admission that plants have a dim sort of intelligence.
"It is shown that a tree, for example, is something more than an aggregation of tissues, but is a complex being performing acts as a whole, and not merely responsive to the direct influence of light, &c. The tree knows more than its branches, as the species know more than the individual, the community than the unit.
"Moreover, inasmuch as my experiments show that many plants and trees possess the power of adapting themselves to unfamiliar circ.u.mstances, such as, for instance, avoiding obstacles by bending aside before touching, or by altering the leaf arrangement, it seems probable that at least as much voluntary power must be accorded to such plants as to certain lowly organised animals.
"Finally, a connecting system by means of which combined movements take place is found in the threads of protoplasm which unite the various cells, and which I have now shown to exist even in the wood of trees.
"One of the important facts seems to be the universality of the upward curvature of the tips of growing branches of trees, and the power possessed by the tree to straighten its branches afterwards, so that new growth shall by similar means be able to obtain the necessary light and air.
"A house, to use a sanitary a.n.a.logy, is functionally useless without it obtains a good supply of light and air. The architect strives so to produce the house as to attain this end, and still leave the house comfortable. But the house, though dependent upon, is not produced by, the light and air. So a tree is functionally useless, and cannot even exist without a proper supply of light and air; but, whereas it has been the custom to ascribe the heliotropic and other motions to the direct influence of those agents, I would rather suggest that the movements are to some extent due to the desire of the plant to acquire its necessaries of life."
The more I have reflected upon Mr. Tylor"s Carshalton experiments, the more convinced I am of their great value. No one, indeed, ought to have doubted that plants were intelligent, but we all of us do much that we ought not to do, and Mr. Tylor supplied a demonstration which may be henceforth authoritatively appealed to.
I will take the present opportunity of insisting upon a suggestion which I made in "Alps and Sanctuaries" (New edition, pp. 152, 153), with which Mr. Tylor was much pleased, and which, at his request, I made the subject of a few words that I ventured to say at the Linnean Society"s rooms after his paper had been read. "Admitting,"
I said, "the common protoplasmic origin of animals and plants, and setting aside the notion that plants preceded animals, we are still faced by the problem why protoplasm should have developed into the organic life of the world, along two main lines, and only two--the animal and the vegetable. Why, if there was an early schism--and this there clearly was--should there not have been many subsequent ones of equal importance? We see innumerable sub-divisions of animals and plants, but we see no other such great subdivision of organic life as that whereby it ranges itself, for the most part readily, as either animal or vegetable. Why any subdivision?--but if any, why not more than two great cla.s.ses?"
The two main stems of the tree of life ought, one would think, to have been formed on the same principle as the boughs which represent genera, and the twigs which stand for species and varieties. If specific differences arise mainly from differences of action taken in consequence of differences of opinion, then, so ultimately do generic; so, therefore, again, do differences between families; so therefore, by a.n.a.logy, should that greatest of differences in virtue of which the world of life is mainly animal, or vegetable. In this last case as much as in that of specific difference, we ought to find divergent form the embodiment and organic expression of divergent opinion. Form is mind made manifest in flesh through action: shades of mental difference being expressed in shades of physical difference, while broad fundamental differences of opinion are expressed in broad fundamental differences of bodily shape.
Or to put it thus:-
If form and habit be regarded as functionally interdependent, that is to say, if neither form nor habit can vary without corresponding variation in the other, and if habit and opinion concerning advantage are also functionally interdependent, it follows self- evidently that form and opinion concerning advantage (and hence form and cunning) will be functionally interdependent also, and that there can be no great modification of the one without corresponding modification of the other. Let there, then, be a point in respect of which opinion might be early and easily divided--a point in respect of which two courses involving different lines of action presented equally-balanced advantages--and there would be an early subdivision of primordial life, according as the one view or the other was taken.
It is obvious that the pros and cons for either course must be supposed very nearly equal, otherwise the course which presented the fewest advantages would be attended with the probable gradual extinction of the organised beings that adopted it, but there being supposed two possible modes of action very evenly balanced as regards advantage and disadvantages, then the ultimate appearance of two corresponding forms of life is a sequitur from the admission that form varies as function, and function as opinion concerning advantage. If there are three, four, five, or six such opinions tenable, we ought to have three, four, five, or six main subdivisions of life. As things are, we have two only. Can we, then, see a matter on which opinion was likely to be easily and early divided into two, and only two, main divisions--no third course being conceivable? If so, this should suggest itself as the probable source from which the two main forms of organic life have been derived.
I submit that we can see such a matter in the question whether it pays better to sit still and make the best of what comes in one"s way, or to go about in search of what one can find. Of course we, as animals, naturally hold that it is better to go about in search of what we can find than to sit still and make the best of what comes; but there is still so much to be said on the other side, that many cla.s.ses of animals have settled down into sessile habits, while a perhaps even larger number are, like spiders, habitual liers in wait rather than travellers in search of food. I would ask my reader, therefore, to see the opinion that it is better to go in search of prey as formulated, and finding its organic expression, in animals; and the other--that it is better to be ever on the look-out to make the best of what chance brings up to them--in plants. Some few intermediate forms still record to us the long struggle during which the schism was not yet complete, and the halting between two opinions which it might be expected that some organisms should exhibit.
"Neither cla.s.s," I said in "Alps and Sanctuaries," "has been quite consistent. Who ever is or can be? Every extreme--every opinion carried to its logical end--will prove to be an absurdity. Plants throw out roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind of locomotion; and, as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a tendril without regarding it as a melancholy and unprincipled compromise" (New edition, p. 153).
Having called attention to this view, and commended it to the consideration of my readers, I proceed to another which should not have been left to be touched upon only in a final chapter, and which, indeed, seems to require a book to itself--I refer to the origin and nature of the feelings, which those who accept volition as having had a large share in organic modification must admit to have had a no less large share in the formation of volition.
Volition grows out of ideas, ideas from feelings. What, then, is feeling, and the subsequent mental images or ideas?
The image of a stone formed in our minds is no representation of the object which has given rise to it. Not only, as has been often remarked, is there no resemblance between the particular thought and the particular thing, but thoughts and things generally are too unlike to be compared. An idea of a stone may be like an idea of another stone, or two stones may be like one another; but an idea of a stone is not like a stone; it cannot be thrown at anything, it occupies no room in s.p.a.ce, has no specific gravity, and when we come to know more about stones, we find our ideas concerning them to be but rude, epitomised, and highly conventional renderings of the actual facts, mere hieroglyphics, in fact, or, as it were, counters or bank-notes, which serve to express and to convey commodities with which they have no pretence of a.n.a.logy.
Indeed we daily find that, as the range of our perceptions becomes enlarged either by invention of new appliances or after use of old ones, we change our ideas though we have no reason to think that the thing about which we are thinking has changed. In the case of a stone, for instance, the rude, una.s.sisted, uneducated senses see it as above all things motionless, whereas a.s.sisted and trained ideas concerning it represent motion as its most essential characteristic; but the stone has not changed. So, again, the uneducated idea represents it as above all things mindless, and is as little able to see mind in connection with it as it lately was to see motion; it will be no greater change of opinion than we have most of us undergone already if we come presently to see it as no less full of elementary mind than of elementary motion, but the stone will not have changed.
The fact that we modify our opinions suggests that our ideas are formed not so much in involuntary self-adjusting mimetic correspondence with the objects that we believe to give rise to them, as by what was in the outset voluntary, conventional arrangement in whatever way we found convenient, of sensation and perception-symbols, which had nothing whatever to do with the objects, and were simply caught hold of as the only things we could grasp. It would seem as if, in the first instance, we must have arbitrarily attached some one of the few and vague sensations which we could alone at first command, to certain motions of outside things as echoed by our brain, and used them to think and feel the things with, so as to docket them, and recognise them with greater force, certainty, and clearness--much as we use words to help us to docket and grasp our feelings and thoughts, or written characters to help us to docket and grasp our words.
If this view be taken we stand in much the same att.i.tude towards our feelings as a dog may be supposed to do towards our own reading and writing. The dog may be supposed to marvel at the wonderful instinctive faculty by which we can tell the price of the different railway stocks merely by looking at a sheet of paper; he supposes this power to be a part of our nature, to have come of itself by luck and not by cunning, but a little reflection will show that feeling is not more likely to have "come by nature" than reading and writing are. Feeling is in all probability the result of the same kind of slow laborious development as that which has attended our more recent arts and our bodily organs; its development must be supposed to have followed the same lines as that of our other arts, and indeed of the body itself, which is the ars artium--for growth of mind is throughout coincident with growth of organic resources, and organic resources grow with growing mind.
Feeling is the art the possession of which differentiates the civilised organic world from that of brute inorganic matter, but still it is an art; it is the outcome of a mind that is common both to organic and inorganic, and which the organic has alone cultivated. It is not a part of mind itself; it is no more this than language and writing are parts of thought. The organic world can alone feel, just as man can alone speak; but as speech is only the development of powers the germs of which are possessed by the lower animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment and development of powers the germs of which exist in inorganic substances. It has all the characteristics of an art, and though it must probably rank as the oldest of those arts that are peculiar to the organic world, it is one which is still in process of development. None of us, indeed, can feel well on more than a very few subjects, and many can hardly feel at all.
But, however this may be, our sensations and perceptions of material phenomena are attendant on the excitation of certain motions in the anterior parts of the brain. Whenever certain motions are excited in this substance, certain sensations and ideas of resistance, extension, &c., are either concomitant, or ensue within a period too brief for our cognisance. It is these sensations and ideas that we directly cognise, and it is to them that we have attached the idea of the particular kind of matter we happen to be thinking of. As this idea is not like the thing itself, so neither is it like the motions in our brain on which it is attendant. It is no more like these than, say, a stone is like the individual characters, written or spoken, that form the word "stone," or than these last are, in sound, like the word "stone" itself, whereby the idea of a stone is so immediately and vividly presented to us. True, this does not involve that our idea shall not resemble the object that gave rise to it, any more than the fact that a looking-gla.s.s bears no resemblance to the things reflected in it involves that the reflection shall not resemble the things reflected; the shifting nature, however, of our ideas and conceptions is enough to show that they must be symbolical, and conditioned by changes going on within ourselves as much as by those outside us; and if, going behind the ideas which suffice for daily use, we extend our inquiries in the direction of the reality underlying our conception, we find reason to think that the brain-motions which attend our conception correspond with exciting motions in the object that occasions it, and that these, rather than anything resembling our conception itself, should be regarded as the reality.
This leads to a third matter, on which I can only touch with extreme brevity.
Different modes of motion have long been known as the causes of our different colour perceptions, or at any rate as a.s.sociated therewith, and of late years, more especially since the promulgation of Newlands" {260a} law, it has been perceived that what we call the kinds or properties of matter are not less conditioned by motion than colour is. The substance or essence of unconditioned matter, as apart from the relations between its various states (which we believe to be its various conditions of motion) must remain for ever unknown to us, for it is only the relations between the conditions of the underlying substance that we cognise at all, and where there are no conditions, there is nothing for us to seize, compare, and, hence, cognise; unconditioned matter must, therefore, be as inconceivable by us as unmattered condition; {261a} but though we can know nothing about matter as apart from its conditions or states, opinion has been for some time tending towards the belief that what we call the different states, or kinds, of matter are only our ways of mentally characterising and docketing our estimates of the different kinds of motion going on in this otherwise uncognisable substratum.
Our conception, then, concerning the nature of any matter depends solely upon its kind and degree of unrest, that is to say, on the characteristics of the vibrations that are going on within it. The exterior object vibrating in a certain way imparts some of its vibrations to our brain--but if the state of the thing itself depends upon its vibrations, it must be considered as to all intents and purposes the vibrations themselves--plus, of course, the underlying substance that is vibrating. If, for example, a pat of b.u.t.ter is a portion of the unknowable underlying substance in such- and-such a state of molecular disturbance, and it is only by alteration of the disturbance that the substance can be altered--the disturbance of the substance is practically equivalent to the substance: a pat of b.u.t.ter is such-and-such a disturbance of the unknowable underlying substance, and such-and-such a disturbance of the underlying substance is a pat of b.u.t.ter. In communicating its vibrations, therefore, to our brain a substance does actually communicate what is, as far as we are concerned, a portion of itself. Our perception of a thing and its attendant feeling are symbols attaching to an introduction within our brain of a feeble state of the thing itself. Our recollection of it is occasioned by a feeble continuance of this feeble state in our brains, becoming less feeble through the accession of fresh but similar vibrations from without. The molecular vibrations which make the thing an idea of which is conveyed to our minds, put within our brain a little feeble emanation from the thing itself--if we come within their reach. This being once put there, will remain as it were dust, till dusted out, or till it decay, or till it receive accession of new vibrations.
The vibrations from a pat of b.u.t.ter do, then, actually put b.u.t.ter into a man"s head. This is one of the commonest of expressions, and would hardly be so common if it were not felt to have some foundation in fact. At first the man does not know what feeling or complex of feelings to employ so as to docket the vibrations, any more than he knows what word to employ so as to docket the feelings, or with what written characters to docket his word; but he gets over this, and henceforward the vibrations of the exterior object (that is to say, the thing) never set up their characteristic disturbances, or, in other words, never come into his head, without the a.s.sociated feeling presenting itself as readily as word and characters present themselves, on the presence of the feeling. The more b.u.t.ter a man sees and handles, the more he gets b.u.t.ter on the brain--till, though he can never get anything like enough to be strictly called b.u.t.ter, it only requires the slightest molecular disturbance with characteristics like those of b.u.t.ter to bring up a vivid and highly sympathetic idea of b.u.t.ter in the man"s mind.
If this view is adopted, our memory of a thing is our retention within the brain of a small leaven of the actual thing itself, or of what qua us is the thing that is remembered, and the ease with which habitual actions come to be performed is due to the power of the vibrations having been increased and modified by continual accession from without till they modify the molecular disturbances of the nervous system, and therefore its material substance, which we have already settled to be only our way of docketing molecular disturbances. The same vibrations, therefore, form the substance remembered, introduce an infinitesimal dose of it within the brain, modify the substance remembering, and, in the course of time, create and further modify the mechanism of both the sensory and motor nerves. Thought and thing are one.
I commend these two last speculations to the reader"s charitable consideration, as feeling that I am here travelling beyond the ground on which I can safely venture; nevertheless, as it may be some time before I have another opportunity of coming before the public, I have thought it, on the whole, better not to omit them, but to give them thus provisionally. I believe they are both substantially true, but am by no means sure that I have expressed them either clearly or accurately; I cannot, however, further delay the issue of my book.
Returning to the point raised in my t.i.tle, is luck, I would ask, or cunning, the more fitting matter to be insisted upon in connection with organic modification? Do animals and plants grow into conformity with their surroundings because they and their fathers and mothers take pains, or because their uncles and aunts go away?
For the survival of the fittest is only the non-survival or going away of the unfittest--in whose direct line the race is not continued, and who are therefore only uncles and aunts of the survivors. I can quite understand its being a good thing for any race that its uncles and aunts should go away, but I do not believe the acc.u.mulation of lucky accidents could result in an eye, no matter how many uncles and aunts may have gone away during how many generations.
I would ask the reader to bear in mind the views concerning life and death expressed in an early chapter. They seem to me not, indeed, to take away any very considerable part of the sting from death; this should not be attempted or desired, for with the sting of death the sweets of life are inseparably bound up so that neither can be weakened without damaging the other. Weaken the fear of death, and the love of life would be weakened. Strengthen it, and we should cling to life even more tenaciously than we do. But though death must always remain as a shock and change of habits from which we must naturally shrink--still it is not the utter end of our being, which, until lately, it must have seemed to those who have been unable to accept the grosser view of the resurrection with which we were familiarised in childhood. We too now know that though worms destroy this body, yet in our flesh shall we so far see G.o.d as to be still in Him and of Him--biding our time for a resurrection in a new and more glorious body; and, moreover, that we shall be to the full as conscious of this as we are at present of much that concerns us as closely as anything can concern us.
The thread of life cannot be shorn between successive generations, except upon grounds which will in equity involve its being shorn between consecutive seconds, and fractions of seconds. On the other hand, it cannot be left unshorn between consecutive seconds without necessitating that it should be left unshorn also beyond the grave, as well as in successive generations. Death is as salient a feature in what we call our life as birth was, but it is no more than this.
As a salient feature, it is a convenient epoch for the drawing of a defining line, by the help of which we may better grasp the conception of life, and think it more effectually, but it is a facon de parler only; it is, as I said in "Life and Habit," {264a} "the most inexorable of all conventions," but our idea of it has no correspondence with eternal underlying realities.
Finally, we must have evolution; consent is too spontaneous, instinctive, and universal among those most able to form an opinion, to admit of further doubt about this. We must also have mind and design. The attempt to eliminate intelligence from among the main agencies of the universe has broken down too signally to be again ventured upon--not until the recent rout has been forgotten.
Nevertheless the old, far-foreseeing Deus ex machina design as from a point outside the universe, which indeed it directs, but of which it is no part, is negatived by the facts of organism. What, then, remains, but the view that I have again in this book endeavoured to uphold--I mean, the supposition that the mind or cunning of which we see such abundant evidence all round us, is, like the kingdom of heaven, within us, and within all things at all times everywhere?