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A ROMANES' ''MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS" AND A PSALM OF MONTREAL BY SAMUEL BUTLER " Tho course of true sclonco, like that of true love, never did run smooth." PuoFKSsoR TvNDALL, Pall Mall Oazette, Oct. 30, 1883. (Op. 7) LONDON TRUBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL 1884 [All rigJUs reserved] H 'SiXitaasnt 'Prt00 BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO, EDINBURGH AND LONDON PREFACE. T DELAYED these pages some weeks in order to give Mr. Eomanes an opportunity of explaining his statement that Canon Kingsley wrote about instinct and inherited memory in Nature, Jan. i8, 1867.* I wrote to the Atlienceum (Jan. 26, 1884) and pointed out that Nature did not begin to appear till nearly three years after the date given by Mr. Eomanes, and that there was nothing from Canon Kingsley on the subject of instinct and inherited memory in any number of Nature up to the date of Canon Kingsley's death. I also asked for the correct reference. This Mr. Eomanes has not thought it incumbent upon him to give. I am told I ought not to have ex- pected him to give it, inasmuch as it is no longer usual for men of any but the lowest scientific standing to correct their misstatements when they are brought to book. Science is made for Fellows of the Eoyal Society, and for no one else, not Fellows of the Eoyal Society for science ; and if the having achieved a certain position should still involve being obliged to be as scrupulous and accurate as other people, what is the good of the position ? This view of the matter is practical, but I * See page 234 of this book. w PREFACE. regret that Mr. Eomanes should have taken it, for his having done so has prevented my being able to tell the reader what Canon Kingsley said about memory and instinct, and this he might have been glad to know. I suspect, however, that what Canon Kingsley said was after all not very important. If it had been, Mr. Eomanes would have probably told us what it was in his own book. I should think it possible that Mr. Romanes — not finding Canon Kingsley's words impor- tant enough to be quoted, or even referred to correctly, or never having seen them himself and not knowing exactly what they were, yet being anxious to give every one, and more particularly Canon Kingsley, his due — felt that this was an occasion on which he might fairly take advantage of his position and say at large whatever he was in the humour for sayiDg at the moment. I should not have thought this possible if I had not ere now had reason to set Mr. Romanes down as one who was not likely to be squeamish about trifles. Nevertheless, on this present occasion I certainly did think that he had only made a slip such as we all make sometimes, and such as he would gladly take the earliest opportunity to correct. As it is, I do not know what to think, except that D.C.L.'s and F.RS.'s seem to be made of much the same frail materials as we ordinary mortals are. As regards the extracts from my previous books given in this volume, I should say that I have revised and corrected the original text throughout, and intro- PREFACE. duced a sentence or two here and there, but have no- where made any important alteration. I regret greatly that lant of space has prevented me from being able to give the chapters from Life and Habit on " The Abeyance of Memory," and " What we should expect to find if Differentiations of Structure and Instinct are mainly due to Memory ; " it is in these chapters that an explanation of many phenomena is given, of which, so far as I know, no explanation of any kind had been previously attempted, and in which phenomena having apparently so little connection as the sterility of hybrids, the principle underlying longevity, the resumption of feral characteristics, the sterility of many animals under confinement, are not only made intelligible but are shown to be all part and parcel of the same story — all being explicable as soon as Memory is made the main factor of heredity. Feb. i6, 1884. « ♦ s Fi S CONTENTS. PACK Selections from Erewhon — Current Opinions I An Erewhonian Trial .... ID Malcontents i6 The Musical Banks 21 Birth FormulsB . . . 34 The "World of the Unborn 41 From the Fair Haven. — Chapter I. of the Memoir of the late John Pickard Owen 48 Selections from Life and Habit — On certain Acquired Habits 68 Conscious and Unconscious Knowers — The Law and Grace 74 Application of foregoing Chapters to certain Habits acquired after Birth which are commonly con- sidered Instinctive 91 Personal Identity 105 Instinct or Inherited Memorv 116 Concluding Remarks T25 Selections from Evolution, Old and New — Impotence of Paley's Conclusion — The Teleology of the Evolutionist 131 Failure of the first Evolutionists to see their Position as Teleological 138 The Teleological Evolution of Organism . . . 146 1 1 viii CONTENTS. PAOR Buffon — Memoir . . . . . . . i6o Buflfon'a Method — The Ironical Character of hia Work 164 Selections from Unconscious Memory — Recapitulation and Statement of an Objection . 181 On Cycles . 193 Refutaiion — Memory at once a Promoter and Dis- turber of Uniformity of Action and Structure . 199 Conclusion 212 Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals — The same continued The same concluded 243 Selections from Alps and Sanctuaries — Dalpe, Prato, Rossura, Calonico , . . . 262 Piora 275 S. Michele and Mt. Pirchiriano .... 282 Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art . . 290 Sanctuaries of Oropa and Graglia .... 304 A Psalm of Montreal 324 r > i , SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON; CURRENT OPINIONS. (chapter X. OF EREWHON.) THIS is what I gathered. That in that country if a man falls into ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of his countrymen, and if convicted is held up to public scorn and sentenced more or less severely as the case may be. There are subdivisions of illnesses into crimes and misdemean- ours as with offences amongst ourselves — a man being punished very heavily for serious illness, while failure of eyes or hearing in one over sixty-five who has had good health hitherto is dealt with by fine only, or im- prisonment in default of payment. But if a man forges a cheque, sets his house on fire, robs with violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is either taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense, or if h« is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of immorality, just as we do when we are ill, and they come and visit him with great solici- tude, and inquire with interest how it all came about, * The first edition of Erewhon was published in the spring of 1872. A ii! Ml . 1 1 i M U ^,1 I f 2 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. what symptoms first showed themselves, and so forth, — questions which he will answer with perfect unre- serve; for bad conduct, though considered no less deplor- able than illness with ourselves, and as unquestionably indicating something wrong with the individual who misbehaves, is nevertheless held to be the result of either pre-natal or post-natal misfortune. I should add that under certain circumstances poverty and iU luck are also considered criminal. Accordingly, there exists a class of men trained in soul-craft, whojn they call straighteners, as nearly as I can translate a word which literally means " one who bendeth back the crooked." These men practise much as medical men in England, and receive a quasi- surreptitious fee on every visit. They are treated with the same unreserve and obeyed just as readily as our own doctors — that is to say, on the whole sufficiently — because people know that it is their interest to get well as soon as they can, and that they will not 'be scouted as they would be if their bodies v/ere out of order, even though they may have to undergo a very painful course of treatment. When I say that they will not be scouted, I do not mean that an Erewhonian offender will suffer no social inconvenience. Friends will fall away from him because of his being less pleasant company, just as we ourselves are disclined to make companions of those who are either poor or poorly. No one with a due sense of self-respect will place himself on an equality in the matter of affection with those who are less lucky than himself in birth, health, money, good looks, capacity, or anything else. Indeed, that dislike and even disgust sliould be felt by the fortunate for the unfortunate, or at any rate for those who have been CURRENT OPINIONS. lergo a very discovered to have met with any of the more serious and less familiar misfortunes, is not only natural, but desirable for any society, whether of man or brute ; what progress either of body or soul had been other- wise possible ? The fact therefore that the Erewhonians attach none of that guilt to crime which they do to physical ailments, does not prevent the more selfish among them from neglecting a friend who has robbed a bank, for instance, till he has fully recovered ; but it does prevent them from even thinking of treat- ing criminals with that contemptuous tone which would seem to say, " I, if I were you, should be a better man than you are," a tone which is held quite reasonable in regard to physical ailment. Hence, though they conceal ill health by every kind of cunning, they are quite open about even the most flagrant mental diseases, should they happen t:; exist, which to do the people justice is not often. Indeed, there are some who, so to speak, are spiritual valetudi- narians, and who make themselves exceedingly ridicu- lous by their nervous supposition that they are wicked, while they are very tolerable people all the time. This however is exceptional ; and on the whole they use much the same reserve or unreserve about the state of their moral welfare as we do about our health. It has followed that all the ordinary greetings among ourselves, such as, How do you do ? and the like, are considered signs of gross ill-breeding; nor do the politer classes tolerate even such a common complimentary remark as telling a man that he was looking well. They salute each other with, " I hope you arc good this morning ; " or " I hope you have recovered from the snappishness from which you were suffering when I last saw you;" and if the perjiou i ■ r! I'f 4 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. saluted has not been good, or is still snappish, he says so, and is condoled with accordingly. Nay, the straighteners have gone so far as to give names from the hypothetical language (as taught at the Colleges of Unreason) to all known forms of mental indisposition, and have classified them according to a system of their own, which, though I could not understand it, seemed to work well in practice, for they are always able to tell a man what is the mattei with him as soon as they have heard his story, and their familiarity with the long names assures him that they thoroughly understand his case. • ••••• We in England rarely shrink from telling our doctor what is the matter with us merely through the fear that he will hurt us. We let him do his worst upon us, and stand it without a murmur, becauoo we are not scouted for being ill, and because we know the doctor is doing his best to cure us, and can judge of our case better than we can ; but we should conceal all illness if we were treated as the Erewbonians are when thTy have anything the matter with them ; we should do as we do with our moral and intellectual diseases, — we should feign health with the most con- summate art, till we were found out, and should hate a single flogging given by way of mere punishment more than the amputation of a limb, if it were kindly and courteously performed from a wish to help us out of our difficulty, and with the full consciousness on the part of the doctor that it was only by an accident of constitution that he was not in the like plight him- self. So the Erewhonians take a Hogging once a week, and a diet of bread and water for two or three months together, whenever their straightener recommends it. CURRENT OPINIONS. I do not suppose that even my host, on having swindled a confiding widow out of the whole of her property, was put to more actual suffering than a man will readily undergo at the hands of an English doctor. And yet he must have had a very bad time of it. The sounds I heard were sufficient to show that his pain was exquisite, but he never shrank from under- going it. He was quite sure that it did him good ; and I think he was right. I cannot believe that that man will ever embezzle money again. He may — but it will be a long time before he does so. During my confinement in prison, and on my journey, I had discovered much of the above ; but it still seemed new and strange, and I was in constant fear of com- mitting some rudeness from my inability to look at things from the same stand-point as my neighbours ; but f'iter a few weeks' stay with the Nosnibors I got to understand things better, especially on having heard all about my host's illness, of which he told me fully and repeatedly. It seemed he had been on the Stock Exchange of the city for many years and had amassed enormous wealth, without exceeding the limits of what was generally considered justifiable or at any rate per- missible dealing ; but at length on several occasions he had become aware of a desire to make money by fraudulent representations, and had actually dealt with two or three sums in a way which had made him rather uncomfortable. He had unfortunr *-ely made light of it and pooh-poohed the ailment, until circum- stances eventually presented themselves which enabled him to cheat upon a very considerable scale ; — he told me what they were, and they were about as bad as anything could be, but I need not detail them ; — he SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. h ll t i seized the opportunity, and became aware when it was too late that he must be seriously out of order. He had neglected himself too long. He drove home at once, broke the news to his wife and daughters as gently as he could, and sent off for one of the most celebrated straighteners of the king- dom to a consultation with the family practitioner, for the case was plainly serious. On the arrival of the straightener he told his story, and expressed his fear that his morals must be permanently impaired. The eminent man reassured him with a few cheer- ing words, and then proceeded to make a more care- ful diagnosis of the case. He inquired concerning Mr. Nosnibor's parents — had their moral health been good ? He was answered that there had not been any- thing seriously amiss with them, but that his maternal grandfather, whom he was supposed to resemble some- what in person, had been a consummate scoundrel and had ended his days in a hobpital, — while a brother of his father's, after having led a most flagitious life for many years, had been at last cured by a philo- sopher of a new school, which as far as I could understand it bore much the same relation to tlie old as homoeopathy to allopathy. The straightener shook his head at this, and laughingly replied that the cure must have been due to nature. After a few more questions he wrote a prescription and departed. I saw the prescription. It ordered a fine to the State of double the money embezzled ; no food but bread and milk for six months, and a severe flogging once a month for twelve. He had received his eleventh flogging on the day of my arrival. I saw him later on the same afternoon, and he was still twinged ; but even though he had been minded to do so (which he CURRENT OPINIONS. irhen it was Drder. He to his wife ent off for ■ the king- litioner, for val of the id his fear [•ed. few cheer- oQore care- concerning ealth been been any- s maternal able some- mdrel and a brother itious life r a philo- I could tlie old ner shook the cure 'ew more id. le to the food but flogging eleventh dm later ,'ed; but rvhich he showed no sign of being), there would have been no escape from following out the straightener's prescrip- tion, for the so-called sanitary laws of Erewhon are very rigorous, and unless the straightener was satisfied that his orders had been obeyed, the patient would have been taken to a hospital (as the poor are), and would have been much worse off. Such at least is the law, but it is never necessary to enforce it. On a subsequent occasion I was present at an inter- view between Mr. Nosnibor and the family straightener, who was considered competent to watch the comple- tion of the cure. I was struck with the delicacy with which he avoided even the remotest semblance of inc^uiry after the physical well-being of his patient, though there was a certain yellowness about my host's eyes which argued a bilious habit of body. To have taken notice of this would have been a gross breach of professional etiquette. I am told that a straightener sometimes thinks it right to glance at the possibility of some slight physical disorder if he finds it important in order to assist him in his diagnosis ; but the answers which he gets are generally untrue or evasive, and he forms his own conclusions upon the matter as well as he can. Sensible men have been known to say that the straightener should in strict confidence be told of every physical ailment that is likely to bear upon the case ; but people are naturally shy of doing this, for they do not like lowering themselves in the opinion of the straightener, and his ignorance of medical science is supreme. I heard of one lady however who had the hardihood to confess that a furious outbreak of ill- humour and extravagant fancies for which she was seeking advice was possibly the result of indisposition. 8 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. t 1 1 1 ■ " You should resist that," said the straightener, in a kind, but grave voice ; " we can do nothing for the bodies of our patients ; such matters are beyond our province, and I desire that I may hear no further particulars." The lady burst into tears, promised faithfully that she would never be unwell again, and kept her word. To return however to Mr. Nosnibor. As the after* noon wore on many carriages drove up with callers to inquire how he had stood his flogging. It had been very severe, but the kind inquiries upon every side gave him great pleasure, and he assured me that he felt almost tempted to do wrong again by the solicitude with which his friends had treated him during his recovery : in this I need hardly say that he was not serious. During the remainder of my stay in the country Mr. Nosnibor was constantly attentive to his business, and largely increased his already great possessions; but I never heard a whisper to the effect of his having been indisposed a second time, or made money by other than the most strictly honourable means. I did hear afterwards in confidence that there had been reason to believe that his health had been not a little affected by the straightener's treatment, but his friends did not choose to be over curious upon the subject, and on his return to his affairs it was by common consent passed over as hardly criminal in one who was other- wise so much afflicted. For they regard bodily ail- ments as the more venial in proportion as they have been produced by causes independent of the constitution. Thus if a person ruin his health by excessive indul- gence at the table, or by drinking, they count it to be almost a part of the mental disease which brought it CURRENT OPINIONS. 9 about, and so it goes for little, but they have no mercy on such illnesses as fevers or catarrhs or lung diseases, which to us appear to be beyond the control of the individual. They are only more lenient towards the diseases of the young — such as measles, which they think to be like sowing one's wild oats — and look over them as pardonable indiscretions if they have not been too serious, and if they are atoned for by complete subsequent recovery. N i i ' i I i ( 10 ) AN EREWHONIAN TRIAL. (chapter XI. OF EREWHON.) T SHALL best convey to the reader an idea of the -^ entire perversion of thought which exists among this extraordinary people, by describing the public trial of a man who was accused of pulmonary consumption — an offence which was punished with death until quite recently. The trial did not take place till I had been some months in the country, and I am deviating from chronological order in giving an account of it here; but I had perhaps better do so in order to exhaust this subject before proceeding with others. The prisoner was placed in the dock, and the jury were sworn much as in Europe; almost all our own modes of procedure were reproduced, even to the re- quiring the prisoner to plead guilty or not guity. He pleaded not guilty and the case proceeded. The evidence for the prosecution was very strong, but I must do the court the justice to observe that the trial was absolutely impartial. Counsel for the prisoner was allowed to urge everything that could be said in his defence. The line taken was that the prisoner was simulating consumption in order to defraud an insurance company, from which he was about to buy an annuity, and that he hoped thus to obtain it on more advantageous terms. >• r AN EREWHONIAN TRIAL. II If this could have been shown to be the case he would have escaped criminal prosecution, and been sent to a hospital as for moral ailment. The view however was one which could not be reasonably sustained, in spite of all the ingenuity and eloquence of one of the most celebrated advocates of the coue' "y. The case was only too clear, for the prisoner was almost at the point of death, and it was astonishing that he had not been tried and convicted long previously. His coughing was incessant during the whole trial, and it was all that the two jailers in charge of him could do to keep him on his legs until it was over. The summing up of the judge was admirable. He dwelt upon every point that could be construed in favour of the prisoner, but as he proceeded it became clear that the evidence was too convincing to admit of doubt, and there was but one opinion in the court as to the impending verdict when the jury retired from the box. They were absent for about ten minutes, and on their return the foreman pronounced the prisoner guilty. There was a faint murmur of applause but it was instantly repressed. The judge then proceeded to pronounce sentence in words which I can never forget, and which I copied out into a note-book next day from the report that was published in the leading newspaper. I must condense it somewhat, and nothing which I could say would give more than a faint idea of the soiemn, not to say majestic, severity with which it was delivered. The sentence was as follows : — " Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consump- tion, and after an impartial trial before a jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty. Against the justice of the verdict I can say nothing: the ■r^r-^ Ni I'i I .1 ■I 12 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. evidence against you was conclusive, and it only re- mains for me to pass such a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of the law. That sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent, brought to this distressing con- dition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious ; but yours is no case for compassion : this is not your first offence : you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by the leniency shown you upon past occasions, to offend yet more seriously against the laws and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year : and I find that though you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful char- acter ; in fact, it is not too much to say that you have spent the greater part of your life in a jail. " It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your con- stitution ; excuses such as these are the ordinary re- fuge of the criminal ; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that — questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the primordial cell, or perhaps even on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this — namely, are you wicked or not ? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesi- tate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly. You are a bad and dangerous person, and stand AN EREWHONIAN TRIAL. 13 branded in the eyes of your fellow-countrymen with one of the most heinous known offences. " It is not my business to justify the law : the law may in some cases have its inevitable hardships, and I may feel regret at times that I have not the option of passing a less severe sentence than I am conipelled to do. But yours is no such case ; on the contrary, had not the capital pun.'rhment for consumption been abolished, I should certainly inflict it now. " It is intolerable that an example of such terrible enormity should be allowed to go at large unpunished. Your presence in the society of respectable people would lead the less able-bodied to think more lightly of all forms of illness ; neither can it be permitted that you should have the chance of corrupting unborn beings who might hereafter pester you. The unborn must not be allowed to come near you : and this not so much for their protection (for they are our natural enemies), as for our own ; for since they will not be utterly gainsaid, it must be seen to that they shall be quartered upon those who are least likely to corrupt them. " But independently of this consideration, and inde- pendently of the physical guilt which attaches itself to a crime so great as yours, there is yet another reason why we should be unable to show you mercy, even if we are inclined to do so. I refer to the existence of a class of men who lie hidden among us, and who are called physicians. Were the severity of the law or the current feeling of the country to be relaxed never so slightly, these abandoned persons, who are now compelled to practise secretly, and who can be con- sulted only at the greatest risk, would become frequent visitors in every household ; their organisation and '; t »4 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. 'f >M their intimate acquaintance with all family secrets would give them a power, both social and political, which nothing could resist. The head of tlie house- hold would become subordinate to the family doctor, who would interfere between man and wife, between mfster and servant, until the doctors should be the only depositaries of power in the nation, and have all that we hold precious at their mercy. A time of universal dephysicalisation would ensue ; medicine- vendors of all kinds would abound in our streets and advertise in all our newspapers. There is one remedy for this, and one only. It is that which the laws oi this country have long received and acted upon, and consists in the sternest repression of all diseases what- soever, as soon as their existence is made manifest to the eye of the ' .w. Would that that eye were far more piercing than it is. " But I will enlarge no further upon things that are themselves so obvious. You may say that it is not your fault. The answer is ready enough at hand, and it amounts to this — that if you had been born of healthy and well-to-do parents, and been well taken care of when you were a child, you would never have offended against the laws of your country, nor found yourself in your present disgraceful position. If you tell me that you had no hand in your parentage and education, and that it is therefore unjust to lay these things to your charge, I answer that whether your being in a consumption is your fault or no, it is a fault in you, and it is my duty to see that against such faults as this the commonwealth shall be protected. You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal ; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate. " I do not hesitate therefore to sentence you to im- Sl iki,: AN EREWHONIAN TRIAL, '5 prisonment, with hard labour, for the rest of your miserable existence. During that period I would earnestly entreat you to repent of these wrongs you have done already, and to entirely reform the constitu- tion of your whole body. I entertain but little hope that you will pay attention to my advice ; you are already far too abandoned. Did it rest with myself, I should add nothing in mitigation of the sentence which I have passed, but it is the merciful provision of the law that even the most hardened criminal shall be allowed some one of the three official remedies, which is to be prescribed at the time of his conviction. I shall therefore order that you receive two tablespoon- % fuls of castor-oil daily, until the pleasure of the court be further known." When the sentence was concluded, the prisoner acknowledged in a few scarcely audible words that he was justly punished, and that he had had a fair trial. He was then removed to the prison from which he was never to return. There was a second attempt at applause when the judge had finished speaking, but- as before it was at once repressed ; and though the feeling of the court was strongly against the prisoner, there was no show of any violence against him, if one may except a little hooting from the bystanders when he was being removed in the prisoners' van. Indeed, nothing struck me more during my whole sojourn in the country, than the general respect for law and order. if ii ■pill ! ; n ;l ( , 'r h ,i-H r !• Ji(] I I ( i6 ) MALCONTENTS. (part of chapter XII. OF EREWHON.) T WKITE with great diffidence, but it seems to me -^ that there is no unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding them for their sheer good luck : it is the normal condition of human life that this should be done, and no right-minded person will compbin at being subjected to the common treatment. There is no alternative open to us. It is idle CO say that men are not responsible for their misfortunes. What is responsibility ? Surely to be responsible means to be liable to have to give an answer should it be; demanded, and all things which live are responsible for t'leir lives and actions should society see fit to question them through the mouth of its authorised agent. What is the offence of a lamb that we should rear it, and tend it, and bill it into security, for the express purpose of killing it ? Its offence is the misfortune of being something whicli society wants to eat, and which cannot defend itself. This is ample. Who shall limit the right of society except society Itself ? And what consideration for the individual is tolerable unless society be the gniner thereby ? Wherefore should a man be so richly rewarded for having been son to a millionaire, were it not clearly provable that MALCONTENTS. 17 the common welfare is thus better furthered ? We cannot seriously detract from a man's merit in having been the son of a rich father without imperilling our own tenure of things which we do not wish to jeopard- ise ; if this were otherwise we should not let him keep his money for a single hour ; we would have it our- selves at once. For property is robbery, but then we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and liave found it expedient to organise our thieving, as we have found it to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law ; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct. But to return. Even in England a man on board a ship with yellow fever is held responsi'-le f r his mischance, no matter what his being kept in quaran- tine may cost him. He may catch the fever and die ; we cannot help it ; he must take his chance as other people do ; but surely it would be desperate unkind- ness to add contumely to our self-protection, unless, indeed, we believe that contumely is one of our best means of self-protection. Again, take the case of maniacs. We say that they are irresponsible for their actions, but we take good care, or ought to take good care, that they shall answer to us for their insanity, and we imprison them in what we ca'l an asylum (that modern sanctuary i) if we do not like their answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility. What we ought to say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less satisfactory answer from a lunatic than from one who is not mad, because lunacy is less infectious than crime. We kill a serpent if we go in danger by it, simply for being such and such a serpent in such and such a place; but we never say that the serpent has only B ; "ii : •! i ; ;'tH ! 1.;! t ! I !! I ' I 11 > nil! i8 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. itself to blame for not having been a harmless crea- ture. Its crime is that of beini' the thinof which it is : but this is a capital offence, and we are right in killing it out of the way, unless we think it more dangerous to do so than to let it escape ; nevertheless we pity the creature, even though we kill it. But in the case of him whose trial I have described above, it was impossible that any one in the court should not have known that it was but by an accident of birth and circumstances that he was not himself ak^ in a consumption; and yet none thought that it disgraced them to hear the judge give vent to the most cruel truisms about him. The judge himself was a kind and thoughtful person. He was a man of magnificent and benign presence. He was evidently of an iron constitution, and his face wore an expression of the maturest wisdom and experience ; yet for all this, old and learned as he was, he could not see things which one would have thought would have been apparent even to a child. He could not emancipate himself from, nay, it did not even occur to him to feel, the bondage of the ideas in which he had been born and bred. So was it with the jury and bystanders ; and — most wonderful of all — so was it even with the prisoner. Throughout he seemed, fully impressed with the notion that he was being dealt with justly : he saw nothing wanton in his being told by the judge that he was to be punished, not so much as a neces- sary protection to society (although this was not entirely L>st sight of), as because he had not been better born and bred than he was. But this led me to hope that he suffered less than he would have done if he had seen the matter in the same light that I did. And, after all, justice is relative. MALCONTENTS. 19 rmless crea- ng which it ire right in Ilk it more aevertheless it. ve described '. the court an accident not himself -ight that it 'Cnt to the ige himself as a man of -s evidently 1 expression yet ior all t see things have been emancipate lim to feel, jeen born )ystanders ; n with the essed with ustly : he the judge a neces- was not not been is led me have done ;hat I did. I may here mention that only a few years before my arrival in the country, the treatment of all convicted in- valids had been much more barbarous than now ; for no physical remedy was pro>^ided, and prisoners were put to the severest labour in all sorts of weather, so that most of them soon succumbed to the extreme hard- ships which they suffered; this was supposed to be beneficial in some ways, inasmuch as it put the country to less expense for the maintenance of its criminal class; but the growth of luxury had induced a relaxa- tion of the old severity, and a sensitive age would no longer tolerate what appeared to be an excess of rigour, even towards the most guilty ; moreover, it was found that juries were less willing to con\ ict, and justice was often cheated because there was no alternative between virtually condemning a man to death and letting him go free ; it was also held that the country paid in re- committals for its verse verity ; for those who had been imprisoned even for trifling ailments were often perma- nently disabled by their imprisonment ; and when a man has been once convicted, it was probable he would never afterwards be long off the hands of the country. These evils had long been apparent and recognised ; yet people were too indolent, and too indifferent to suffering not their own, to bestir themselves about putting an end to them, until at last a benevolent reformer devoted his whole life to effecting the necessary changes. He divided illnesses into three classes — those affecting the head, the trunk, and the lower limbs — and obtained an enactment that all diseases of the head, whether internal or external, should be treated with h'udcnum, those of the body with castor-oil, and those of the lower limbs with an embrocation of strong sulphuric acid and water. It may be said Ill 20. SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. l-i Hi fNI that tlie classification was not sufficiently careful, and that the remedies were ill chosen ; but it is a hard thing to initiate any reform, and it was necessary to familiarise the public mind with the principle, by inserting the thin end of the wedge first: it is not therefore to be wondered at that among so practical a people there should still be some room for improvement. The mass of the nation are well pleased with existing arrangements, and believe that their treatment of criminals leaves little or nothing to be desired ; but there is an energetic minority who hold what are con- sidered to be extreme opinions, and who are not at all disposed to rest contented until the principle lately admitted has been carried further. ^m ( 21 ) THE MUSICAL BANKS. (chapter XIV. OF EUEWHON.) ON my return to the drawing-room, I found the ladies were just putting away their work and preparing to go out. I asked them where they were going. They answered with a certain air of reserve that they were going to the bank to get some money. Now I had already collected that the mercantile affairs of the Erewhonians were conducted on a totally different system from our own ; I had however gathered little hitherto, except that they had two distinct commercial systems, of which the one appealed more strongly to the imagination than anything to which we are accustomed in Europe, inasmuch as the banks con- ducted upon this system were decorated in the most profuse fashion, and all mercantile transactions were ac- companied with music, so that they were called musical banks though the music was hideous to a European ear. As for the system itself I never understood it, neither can I do so now : they have a code in connec- tion with it, which I have no doubt they themselves understand, but no foreigner can hope to do so. One rule runs into and against another as in a most complicated grammar, or as in Chinese pronunciation, wherein I am told the slightest change in accentuation or tone of voice alters the meaning of a whole sentence. 22 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. ■iii III Whatever is incoherent in my description must be referred to the fact of my never having attained to a full comprehension of the subject. So far however as I could collect anything certain, they appeared to have two entirely distinct currencies, each under the control of its own banks and mer- cantile codes. The one of them (the one with the musical banks) was supposed to be the system, and to give out tlie currency in which all monetary trans- actions should be carried on. As far as I could see, all who wished to be considered respectable, did keep a certain amount of this currency at these banks ; nevertheless, if there is one thing of which I am more sure than another it is that the amount so kept was but a very small part of their possessions. I think they took the money, put it into the bank, and then drew it out again, repeating the process day by day, and keeping a certain amount of currency for this purpose and no other, while they paid the expenses of the bank with the other coinage. I am sure the managers and cashiers of the musical banks were not paid in their own currency. Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these musical banks, or rather to the great mother bank of the city, sometimes but not very often. He was a pillar of one of the other kind of banks, though he held some minor office also in these. The ladies generally went alone ; as indeed was the case in most families, except on some few great annual occasions. I had long wanted to know more of this strange system, and had the greatest desire to accompany my hostess and her daughters. I had seen them go out almost every morning since my arrival, and had noticed that they carried their purses in their hands, not exactly ostentatiously, yet just so as that those m\ ilL THE MUSICAL BANKS. v/lio met them should see whither they were going. I had never yet been asked to go with them myself. It is not easy to convey a person's manner by words, and I can hardly give any idea of the peculiar feeling which came upon me whenever I saw tlie ladies in the hall, with their purses in their liands, and on the point of starting for the bank. There was a some- thing of regret, a something as though they would wish to take me with them, but did not like to ask me, and yet as though I were hardly to ask to be taken. I was determined however to bring matters to an issue with my hostess about my going with them, and after a little parleying and many inquiries as to whether I was perfectly sure that I myself wished to go, it was decided that I might do so. We passed through several streets of more or less considerable houses, and at last turning round a corner we came upon a large piazza, at the end of which was a magnificent building, of a strange but noble architecture and of great antiquity. It did not open directly on to the piazza, there being a screen, through which was an archway, between the piazza and the actual precincts of the bank. On passing under the archway we found ourselves upon a green sward, round which there ran an arcade or cloister, while in front of us uprose the Liajestic towers of the bank and its venerable front, which was divided into three deep recesses and adorned with all sorts of marbles and many sculptures. On either side there were beau- tiful old trees wherein the birds were busy by the hundred, and a number of quaint but substantial houses of singularly comfortable appearance; they were situated in the midst of orchards and gardens, and gave me an impression of great peace and plenty. 24 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON, '! Indeed it had been no error to say that this building was one which appealed to the imagination ; it did more — it carried both imagination and judgment by storm. It was an epic in stone and marble ; neither had I ever seen anything in the least comparable to it. I was completely charmed and melted. I felt more conscious of the existence of a remote past. One knows of this always, but the knowledge is never so living as in the actual presence of some witness to the life of bygone ages. I felt how short a space of human life was the period of our own existence. I was more impressed with my own littleness, and much more in- clinable to believe that the people whose sense of the fitness of things was equal to the upraising of so serene a handiwork, were hardly likely to be wrong in tlie conclusions they might come to upon any subject. My feeling certainly was that the currency of this bank must be the right one. We crossed the sward and entered the building. If the outside had been impressive the inside was even more so. It was very lofty and divided into several parts by walls which rested upon massive pillars • the windows were filled with glass, on which had been painted the principal commercial incidents of the bank for many ages. In a remote part of the build- ing there were men and boys singing ; this was the only disturbing feature, for as the gamut was still unknown, there was no music in the country which could be agreeable to a European ear. The singers seemed to have derived their inspirations from the songs of birds and the wailing of the wind, which last they tried to imitate in melancholy cadences which at times degenerated into a howl. To my thinking the noise was hideous, but it produced a great effect upon THE MUSICAL BANKS. 25 my companions, who professed themselves much moved. As soon as the singing was over the ladies requested me to stay where I was, while they went inside the place from whicli it had seemed *'.o come. During their absence certain reflections forced them- selves upon me. In the first place, it struck me as strange that the building should be so nearly empty; I was almost alone, and the few besides myself had been led by curiosity, and had no intention of doing business with the bank. But there might be more inside. I stole up to the curtain, and ventured to draw the extreme edge of it on one side. No, there was hardly any one there. I saw a large number of cashiers, all at their desks ready to pay cheques, and one or two who seemed to be the managing partners. I also saw my hostess and her daughters and two or three other ladies ; also three or four old women and the boys from one of the neighbouring Colleges of Unreason ; but there was no one else. This did not look as though the bank was doing a very large business ; and yet I had always been told that every one in the city dealt with this establishment. I cannot describe all that took place in these inner precincts, for a sinister-looking person in a black gown came and made unpleasant gestures at me for peeping. I happened to have in my pocket one of the musical bank pieces, which had been given me by Mrs. Nosnibor, so I tried to tip him with it; but having seen what it was, he became so angry that it was all I could do to pacify him. When he was gone I ventured to take a second look, and saw Zulora in the very act of giving a piece of paper which looked like a cheque to one of the cashiers. He did not 'I ' -I I I -If i! m a6 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. examine it, but putting his hand into an antique coffer hard by, he pulled out a quantity of dull-looking metal pieces apparently at random, and handed them over without counting them ; neither did Zulora count them, but put them into her purse and departed. It seemed a very singular proceeding, but I supposed that they knew their own business best, at any rate Zulora seemed quite satisfied, thanked him for the money, and began making towards the curtain ; on this I let it drop and retreated to a reasonable distance. Mrs. Nosnibor and her daughters soon joined me. For some few minutes we all kept silence, but at last I ventured to remark that the bank was not so busy to- day as it probably often was. On this Mrs. Nosnibor said that it was indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions. I could say nothing in reply, but I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do approxi- mately know where they get that which does them good. Mrs. Nosnibor went on to say that I must not imagine there was any want of confidence in the bank because I had seen so few people there ; the heart of the country was thoroughly devoted to these establish- ments, and any sign of their being in danger would bring in support from the most unexpected quarters. It was only because per^ple knew them to be so very safe, that in some cases (as she lamented to say in Mr. Nosnibor's) they felt that their support was unnecessary. Moreover these institutions never departed from the safest and most approved banking principles. Thus they never allowed interest on deposit, a thing now fre- quently done by certain bubble companies, which by doing an illegitimate trade had drawn many customers away; and even the shareholders were fewer than THE MUSICAL BANKS. 27 formerly, owing to the innovations of these unscrupu- lous persons. It came out by and by that the musical banks paid little or no dividend, but divided their profits l)y way of bonus on the original shares once in every three liundred and fifty years; and as it was now only two Imndred years since there had been one of these dis- tributions, people felt tliat they could not hope for another in their own time antl preferred investments whereby they got some more tangible return ; all which, she said, was very melancholy to think of. Having made these last admissions, she returned to her original statement, namely, that every one in the country really supported the bank. As to the fewness of the people, and the absence of the able-bodied, she pointed out to me with some justice that this was exactly what we ought to expect. The men who were most conversant about the stability of human institu- tions, such as the lawyers, men of science, doctors, statesmen, painters, and the like, were just those who were most likely to be misled by their own fancied accomplishments, and to be made unduly suspicious by their licentious desire ibr greater present return, which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition, by their vanity, which would prompt them to aifect superiority to the prejudices of the vulgar, and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies, which were generally diseased ; let a person's intellect be never so sound, unless his body were in absolute health, he could form no judgment worth having on matters of this kind. The body was everything: it need not perhaps be such a strouff body (she said this because she saw I was thinking of the 38 SELECTIONS FROM ERE W HON. 'I ffl :ui I'lp ! old and infirm-looking folks whom I had seen in the bank), but it must be in perfect health ; in this case, the less active strength it had the more free would be the working of the intellect, and therefore the sounder the conclusion. The people, then, whom I had seen at the bank were in reality the very ones whose opinions were most worth having ; they declared its advantages to be incalculable, and even professed to consider the im- mediate return to be far larger than they were entitled .to ; and so she ran on, nor did she leave oft' till we had got back to the house. She might say what she pleased, but her manner was not one that carried much conviction ; and later on I saw signs of general indifference to these banks that were not to be mistaken. Their supporters often denied it, but the denial was generally so couched as to add another proof of its existence. In commercial panics, and in times of general distress, the people as a mass did not so much as even think of turning to these banks. A few individuals m^!ght do so, some from habit and early training, some fioiu hope of gain, but few from a genuine belief that the money was good ; the masses turned instinctively to the other currency. In a conversation with one of the musical bank managers I ventured to hint this as plainly as uoliteness would allow. He said that it had been more or less true till lately ; but that now they had put fresh stained glass windows into all the banks in the country, and repaired the buildings, and enlarged the organs, and taken to talking nicely to the people in the streets, and to remembering the ages of their children and giving them things when they were ill, so that all would henceforth go smoothly. THE MUSICAL BANKS. 29 " But haven't you done anything to the money itself ? " said I timidly. To this day I do not know exactly what the bank- manager said, but it came to this in the end — that I liad better not meddle with things that I did not imder.stand. On reviewing the whole matter, I can be certain of this much only, that the money given out at the musical banks is not the current coin of the realm. It is not the money with which the people do as a general rule buy their bread, meat, and clothing. It is like it ; some coins very like it ; and it is not counterfeit. It is not, take it all round, a spurious article made of base metal in imitation of the money which is in daily use; but it is a distinct coinage which, though I do not suppose it ever actually superseded the oT-dinary gold, silver, and copper, was probably issued by authority, and was intended to supplant those metals. Some of the pieces were really of exquisite beauty ; and some were, I do verily be- lieve, nothing but the ordinary currency, only that there was another head and name in place of that of the commonwealth. And here was one of the great marvels ; for those who were most strongly in favour of this coinage maintained, and even grew more excited if they were opposed here than on any other matter, that the very self-same coin with the head of the commonwealth upon it was of little if any value, while it became exceedingly precious if stamped with the other image. Some of the coins were plainly bad ; of these last there were not many ; still there were enough for them to be not uncommon. These were entirely composed of alloy J they would bend easily, would melt away to SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. nothing with a little heat, and were quite iinsuited for a currency. Yet there were few of the wealthier classes who did not maintain that even these coins were genuine good money, though they were chary of taking them. Every one knew this, so they were seldom oflered ; but all thought it incumbent upon them to retain a good many in their possession, and to let them be seen from time to time in their hands and purses. Of course people knew their real value exceedingly well ; but few, if any, dared to say what that value was ; or if they did, it would be only in certain companies or in writing in the newspapers anonymously. Strange ! there was hardly any insinua- tion against this coinage which they would not tolerate and even applaud in their daily papers ; and yet, if the same thing were said without ambiguity to their faces — nominative case verb and accusative being all in their right places, and doubt impossible — they would consider themselves very seriously and justly outraged, and accuse the speaker of being unwell. I never could understand, neither can I do so now, why a single currency should not suffice them ; it would seem to me as thoudi all their dealings would iiave been thus greatly simplified ; but I was met with a look of horror if ever I dared to hint at it Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough money at the musical banks to swear by, would call the other banks (where their securities really lay) cold, deadening, paralsying, and the like. I noticed another thing moreover which struck me greatly. I was taken to the opening of one of these banks in a neighbouring town, and saw a large as- semblage of cashiers and managers. I sat opposite them and scanned their faces attentively. They did THE MUSICAL BANKS. 31 not please me ; they lacked, with a few exceptions, the true Erewhonian frankness ; and an equal number from any other class would have looked happier and better men. When I met them in the streets they did not seem like other people, but had, as a general rule, a cramped expression upon their faces which pained and depressed me. Those who came from the country were better ; they seemed to hav3 lived less as a separate class, and to be freer and healthier ; but in spite of my seeing not a few whose looks were benign and noble, I could not help asking myself conceriiing the greater number of those whom I met, whether Erewhon would be a better country if their expression were to be transferred to the people in general. I answered myself emphatically, no. A man's expression is his sacrament ; it is the outward and visible sign of his inward and spiritual grace, or want of grace ; and as I looked at the majority of these men, I could not help feeling that there ma^t be a something in their lives which had stunted their natural development, and that they would have been more healthily-minded in any other profession. I was always sorry for them, for in nine cases out of ten they were well-mearing persons ; they were in the main very poorly paid ; their constitutions were as a rule above suspicion ; and there were recorded numberless instances of their self-sacrifice and gene- rosity ; but they had had the misfortune to have been betrayed into a false positiou at an age for the most part when their judgment was not matured, and after having been kept in studied ignorance of the real diffi- culties of the system. But this did not make their position the less a false one, and its bad effects upon themselves were unmistakable. SELECTIONS FROM ERE WHOM. ml li Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them, which struck me as a very bad sign. When they were in the room every one would talk as though all currency save that of the musical banks should be abolished ; and yet they knew perfectly well that even the cashiers themselves hardly used the musical bank money more than other people. It was expected of them that they should appear to do so, but this was all. Tlie less thoughtful of them did not seem particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at heart, though perhaps they hardly knew it, and would not have owned to being so. Some few were opponents of the whole system ; but these were liable to be dis- missed from their employment at any moment, and this rendered them very careful, for a man who had once been cashier at a musical bank was out of the field for other employment, and was generally unfitted for it by reason of that course of treatment which was commonly called his education. In fact it was a career from which retreat was virtually impossible, and into which young men were generally induced to enter before they could be reasonably expected, considering their training, to have formed any opinions of their own. Few indeed were those who had the courage to insist on seeing both sides of the question before they com- mitted themselves to either. One would have thought that this was an elementary principle, — one of the first things that an honourable man would teach his boy to do ; but in practice it was not so. X even saw cases in which parents bought the right of presenting to the office of cashier at one of these banks, with the fixed determination that some one of their sons (perhaps a mere child) should fill it. There was the lad himself — growing up with every promise THE MUSICAL BANKS. 33 of becoming a good and honourable man — but utterly without warning concerning the iron shoe which his natural protector was providing for him. Who could say that the whole thing would not end in a life-long lie, and vain chafing to escape ? I confess that there were few things in Erewhon which shocked me more than this. { 34 ) m I ■ I BIRTH FORMULA!:. (chapter XVII. OF EREWHON.) I HEARD what follows not from Arowhena, but from Mr. Nosnibor and some of the gentlemen who occa- sionally dined at the house : they told me that the Erewhonians believe in pre-existence ; and not only this (of which I will write more fully in the next chapter); but they believe that it is of their own free act and deed in a previous state that people come to be born into this world at all. They hold that the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting the married (and sometimes even the unmarried) of both sexes, fluttering about them inces- santly, and giving them no peace either of mind or body until they have consented to take them under their protection. If this were not so — this is at least what they urge — it would be a monstrous freedom for one man to take with another, to say that he should under- go the chances and changes of this mortal life without any option in the matter. No man would nave any right to get married at all, inasmuch as he can never tell what misery his doing so may entail forcibly upon his children who cannot be unhappy as long as they remain unborn. They feel this so strongly that they are resolved to shift the blame on to other shoulders ; they have therefore invented a long mythology as to the world in which the unborn people live, what they do, wwy^jfO"" BIRTH FORMUL.r.. 35 and the arts and machinations to which they have recourse in order to get themselves into our own world. I cannot think they seriously believe in this my- thology concerning pre-existence ; they do and they do not ; they do not know themselves what they believe ; all they know is that it is a disease not to believe as they do. The only thing of whi h they are quite sure is that it is the pestering of the unborn, which causes them to be brought into this world, and that they would not be here if they would only let peaceable people alone. It would be hard to disprove this position, and they might have a good case if they would only leave it as it stands. But this they will not do ; they must have assurance doubly su . they must have the writ- ten word of the child itself as soon as it is born, giving the parents indemnity from all responsibility on the score of its birth, and asserting its own pre-existence. They have therefore devised something which they call a birth formula — a document which varies in words according to the caution of parents, but is much the same practically in all cases ; for it has been the business of the Erewhonian lawyers during many ages to exercise their skill in perfecting it and providing for every contingency. These formulae are printed on common paper at a moderate cost for the poor; but the rich have them written on parchment and handsomely bound, so that the getting up of a person's birth formula is a test of his social position. They commence by setting forth. That whereas A. B. was a member of the king- dom of the unborn, where he was well provided for in every way, and had no cause of discontent, &c. &c., he did of his own wanton restlessness conceive a desire Jl < ! I !!; 36 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. to enter into this present world ; that thereon havin-^ taken the necessary steps as set forth in laws of the unborn kingdom, he set himself v/ith malice aforethought to plague and pester two unfortunate people who had never wronged him, and who were quite contented until he conceived this base design against their peace ; for which wrong he now humbly entreats their pardon. He acknowledges that he is respon- sible for all physical blemishes and deficiimcies which may render him answerable to the laws of his country ; that his parents have nothing whatever to do with any of these things; and that they have a right to kill him at once if they be so minded, though he entreats them to show their marvellous goodness and clemency towards him by sparing his life. If they will do this he promises to be their most abject creature during his earlier years, and indeed unto his life's end, unless they should see fit in their abundant generosity to remit some portion of his service hereafter. And so the formula continues, going sometimes into very mirute details, according to the fancies of family lawyers, who will not make it any shorter than they can help. The deed being thus prepared, on the third or fourth day after the birth of the child, or as they call it, the " final importunity," the friends gather together, and there is a feast held, where they are all very melancholy — as a general rule, I believe quite truly so — and make presents to the father and mother of the child in order to console them for the injury which has just been done them by the unborn. By and by the child himself is brought down by his nurse, and the company begin to rail upon him, up- braiding him for his impertinence and asking him if' '111! 'ill 1 il BIRTH FORMUL.^. 37 what amends he proposes to make for the wrong that he has committed, and how he can look for care and nourishment from those who have perhaps already been injured by the unborn on some ten or twelve occasions ; for they say of people with large families, that they have suffered terrible injuries from the unborn; till at last, when this has been carried far enough, some one suggests the formula, which is brought forth and solemnly read to the child by the family straightener. This gentleman is always invited on these occasions, for the very fact of intrusion into a peaceful family shows a depravity on the part of the child which requires his professional services. On being teased by the reading and tweaked by the nurse, the child will commonly fall a-crying, which is reckoned a good sign as showing a conscious- ness of guilt. He is thereon asked, Does he assent to the formula ? on which, as he still continues crying and can obviously make no answer, some one of the friends comes forward and undertakes to sign the docu- ment on his behalf, feeling sure (so he says) that the child would do it if he only knew how, and that he will release the present signer from his engagement on arriving at maturity. The friend then inscribes the signature of the child at the foot of the parchment, which is held to bind the child as much as though he had signed it himself. Even this, however, does not fully content them, for they feel a little uneasy until they have got the child's own signature after all. So when he is about fourteen these good people partly bribe him by promises of greater liberty and good things, and partly intimidate him through their great power of making themselves passively unpleasant to him, so that though there is a show of freedom made, 38 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. M'i there is really none, and partly they use the offices of the teachers in the Colleges of Unreason, till at last, in one way or another, they take very good care that he shall sign the paper by which lie professes to have been a free agent in coming into the world, and to take all the responsibility of having done so on to his own shoulders. And yet, though this document is in theory the most important which any one can sign in his whole life, they will have him commit himself to it at an age when neither they nor the law will for many a year allow any one else to bind him to the smallest obligation, no matter how righteously he may owe it, because they hold him too young to know what he is about. I thought this seemed rather hard, and not of a piece with the many admirable institutions existing among them. I once ventured to say a part of what I thought about it to one of the Professors of Unreason. I asked him whether he did not think it would do serious harm to a lad's principles, and weaken his sense of the sanctity of his word, and of truth generally, that he should be led into entering upon an engagement which it was so plainly impossible he should keep even for a single day with tolerable integrity — whether, in fact, the teachers who so led him, or who taught anything as a certainty of which they were themselves uncertain, were not earning their living by impairing the truth- sense of their pupils. The professor, who was a delight- ful person, seemed surprised at the vhw I took, and gave me to understand, perhaps justl;y enough, that I ought not to make so much fuss about a trifle. No one, he said, expected that the boy either would or could do all that he undertook ; but the world was full of compromises ; and there was hardly any engagement "nm I BIRTH FORMULA. 39 which would bear being interpreted literally. Human language was too gross a vehicle of thought — thought being incapable of absolute translation. He added, that as there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the moaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can renr^ : thought without a jarring and a harshness some- wlijre — and so forth; all of which seemed to c to this in the end, that it was the custom of the country, and that the Erewhonians were a conservative people ; that the boy would have to begin compiomising sooner or later, and this was part of his education in the art. It was perhaps to be regretted that compromise should be as necessary as it was ; still it was necessary, and the sooner the boy got to understand it the better for himself. But they never tell this to the boy. From the book of their mythology about the unborn I made the extracts which will form the following chapter. I' ( 40 ) I I •in kuLi THE WORLD OF THE UNBORN. (part of chapter XVIII. OF EREWHON.) THE Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth and stars and all the heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west, and not from west to east, and in like manner they say it is by chance that man is drawn through life with his face to the past instead of to the fut :. For the future is there as much as the past, only ^nat we may not see it. Is it not in the loins of the past, and must not the past al:er before the future can do so ? They have a fable that there was a race of men tried upon the earth once, who knew the future better than the past, but that they died in a twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them. They say that if any were to be born too prescient now, he would die miserably, before he had time to transmit so peace-destroying a faculty to descendants. Strange fate for man ! He must perish if he get that, which he must perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no better than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the devils. Having waded through many chapters like the above, I came at last to the unborn themselves, and found that they were held to be souls pure and simple, having no actual bodies, but living in a sort of gaseous THE WORLD OF THE UNBORN. 41 yet more or less anthropomorphic existence, like that of a ghost; they have thus neither flesh nor blood nor warmth. Nevertheless they are supposed to have local habitations and cities wherein they dwell, though these are as unsubstantial as their inhabitants ; tliey are even thought to eat and drink some thin ambrosial sustenance, and generally to be capable of doing what- ever mankind can do, only after a visionary ghostly fashion, as in a dream. On the other hand, as long as they remain where they are they never die — the only form of death in the unborn world being the leaving it for our own. They are believed to be extremely numerous, far more so than mankind. They arrive from unknown planets, full grown, in large batches at a time ; but they can only leave the unborn world by taking the steps necessary for their arrival here — which is, in fact, by suicide. They ought to be a happy people, for they have no extremes of good or ill fortune ; never marrying, but living in a state much like that fabled by the poets as the primitive condition of mankind. In spite of this, however, they are incessantly complaining ; they know that we in this world have bodies, and indeed they know everything else about us, for they move among us whithersoever they will, and can read our thoughts, as well as survey our actions at pleasure. One would think that this should be enough for them ; and indeed most of them are alive to the desperate risk which they will run by indulging themselves in that body with " sensible warm motion " which they so much desire ; nevertheless, there are some to whom the ennui of a disembodied existence is so intolerable that they will venture anything for a change ; so they resolve to quit. The conditions which they must accept are 1 1 i! m wm 4» SELECTIONS FROM ERE WHOM. SO uncertain, that none but the most foolish of the un- born will consent to take tliem ; and it is from these and these only that our own ranks are recruited. When they have finally made up their minds to leave, they must go before the magistrate of the nearest town and siijn an affidavit of their desire to quit their then existence. On their having done this, the magistrate reads them the conditions which they must accept, and which are so long that I can only extract some of the principal points, which are mainly the following : — First, they must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense of identity ; they must go into the world lielpless, and without a will of their own ; they must draw lots for their dispositions before they go, and take it, such as it is, for better or worse — neither are they to be allowed any choice in the matter of the body which they so much desire ; they are simply allotted by chance, and without appeal, to two people whom it is their business to lind and pester until they adopt them. Who these are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind, healthy or diseased, there is no knowing ; they have, in fact, to entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good con- stitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee. It is curious to read the lectures which the wiser Leads give to those who are meditating a change. They talk with them as we talk with a spendthrift, and with about as much success. " To be born," they say, " is a felony — it is a capi- tal crime, for which sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of the offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or eighty years, but what is that, in comparison with the eter- '^mL THE WORLD OF THE UNBORN. 43 nity which you now enjoy ? And even though the sentence were commuted, and you were allowed to live for ever, you would in time become so terribly weary of life that execution wouUl be the greatest mercy to you. Consider the infinite risk ; to be born of wicked parents and trained in vice ! to be born of silly parents, and trained to unrealities ! of parents who regard you as a sort of chattel or property, belong- ing more to them than to yourself ! Again, you may draw utterly unsympathetic parents, who will never be able to understand you, and who will thwart you as long as they can to the utmost of their power (as a hen when she has hatched a duckling), and then call you ungrateful because you do not love them, or parents who may look upon you as a thing to be cowed while it is still young, lest it should give them trouble hereafter by having wishes and feelings of its own. " In later life, when you have been finally allowed to pass muster as a full member of the world, you will yourself become liable to the pesterings of the unborn — and a very happy life you may be led in consequence ! For we solicit so strongly that a few only — nor these the best — can refuse us ; and yet not to refuse is much the same as going into partnership with half a dozen different people about whom one can know absolutely nothing beforehand — not even whether one is going into partnership with men or women, nor with how many of either. Delude not yourself with thinking that you will be wiser than your parents. You may be an age in advance of them, but unless you are one of the great ones (and if you are one of the great ones, woe betide you), you will still be an age behind your children. " Imagine what it must be to have an unborn M It i '' ' 'il rifi 44 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. quartered upon you, who is of a different temperament to your own ; nay, half a dozen such, who will not love you though you may tell them that you have stinted yourself in a thousand ways to provide for their well- being, — who will forget all that self-sacrifice of which you are yourself so conscious, and of whom you may never be sure that they are not bearing a grudge against you for errors of judgment into which you may have fallen, but ^'hich you had hoped had been long since atoned for. Ingratitude such as this is not un- common, yet fancjT" what it must be to bear ! It is hard upon the duckling to have been hatched by a hen, but is it not also hard upon the hen to have hatched the duckling ? " Consider it again, we pray you, not for our sake but for your own. Your initial character you must draw by lot ; but whatever it is, it can only come to a tolerably successful development after long training ; remember that over that training you will have no control. It is possible, and even probable, that what- ever you may get in after life which is of real pleasure and service to you, will have to be won in spite of, rather than by the help of, those whom you are now about to pester, and that ycu will only win your freedom after years of a painful struggle, in which it will be hard to say whether you have suffered most injury, or inflicted it. " Eemember also, that if you go into the world you will have free will; that you will be obliged to have it, that there is no escaping it, that you will be fettered to it during your whole life, and must on every occasion do Lhat which on the whole seems best to you at any given time, no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing it. Your mind will be a balance for con- r^-^^'^iii^— - THE WORLD OF THE UNBORN. 45 siderations, and your action will go with the heavier scale. How it shall fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you may have drawn at birth, the bias which they will have obtained by use, and the weight of the immediate considerations. If the scales were good to start with, and if they have not been out- rageously tampered with in childhood, and if the com- binations into which you enter are average ones, you may come off well ; but there are too many " ifs " in this, and with the failure of any one of them your misery is assured. Eeflect on this, and remember that should the ill come upon you, you will have yourself to thank, for it is your own choice to be born, aui there is no compulsion in the matter. " Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind ; there is a certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to very consider- able happiness ; but mark how they are distributed over a man's life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the miseries of a decrepit age ? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at sixty ? For you must live on your capital ; there is no investing your powers so that you may get a small annuity of life for ever : you must eat up your principal bit by bit and be tortured by seeing it grow continually smaller and smaller, even though you happen to escape being rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty. Eemember, too, that there never yet was a man of forty who would not come back into the world of the unborn if he could do so with decency and honour. Being in the world, he will as a general rule stay till he is forced to go ; but do you think that ■ 1 IT ' i 11 :iiil 46 SELECTIONS FROM EREWHON. he would consent to be born again, and re-live his life, if he had the offer of doing so? Do not think it. If he could so alter the past as that he should never have come into being at all, do you not think that he would do it very gladly ? What was it that one of their own poets meant, if it was not this, when he cried out upon the day in which he was born, and the night in which it was said there is a man child conceived ? * For now,' he says, * I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept ; then had I been at rest with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves ; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or as an hidden untimely birth, I had not been ; as infants which never saw light. There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' Be very sure that the guilt of being born carries this punishment at times to all men ; but how can they ask for pity, or complain of any mischief that may befall them, having entered open-eyed into the snare ? " One word more and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a dream, flit in some puzzled mo- ment across your brain, and you shall feel that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work, and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly to return ; we say in such a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it eludes your grasp, and you watch it, as Orpheus watched Eurydice, gliding back again into the twi- light kingdom, fly — fly — if you can remember the advice — to the haven of your present and immediate duty, taking shelter incessantly in the work which you have in hand. This much you may perhaps recall ; and this, if you will imprint it deeply upon your every t" ^ *^^^i - jw J- THE WORLD OF THE UNBORN. 47 faculty, will be most likely to bring you safely and honourably home through the trials that are before you."-"- This is the fashion in which they reason with those who would be for leaving them, but it is seldom that they do much good, for none but the unquiet and unreasonable ever think of being born, and those who are foolish enough to think of it are generally foolish enough to do it. Finding therefore that they can do no more, the friends follow weeping to the courthouse of the chief magistrate, where the one who wishes to be born declares solemnly and openly that he accepts the conditions attached to his decision. On this he is presented with the potion, which immediately destroys his memory and sense of identity, and dissipates the thin gaseous tenement which he has inhabited : he becomes a bare vital principle, not to be perceived by human senses, nor appreciated by any chemical test. He has but one instinct, which is that he is to go to such and such a place, where he will find two persons whom he is to importune till they consent to undertake him ; but whether he is to find these persons among the race of Chowbok or the Erewhonians themselves is not for him to choose. * The myth above alluded to exists in Erewhon with changed names and considerable modifications. I have taken the liberty of referring to the story as familiar to ourselves. lil m SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. t : : i! I ''i 1 ■i .,1; MEMOIR OF THE LATE yOHN PICKARD OWEN. (chapter I. OF THE FAIR HAVEN. *) rriHE subject of this memoir, and author of the work J- which follows it, was born in Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Eoad, London, on the 5 th of Feb- ruary 1832. He was my elder brother by about eighteen months. Our father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession of unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a slender income when my brother and myself were about three and four years old. My father died some five or six years afterwards, and we only recollected him as a singularly gentle and humorous playmate who doted upon us both and never spoke unkindly. The charm of such a recollection can never be dis- pelled ; both my brother and myself returned his love with interest, and cherished his me nory with the most affectionate regret, from the day on which he left us till the time came that the one of us was again to see him face to face. So sweet and winning was his nature that his slightest wish was our law — and whenever we pleased him, no matter how little, he never failed to thank us as though we had done him * The first edition of the Fair Haven was published April 1873. JOHN PICKARD OWEN. 49 a service which we should have had a perfect right to withhold. How proud were we upon any of these occasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being thanked ! He did indee> well know the art of becoming idolised by his children, and dearly did he prize the results of his own proficiency ; yet truly there was no art about it ; all arose spontaneously from the well-spring of a sympathetic nature which was quick to feel as others felt, whether old or young, rich or poor, wise or foolish. On one point alone did he neglect us — I refer to our religious education. On all other matters he was the kindest and most careful teacher in the world. Love and gratitude be to his memory ! My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of a quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection. She must have been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was still comely when we first remembered her ; she was also highly accomplished, but she felt my father's loss of fortune more keenly than my father himself, and it preyed upon her mind, though rather for our sake than for her own. Had we not known my father we should have loved her better than any one in the world, but affection goes by comparison, and my father spoiled us for any one but himself; indeed, in after life, I remember my mother's telling me, with many tears, how jealous she had often been of the love we bore him, and how mean she had thought it of him to entrust all scolding or repression to her, so that he might have more than his due share of our affection. Not that I believe my father did this consciously ; still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say we might often have got off scot-free when we really deserved reproof D 11 I I i so SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. h'Sr i |i !" iti -' had not my mother undertaken the onus of scolding us herself. We therefore naturally feared her more than my father, and fearing more we loved less. For as love casteth out fear, so fear love. This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the way to bear it. She tried to up- braid us, in little ways, into loving her as much as my father ; the more she tried this, the less we could suc- ceed in doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need not be detailed. Not but what we really loved her deeply, while her affection for us was insur- passable; still we loved her less than we loved my father, and this was the grievance. My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my mother. He was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, and a thoroughly con- sistent member of the Church of England ; but he con- ceived, and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should first teach her children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to them a knowledge of the One in whom we live and move and have our being. My mother accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a cer- tain narrowness of view — the natural but deplorable result of her earlier surroundings — she was one of the most truly pious women whom I have ever known ; unfortunately for herself and us she had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical literalism — a school which in after life both my brother and myself came to regard as the main obstacle to the complete over- throw of unbelief; we therefore looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for my own part I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of Christ has ever encountered. But of this more hereafter. yOHN PICKARD OWEN. 51 colding ir more I. For mother to up- i as my lid suc- fashion I really I insur- ^ed my entirely id, of a ily con- he con- who mds in One in My a cer- orable of the Icnown ; trained school came over- with ^n part which of this t My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of our religious education. Whatever she be- lieved she believed literally, and, if I may say so, with a harshness of realisation which left little scope for imagination or mystery. Her ideas concerning heaven and her solutions of life's enigmas were clear and simple, but they could only be reconciled with certain obvious facts — such as the omnipotence anu all-goodness of God — by leaving many things absolutely out of sight. And this my mother succeeded effectually in doing. She never doubted that her opinions comprised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ; she therefore made haste to sow the good seed in our tender minds, and so far succeeded that when my brother was four years old he could repeat the Apostles' Creed, the general confession, and the Lord's Prayer without a blunder. My mother made herself believe that he delighted in them ; but, alas ! it was far other- wise ; for strange as it may appear concerning one whose later life was a continual prayer, in childhood he detested nothing £,0 much as being made to pray, and to learn his catechism. In this I am sorry to say we were both heartily of a mind. As for Sunday the less said the better. I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents had better, perhaps, express myself more plainly) that this aversion was probably the result of my mother's undue eagerness to reap an artificial fruit of lip-service, which could have little meaning to the heart of one so young. I believe that the severe check which the natural growth of faith experienced in my brother's case was due almost entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained ; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being made II J;!i i m K it Vtl fi Sa SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. to say our prayers. Morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice ^\hicll we could em- Tlius we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father tell my mother that it was a shame to wake lis ; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a state apparently of the profoundest slumber when we were really wide awake and in great fear of detection. For we knew how to pretend to be asleep, but we did not know Low we ought to wake again ; there was nothing for it therefore when we were once committed, but to go on sleeping till we were fairly undressed and put to bed, and could wake up safely in the dark. But de- ceit is never long successful, and we ^ere at last igno- miniously exposed. It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John, and tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front of him. iNow my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent in his theories concerning sleep, and had no conception what a real sleeper would do under these circumstances. Fear deprived him of his powers of reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that because sleepers, so far as he had observed them, were always motionless, therefore they must be rigid and incapable of motion ; and indeed that any movement, under any circum- stances (for from his earliest childhood he liked to carry his theories to their legitimate conclusion), would be physically impossible for one who was really sleep- ing ; forgetful, oh ! unhappy one, of the flexibility of his own body on being carried up stairs, and, more un- happy still, ignorant of the art of waking. He there- JOHN PICKARD OWEN. S3 fore clenclied his fingers harder and harder as he felt my motlier trying to unfold them, while his head hung listless, and his eyes were closed as though he were sleeping sweetly. It is needless to detail the agony of shame that followed. My mother begged my father to box his ears, which my father flatly refused to do. Then she boxed them herself, and there followed a scene, and a day or two of disgrace for both of us. Shortly after this there happened another misad- venture. A lady came to stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had been brought into cur nursery, for my father's fortunes had already railed, and we were living in a humble way. We were still but four and five years old, so the arrangement was not unnatural, and it was assumed that we should be asleep before the lady went to bed, and be down stairs before she would get up in the morning. But the arrival of this lady and her being put to sleep in the nursery were great events to us in those days, and being particularly wanted to go to deep, we of course sat up in bed talking and keeping ourselves awake till she should come up stairs. Perhaps we had fancied that she would give us something, but if so we were disappointed. However, whether this was the case or not, we were wide awake when our visitor came to bed, and having no particular object to gain, we made no pretence of sleeping. The lady kissed us both, told us to lie still and go to sleep like good children, and then began doing her hair, I remember this was the occasion on which my brother discovered a good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto been beyond his ken ; more especially that the mass of petticoats and clothes which envelop the female form were not, as he ^ :iii I ' 54 SELECTIONS FROM THE F.ilR HAVEN. expressed it to me, " all solid woinnn, " but that women were not in reality more substantially built than men, and had legs as much as lie had — a fact which he had never yet realised. On this he for a long time considered them as impostors, who had wronged him by leading him to suppose that they had far more " body in them " (so he said) than he now found they had. This was a sort of thing which he r'^garded with stern moral reprobation. If he had been old enough to have a solicitor I believe he would have put the matter into his hands, us well as certain other things which had lately troubled him. For but recently my mother had bought a fowl, and he had seen it plucked, and the inside taken out ; his irritation had been extreme on discovering that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that their in sides — and these formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of the bird — were perfactly useless. He was now beginning to understand that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was concerned ; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with what they ought to have considering their apparent bulk ; insig- nificant, mere skin and bone covering: a cavern. What right had they, or anything else, to assert themselves as so big, and prove so empty ? And now this dis- covery of woman's falsehood was quite too much for him. The world itself was hollow, made up of shams and delusions, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough. Every- thing with him was to be exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing hitherto. If h( JOHN PICKARD OWEN. 55 If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid ; if hollow, very hollow; notliing was to bo half and half, and nothing was to change unless he had himself already beronie accustomed to its times and manners of changing ; there were to be no exceptions and no contradictions ; all things were to he perfectly con- sistent, and all premisses to be carried with extremest rigour to their legitimate conclusions. Heaven was to be very neat (for he was always tidy himself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous system, such as those caused by dogs barking at him, or cows driven in the streets. God was to resemble my father, and the Holy Spirit to bear some sort of indistinct analogy to my mother. Such were the ideal theories of his childhood — unconsciously formed, but very firmly believed in. As he grew up he made such modifications as were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but every modifi- cation was an effort to him, in spite of a continual and successful resistance to what he recoL-nised as his initial mental defect. I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in the preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice it as an almost invariable rule that children's earliest ideas of God are modelled upon the character of their father — if they have one. Should the father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest love, fond of showing it, and reserved only about his displeasure, the child, having learned to look upon God as his Heavenly Father through the Lord's Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God as he does towards his own father ; this conception will stick to a man for years and years after he has attained manhood — probably it |! ' 1^ ■\ m k l! 56 SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. will never leave him. On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be painful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated like- ness of his father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness of still-born love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul, p' 1 hence, later, crime. To return, however, to the lady. When she had put on her night-gown, she knelt down by her bed-side and, to our consternation, began to say her prayers. This was a cruel blow to both of us ; we had always been under the impression that grown-up people were not made to say their prayers, and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accord had never occurred to us as possible. Of course the lady would not say her prayers if she were not obliged ; and yet she did say them ; therefore she must be obliged to say them; therefore we should be obliged to say them, and this was a great disappointment. Awe-struck and open-mouthed we listened while the lady prayed aloud and with a good deal of pathos for many virtues and blessings which I do not now remember, and finally for my father and mother and for both of us — shortly afterwards she rose, blew out the light and got into bed. Every word that she said had confirmed our worst apprehensions ; it was just what we had been taught to say ourselves. Next morning we compared notes and drew some painful inferences ; but in the course of the day our spirits rallied. We agreed that there were many mysteries in connection with life and things which it was high time to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us which might not readily occur again. JOHN PICKARD OWEN. 57 All we had to do was to be true to ourselves and equal to the occasion. We laid our plans with great astute- ness. We would be fast asleep when the lady came up to bed, but our heads should be turned in the liirection of her bed, and covered with clothes, all but a single peep-hole. My brother, as the eldest, had clearly a right to be nearest the lady, but I could see sufficiently, and could depend on his reporting faithfully whatever should escape nie. Tliere was no chance of her giving us anyi:hing — if she had meant to do so she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider the moment of her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose, but then she was not going yet, and the interval was at our own disposal. We spent the afternoon in trying to learn to snore, but we were not certain about it, and in the end concluded that as snoring was not de rigiteur we had better dispense with it. We were put to bed ; the light was taken away ; we were told to go to sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so ; the tongue indeed swore, but the mind was unsworn. It was agreed that we should keep pinching one another to prevent our going to sleep. We did so at frequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the heavy creak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and presently our victim entered. To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that we were asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder of her visit whenever she found us awake she always said them, but when she thought we were asleep, she never prayed. I should perhaps say that we had the matter out with her before she left, and that the consequences were •': I I 1 ! V ' ll 58 SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. unpleasant for all parties ; they added to the troubles in whicli we were already involved as to our prayers, and were indirectly among the earliest causes which led my brother to look with scepticism upon religion. For awhile, however, all went on as though nothing had happened. An effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been forgotten, but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that my mother told him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no less rapidly than in stature. For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one great sorrow of our father's death. Shortly after this we were sent to a day school in Bloomsbury. We were neither of us very happy there, bu.t my brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up a fair knowledge of Latin and Greek ; he also learned to draw, and to exercise him- self a little in English composition. When I was about fourteen my mother capitalised a part of her income and started me off to America, where she had friends who could give me a helping hand; by their kindness I was enabled, after an absence of twenty years, to return with a handsome income, but not, alas ! before the death of my mother. Up to the time of my departure my mother con- tinued to read the Bible with us and explain it. She had become enamoured of those millenarian opinions which laid hold of so many some twenty- five or thirty years ago. The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in the Bible, and she was imbued with a con- viction that all the many ?.nd varied horrors with which it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment. The year eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be (as indeed it was) a time of general bloodshed and con- '4i,r JOHN PICKARD OWEN. 59 con- She tnions -hirty fusion, while in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, should it please God to spare her, her eyes would be gladdened by the visible descent of the Son of Man with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ should rise first ; then she, as one of them that were alive, would be caught up with other saints into the air, and would possibly receive while rising some distinguishing token of con- fidence and approbation which should fall with due impressiveness upon the surrounding multitude ; then would come the consummation of all things, and she would be ever with the Lord. She died peaceably in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic was the nearest approach to the fulHlment of prophecy which the year eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth. These opinions of my mother's injured her naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge in all manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, which any but the most narrow literalist would feel at once to be untenable. Thus several times she expressed to us her conviction that my brother and myself were to be the two witnesses men- tioned in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Eevela- tion, and dilated upon the gratification she should ex- perience upon finding that we had indeed been reserved for a position of such distinction. We were as yet mere children, and naturally took all for granted that our mother told us ; we therefore made a careful exam- ination of the passage which threw light upon our future. On finding that the prospect was gloomy and full of bloodshed we protested against the honours which were intended for us, more especially when we reflected that the mother of the two witnesses was not menaced in ;! I !I1* I » I 1 ! ? 60 SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. Scripture with any particular discomfort. If we were to be martyrs, my mother ought to wish to be a martyr too, whereas nothing was farther from her intention. Her notion clearly was that we were to be massacred somewhere in the streets of London, in consequence of the anti- Christian machinations of the Pope ; that after lying about unburied for three days and a half we were to come to life again ; and finally, that we should con- spicuously ascend to heaven, in front, perhaps, of the Foundling Hospital. She was not herself indeed to share either our martyr- dom or our glorification, but was to survive us many years on earth, living in an odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as the central and most august figure in a select society. She would perhaps be able indirectly, through her sons' influence with the Almighty, to have a voice in most of the arrangements both of this world and of the next. If all this were to come true (and things seemed very like it), those friends who ha I neglected us in our adversity would not find it too easy to be restored to favour, however greatly they might desire it — that is to say, they would not have found it too easy in the case of one less mag- nanimous and spiritually-minded than herself. My mother said but little of the above directly, but the fragments which occasionally escaped her were pregnant, and on looking back it is easy to perceive that she must have been building one of the most stupendous aerial fabrics that have ever been reared. I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraid that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of one of the most de- votedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed. But one can love whUe smiling, and the very wildness of JOHN PICKARD OWEN. 6i my mother's dream serves to show how entirely her whole soul was occupied with the things which are above. To her, religion was all in all ; the earth was but a place of pilgrimage — only so far important as it was a possible road to heaven. She impressed this upon both of us by every word and action — instant in season and out of season, so that she might but fill us more deeply with a sense of the things belonging to our peace. But the inevitable consequences happened; my mother had aimed too high and had overshot her mark. The influence indeed of her guileless and unworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even during the time of Lis extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is in the main referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my father, which had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had insisted on the most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible ; she had also dwelt upon the duty of independent research, and on the necessity of giving up everything rather than assent to things which our conscience did not assent to. No one could have more effectually taught us to try to think the truth, and we had taken her at her word because our hearts told us that she was right. But she required three incompatible things. When my brother grew older he came to feel that independent and unflinching examina- tion, with a determination to abide by the results, would lead him to reject the point which to my mother was more important than any other — I mean the absolute accuracy of the Gospel records. My mother was inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt the authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews ; and then, as it appeared to him, she tried to make him , J 62 SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. [M: :) i' is In B!;Fr 11 H' violate the duties of examination and candour which he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn. Thereon came pain and an estrangement which was none the less pro- found for being mutually concealed. It seemed to my mother that he would not give up the wilfulness of his own opinions for her and for his Redeemer's sake. To him it seemed that he was ready to give up not only his mother but Christ Himself for Christ's sake. Tliis estrangement was the gradual work of some five or six years, during which my brother was between eleven and seventeen years old. At seventeen, I am told that he was remarkably well informed and clever. His manners were, like my father's, singularly genial, and his appearance very prepossessing. He had as yet no doubt Cuucerning the soundness of any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was already too active to allow of his being contented with my mother's child- like faith. There were points on which he did not indeed doubt, but which it would none the less be interesting to consider ; such for example as the per- fectibility of the regenerate Christian, and the mean) , of the mysteiious central chapters of the Epistle to tn Eomans. He was engaged in these researches though still only a boy, when an event occurred which gave the first real shock to his faith. He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest children every Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well fitted him. On one occasion, however, while he was explaining the effect of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered to his great surprise that the boy had never been baptized. He pushed his inquiries further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his class only five had been baptized, and, not only so, but that no differ- JOHN PICKARD OWEN. 63 ence in disposition or conduct could be discovered be- tween the regenerate boys and the unregenerate. The good and bad boys were distributed in proportions equal to the respective numbe 's of the baptized and unbap- tized. In spite of a certain impetuosity of natural character, he was also of a matter-of-fact and experi- mental turn of mind ; he therefore went through the whole school, which numbered about a hundred boys, and found out who had been baptized and who had not. The same results appeared. The majority had not been baptized ; yet the good and bad dispositions were so distributed as to preclude all possibility of maintaining that the baptized boys were better than the unbaptized. The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled by a fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but as a matter of fact my brother was seri- ously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom he applied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real power, and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by his inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated ; the difficulty, indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to my brother, but instead of saying so at once, and referring to any recognised theological authority, he tried to put him off with words which seemed intended to silence him rather than to satisfy him ; finally he lost his temper, and my brother fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy. This kind of treatment did not answer with ray brother. He alludes to it resentfully in the introduc- tory chapter of his book. He became suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being defended at the ex- pense of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon '■I illii M III \n 64 SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. his own unaided investigation. The result may be guessed : he began to go astray, and strayed further and furtlier. The children of God, he reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, were no more spirit uaiiy minded than the children of the world and the devil. Was then the grace of God a gift which left no trace whatever upon those who were possessed of it ? A thing the presence or absence of which might be ascertained by consulting the parish registry, but was not discernible in conduct ? Tlie grace of man was more clearly perceptible than this. Assuredly there must be a screw loose some- where, which, for aught he knew, might be jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom. Wl'ere then was this loose screw to be found ? He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was caused by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism. He, therefore, to my mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists, and was im- mersed in a pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he remained quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their doctrine of pre- destination. Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my brother than my brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Eoman Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Eome, where he felt sure that he had now found rest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken ; after about two years he rebelled against the stifling of all free inquiry ; on this rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and he was soon battling with unbelief. He then fell in with one who was a pure Deist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held, except JOHN PICKARD OWEN. 65 a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator. On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am painfully struck with the manner in which they show that all these pitiable vagaries were to be traced to a single cause — a cause which still exists to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I fear, seems likely to continue in full force for many a year to come — I mean, to a false system of training which teaches people to regard Christianity as a thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely in the strictest reading of the letter, or to be rejected as absolutely untrue. The fact is, that all permanent truth is as one of those coal measures, a seam of which lies near the surface, and even crops up above the ground, but which is generally of an inferior quality and soon worked out ; beneath it there comes a labour of sand and clay, and then at last the true seam of precious quality, and in virtually inexhaustible supply. The truth which is on the surface is rarely the whole truth. It is seldom until this has been worked out and done with — as in the case of the apparent flatness of the earth — that unchangeable truth is discovered. It is the glory of the Lord to conceal a matter : it is the glory of the king to iind it out. If my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had some judicious and wide-minded friend, to correct and supplement the mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering ; but, as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and unspiritual as the other — each impressed with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest- E HI H; 1 66 SELECTIONS FROM THE FAIR HAVEN. I. hi IIk minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met ; hut no one from his early manhood could have anguied this result ; on the contrary, he showed every sign of being li^'ely to develop into one of those who can never see i .'"e ;an one side of a question at a time, in spite o. . eeing that side with singular clearness of menta. isioi; Tn after life, he often met with mere lads who seemed to him to be years and years in advance of what he had been at their age, and would say, smiling, " With a great sum obtained I this freedom ; bat thou wast free-born." Yet when one comes to think of it, a late develop- ment and laborious growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over early luxuriant. Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with which he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the greatest painters had begun with a hard and precise manner, from which they had only broken after several years of effort ; and that in like manner all the early schools were founded upon definiteness of outline to the exclusion of truth of effect. This may be true ; but in my brother's case there was something even more unpromising than this ; there was a com- monness, so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could have foreseen his after- emancipation. Yet in the course of time he was indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, I firmly trust, be found to have been of inestimable service to the whole human race. For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the Christian scheme as a whole, or even to conceive the idea that there was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion through which he was at the time passing ; yet when r! •rOHN PICKARD OWEN. 67 may the idea was at length presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded fragments of his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a con- sistently organised scheme. Then became apparent the value of his knowledge of the details of so many different sides of Christian verity. Buried in the details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were only the unessential developments of certain component parts. Awakening to the perception of the whole after an intimate acquaintance with the details, he was able to realise the position and meaning of all that he had hitherto experienced in a way wldch has been vouchsafed to few, if any others. Thus he became truly a broad Churchman. Not broad in the ordinary and ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is as little able to sympathise with Eomanists, extreme High Church- men and Dissenters, as these are with himself — he is only one of a sect which is called by the name of broad, though it is no broader than its own base), but in the true sense of being able to believe in the naturalness, legitimacy, and truth qud Christianity even of those doctrines which seem to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder. f ,-■* >•*<; i: SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. I ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS. (from chapter I. OF LIFE AND HABIT.*) IT will be our business in the following chapters to consider whether the unconsciousness, or quasi- unconsciousness, with which we perform certain ac- quired actions, throws any light upon Embryology and inherited instincts, and otherwise to follow the train of thouirht which the class of actions above mentioned may suggest. More especially I propose to consider them in so far as they bear upon the origin of species and the continuation of life by successive generations, whether in the animal or vegetable kingdoms. Taking then, the art of playing the piano as an example of the kind of action we are in search of, we observe that a practised player will perform very diffi- cult pieces apparenciy without effort, often, indeed, while thinking and talking of something quite other than hiS music ; yet he will play accurately and, pos- sibly, with much expression. If he has been playing a fugue, say in four parts, he will have kept each part well distinct, in such a manner as to prove that his mind was not prevented, by its other occupations, from consciously or unconsciously following four dis- tinct trains of musical thought at the same time, nor * The first edition of Life and Habit was published in December, 1877, ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS. 69 nor from making liis fingers act in exactly the required manner as regards each note of each part. It commonly happens that in the course of four or live minutes a player may have struck four or five thousand notes. If we take intj consideration the rests, dotted notes, accidentals, variations of time, &c., we shall find his attention must have been exercised on many more occasions than when he was actually striking notes: so that it may not be too much to say that the attention of a first-rate player has been exercised — to an infinitesimally small extent — but still truly exercised — on as many as ten thousand occasions within the space of five minutes, for no note can be struck nor point attended to without a certain amount of attention, no matter how rapidly or uncon- sciously given. Moreover, each act of attention has been followed by an act of volition, and each act of volition by a muscular action, which is composed of many minor actions ; some so small that we can no more follow them than the player himself can perceive them; nevertheless, it may have been perfectly plain that the player was not attending to what he was doing, but was listening to conversation on some other subject, not to say joining in it himself. If he has been play- ing the violin, he may have done all the above, and may also have been walking about. Herr Joachim would unquestionably be able to do all that has hero been described. So complete may be the player's unconsciousness of the attention he is giving, and the brain power he is exerting, that we may find it difficult to awaken his attention to any particular part of his performance without putting him out. Indeed we cannot do so. 70 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. We observe that he finds it hardly less difficult to compass a voluntary consciousness of what ho has once learnt so thoroughly that it has passed, so to speak, into the domain of unconsciousness, than he found it to learn the note or passai^e in the first instance. The eflbrt alter a second consciousness of detail baffles him — compels him to turn to his music or play slowly. In fact it seems as though he knows the piece too well to be able to know that he knows it, and is only conscious of knowing those passages which he does not know so thoroughly. At the end of his performance, his pov.er of re- collecting appears to be no less annihilated than was his consciousness of attention and volition. For of the thousands of acts requiring the exercise of both the one and the other, which he has done during the five minutes, we will say, of his performance, he will remember hardly one when it is over. If he calls to mind anything beyond the main fact that he has played such and such a piece, it will probably be some passage wliich he has found more difficult than the others, and with the like of which he has not been so long familiar. All the rest he will forget as com- pletely as the breath which he has drawn while playing. He finds it difficult to remember even the difficulties he experienced in learning to play. A few may have so impressed him that they remain with him, but the greater part will have escaped him as completely as the remembrance of what he ate, or how he put on his clothes, this day ten years ago ; nevertheless, it is plain he does in reality remember more than he re- members remembering, for he avoids mistakes which he made at one time, and his performance proves that ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS. 71 all the notes are in his memory, thou<];h if cuUod upon to play such and such a bar at random from the inid(U(3 of the piece, and neitlicr more nor less, lie ^vill probably say that he cannot remember it unless he begins from the bei,nnning of tlie phrase wliieli leads to it. In spite, however, of the performer's present pro- ficiency, our experience of the manner in whicli pro- ficiency is usually acquired warrants us in assuming that there must have been a time when what is now so easy as to be done without conscious eflbrt of the brain was only done by means of brain work which •was very keenly perceived, even to fatigue and positive distress. Even now, if the player is playing something the like of which he has not met before, we observe he pauses and becomes immediately conscious of attention. We draw the inference, therefore, as regards piano- forte or violin playing, that the more the familiarity or knowledge of the art, the less is there consciousness of such knowledge ; even so far as that there should be almost as much difficulty in awakening consciousness which has become, so to speak, latent, — a consciousness of that which is known too well to admit of recognised self-analysis while the knowledge is being exercised — as in creating a consciousness of that which is not yet well enough knov n to be properly designated as known at all. On the other hand, we observe that the less the familiarity or kii owledge, the greater the conscious- ness of whatever knowledge there is. To sum up, then, briefly. It would appear as though perfect knowledge and perfect ignorance were extremes which meet and become indistinguishable from one another; so also perfect volition and perfect ? wm 72 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. absence of volition, perfect memory and perfect forget- fulness ; for we are unconscious of knowing, willing, or remembering, either from not yet having known or willed, or from knowing and willing so well and so intensely as to be no longer conscious of either. Conscious knowledge and volition are of attention ; attention is of suspense ; suspense is of doubt ; doubt is of uncertainty ; uncertainty is of ignorance ; so that the mere fact of conscious knowing or willing implies the presence of more or less novelty and doubt. It would also appear as a general principle on a superficial view of the foregoing instances (and the reader may readily supply himself with others which are perhaps more to the purpose), that unconscious knowledge and unconscious volition are never acquired otherwise than as the result of experience, familiarity, or habit ; so that whenever we observe a person able to do any complicated action unconsciously, we may assume both that he must have done it very often before he could acquire so great proficiency, and also that there must have been a time when he did not know how to do it at all. We may assume that there was a time when he was yet so nearly on the point of neither knowing nor willing perfectly, that he was quite alive to whatever knowledge or volition he could exert; going further back, we shall find him still more keenly alive to a less perfect knowledge ; earlier still, we find him well aware that he does not know nor will correctly, but trying hard to do both the one and the other ; and so on, bpck and back, till both difficulty and consciousness become little more than " a sound of going," as it v/ere, in the brain, a flitting to and fro of something barely recognisable as the desire to will or know at all — much ON CERTAIN ACQUIRED HABITS. 73 less as the desire to know or will definitely this or that. Finally they retreat beyond our ken into the repose — the inorganic kingdom — of as yet unawakened interest. In either case — the repose of perfect ignorance or of perfect knowledge — disturbance is troublesome. When first starting on an Atlantic steamer, our rest is hindered by the screw ; after a short time, it is hindered if the screw stops. A uniform impression is practically no impression. One cannot either learn or unlearn without pains or pain. ! ■1* ( 74 ) CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS — THE LAW AND GRACE. (FUOM chapter II. OF LIFE AND HABIT.) CERTAIN it is that we know best what we are least conscious of knowing, or at any rate least able to prove ; as, for example, our own existence, or that there is a country England. If any one asks us for proof on matters of this sort, we have none ready, and are justly annoyed at being called to consider what we regard as settled questions. Again, there is hardly anything which so much afi'ects our actions as the centre of the earth (unless, perhaps, it be that still hotter and more unprofitable s )ot the centre of the universe), for we are incessantly trying to get as near it as circum- stances will allow, or to avoid getting nearer than is for the time being convenient. Walking, running, standing, sitting, lying, waking, or sleeping, from birth till death it is a paramount object with us ; even after death — if it be not fanciful to say so — it is one of the few things of which what is left of us can still feel the in- fluence ; yet what can engross less of our attention than this dark and distant spot so many thousands of miles away ? The air we breathe, so long as it is neither too hot nor cold, nor rough, nor full of smoke — that is to say, so long as it is in that state with which we are best CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS. 75 acquainted — seldom enters into our thoughts ; yet there is hardly anything with which we are more incessantly occupied night and day. Indeed, it is not too much to say that we have no really profound knowledge upon any subject — no know- ledge on the strength of which we are ready to act at moments unhesitatingly without either preparation or after-thought — till we have left off feeling conscious of the possession of such knowledge, and of the grounds on which it rests. A lesson thoroughly learned must be like the air which feels so light, though press- ing so heavily against us, because every pore of our skin is saturated, so to speak, with it on all sides equally. This perfection of knowledge sometimes ex- tends to positive disbelief in the thing known, so that the most thorough knower shall believe himself alto- getlier ignorant. No thief, for example, is such an utter thief — so good a thief — as the kleptomaniac. Until he has become a kleptomaniac, and can steal a horse as it were by a reflex action, he is still but half a thief, with many unthievish notions still clinging to him. Yet the kleptomaniac is probably unaware that he can steal at all, much less that he can steal so well. He would be shocked if he were to know the truth. So again, no man is a great hypocrite until he has left off knowing that he is a hypocrite. The great hypo- crites of the world are almost invariably under the impression that they are among the very few really honest people to be found ; and, as we must all have observed, it is rare to find any one strongly under this impression without ourselves having good reason to differ from him. Again, it has been often and very truly said that it is not the conscious and self-styled sceptic, as Shelley, 76 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. I I , I for example, who is the true unbeliever. Such a man as Shelley will, as indeed his life abundantly proves, have more in common than not with the true unself- conscious believer. Gallio again, whose indifference to religious animosities has won him the cheapest immor- tality which, so far as I can remember, was ever yet won, was probably, if the truth were known, a person of the sincerest piety. It is the unconscious un-r believer who is the true infidel, however greatly he would be surprised to know the truth. Mr. Spurgeon was reported as having asked God to remove Lord Beaconsfield from office "as soon ris possible." There lurks a more profound distrust of God's power in these words than in almost any open denial of His existence. In like manner, the most perfect humour and irony is generally quite unconscious. Examples of "joth are frequently given by men whom the world considers s deficient in humour; it is more probably true that these persons are unconscious v. ihe^v own delightful power through the very mastery and prfection with which they hold it. There is a pla/, for instance, of genuine fun in some of the more serious scientific and theological journals which for some time past we have looked for in vain in " ." The following extract, from a journal which I will not advertise, may serve as an example : " Lycurgus, when they had abandoned to his revenge him wlio had put out his eyes, took him home, and Uie punishment he inflicted upon him was sedulous in- fc;tructi( ns to virtue." Yet this truly comic paper does not probably know that it is comic, any more than the Klc])iomaniac knows that he steals, or than John "^arl'.on kwdw lie was a humorist when he wrote a liyjT^n upon the circumcision, and spent his honey- n a CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS. 77 moon in composing a treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe know how exquisitely humorous he was when he wrote, in his Wilhehn Meister, that a beautiful tear glistened in Theresa's right eye, and then went on to explain that it glistened in her right eye and not in her left, because she had had a wart on her left which had been removed — and successfully. Goethe probably wrote this without a chuckle ; he believed what a good many people who have never read Wilhelm Meister believe still, namely, that it was a work full of pathos — of fine and tender feeling ; yet a less consummate humorist must have felt that there was scarcely a paragraph in it from first to last the chief merit of which did not lie in its absurdity. But enough has perhaps been said. As the fish in the sea, or the bird in the air, so unreasoningly and inarticulately safe must a man feel before he can be said to know. It is only those who are ignorant and uncultivated who can know anything at all in a proper sense of the words. Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty even of his most assured convictions. It is perhaps fortunate for our comfort that we can none of us be cultivated upon very many subjects, so that considerable scope fo. assurance will still remain to us; but however this may be, we certainly observe it as a fact that those are the greatest men who are most uncertain in s te of certainty, and at the same time most certain in spite of uncertainty, and who are thus best able to feel that there is nothing in such complete harmony with itself as a flat contradiction in terms. For nature hates that any principle should breed, so to speak, hermaphroditically, but will give to each an help meet for it which shall cross it and be the undoing of it ; as m i -1 78 SI- LECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. L, ii ill tliG case of descont with moiliticatioii, of which the essence is tliat every oficpriiii^ resembles its parents, anil yet, at the same time, tliat no oHspring resembles its parents. ])Ut for the slij,'litly irritating stimulant of this ])('r]H'tual crossinjj;, we should pass our lives un- consciously as tliouuh in slumber. Until we have «;ot to uuderstand that thougli black is not white, yet it may be whiter tlian white itself (and any ])ainter will readily paint that which shall show obviously as black, yet it shall be whiter than that which shall show no less obviously as white), we may be les, and even at times to be apparently subversive of them altogether, or the action will halt. It must become automatic before we are safe with it. While we are fumbling for the grounds of our conviction, our conviction is i)rone to fall, as Peter for lack of faith sinking into the waves of Galilee ; so that the very power to prove at all is an d, priori argument against the truth — or at any rate the prac- tical importance to the vast majority of mankind — of all that is supported by demonstration. For the power to prove implies a sense of the need of proof, and things which the majority of mankind find practically important are in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred above proof. The need of proof becomes as obsolete in the case of assured knowledge, as the practice of forti- CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS. 79 fyiiig towns in tlie middle of an old and lonj^-settled country. Who builds defences for that whicli is im- pregnable or little likely to bo assailed ? The answer is ready, that unless tlie defences had been built in former times it would be impossible to do without them now ; but this does not touch the argument, which is not that demonstration is unwise but that as long as a demonstration is still felt necessary, and therefore kept ready to hand, the subject of such demonstration is not yet securely known. Qui s excuse, s accuse ; and unless a matter can hold its own without the brag and self- assertion of continual demonstration, it is still more or less of a parvenu, which we shall not lose much by neglecting till it has less occasion to blow its own trumpet. The only alternative is that it is an error in process of detection, for if evidence concerning any opinion has long been deemed superfluous, and ever after this comes to be again felt necessary, we know that the opinion is doomed. If there is any truth in the above, it follows that our conception of the words " science " and " scientific " must undergo some modification. Not that we should speak slightingly of science, but that we should recog- nise more than we do, that there are two distinct classes of scientific people, corresponding not inaptly with the two main parties into which the political world is divided. The one class is deeply versed in those sciences which have already become the common pro- perty of mankind ; enjoying, enforcing, perpetuating, and engraining still more deeply into the mind of man acquisitions already approved by common experience, but somewhat careless about extension of empire, or at any rate disinclined, for the most part, to active effort on their own part for the sake of such extension 80 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. ■■! ■ 1^1 — neither progressive, in fact, nor aggressive — but quiet, peaceable people, who wish to live and let live, as their fathers before them ; while the other class is chiefly intent upon pushing forward the boundaries of science, and is comparatively indifferent to what is ; aown already save in so far as necessary for purposes of extension. These last are called pioneers of science, and to them alone is the title " scientific " commonly accorded ; but pioneers, important to an army as they are, are still not the army itself, which can get on better without the pioneers than the pioneers with- out the army. Surely the class which knows thoroughly well what it knows, and which adjudicates upon the value of the discoveries made by the pioneers — surely this class has as good a right or better to be called scientific than the pioneers themselves. These two classes above described blend into one another v,;-.'th every shade of gradation. Some are ad- mirably proficient in the well-known sciences — that is to say, they have good health, good looks, good temper, common sense, and energy, and they hold all these good things in such perfection as to be altogether without introspection — to be not under the law, but so entirely under grace that every one who sees them likes them. But such may, and perhaps more commonly will, have very little inclination to extend the boundaries of human knowledge ; their aim is in another direction altogether. Of the pioneers, on the other hand, some are agreeable people, well versed in the older sciences, though still more eminent as pioneers, while others, whose services in this last capacity have been of inestimable value, are noticeably ignorant of the sciences which have already become current with the larger part of man- kind — in other words, tht^y are ugly, rude, and disagree- . CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS KNOWERS. 8i as able people, very progressive, it may be, but very aggressive to boot. The main difference between these two classes lies in the fact that the knowledge of tlie one, so far as it is new, is known consciously, while that of the other is unconscious, consisting of sense and instinct rather than of recognised knowledge. So long as a man has these, and of the same kind as the more powerful body of his fellow-countrymen, he is a man of science though he can hardly read or write. As my great namesake said so well, " He knows what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly." As is usual in cases of great proficiency, these true and thorough knowers do not know that they are scientific, and can seldom give a reason for the faith that is in them. They be- lieve themselves to be ignorant, uncultured men, nor can even the professors whom they sometimes outwit in their own professorial domain perceive that they have been outwitted by men of superior scientific attainments to their own. The following passage from Dr. Carpenter's " Mesmerism, Spiritualism," &c., may serve as an illustration : — " It is well known that persons who are conversant with the geological structure of a district are often able to indicate with considerable certainty in what spot and at what depth water will be found ; and men of less sdentijic knovjledge, hut of considerdbU 'practical experience " — (so that in Dr. Carpenter's mind there seems to be some sort of contrast or difference in kind between the knowledge which is derived from obser- vation of facts and scientific knowledge) — " frequently arrive at a true conclusion upon this point without being able to assign reasons for their opinions." " Exactly the same may be said in regard to the F 'il 8a SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. i m II illi! mineral structure of a iiiining district ; tlie course of a metallic vein beinf]^ often correctly indicated by the shrewd e the first to admit that, though there are many changes between infancy and old age, yet they come about in any one individual under such circuinstrmces as we are all agreed in considering as the iactors of personal identity rather than as hiudrances thereto — that is to say that there has been no entire and perma- nent death on the part of the individual between any two phases of his existence, and that any one phase has had a lasting though perhaps imperceptible effect upon all succeeding ones. So that no one ever seriously argued in the manner supposed by Bishop Butler, unless Avitli moditicfttions and saving clauses, to which it does not suit his purpose to call attention. No doubt it would be more strictly accurate to say " you are the now phase of the person I met last night," or " you are the being which has been evolved from the being I met last night," than " you are the person I met last night." But life is too short for the peri- phrases which would crowd upon us from every II Tf •'*•■?■'■«- 114 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. quarter, if we did not set our face against all that is under the surface of things, unless, that is to say, the going beneath the surface is, for some special chance of profit, excusable or capable of extenuation. 1 1 Take again the case of some weeping trees, whose boughs spring up into fresh trees when they have reached the ground, who shall say at what time they cease to be mambers of the parent tree ? In the case of cuttings from plants it is easy to elude the difficulty by making a parade of the sharp and sudden act of separation from the parent stock, but this is only a piece of mental sleight of hand ; the cutting remains PS much part of its parent plant as though it had never been severed from it ; it goes on profiting by the ex- perience which it had before it was cut off, as much as though it had never been cut off at all. This will be more readily seen in the case of T"orms which have been cut in half. Let a worm be cut in half, and the two halves will become fresh worms ; which of them is the original worm ? Surely both. Perhaps no simplor case than this could readily be found of the manner in which personality eludes us, the moment we try to in- vestigate its real nature. There are few ideas which on first consideration appear so simple, and none wnich becomes more utterly incapable of limitation or defini- tion as soon as it is examined closely. It has gone the way of species. It is now generally held that species blend or have blended into one an- other ; so that any possibility of arrangement and appa- rent subdivision into definite groups, is due to the sup- pression by death both of individuals and whole genera, which, had they been now existing, would have linked all living beings by a series of gradations so subtle that PERSONAL IDENTITY. IIS little classification could have been attempted. What we have failed to see is that the individual is as much linked onto other individuals as the species is linked on to other species. How it is that the one great personality of life as a whole, should have split itself up into so many centres of thought and action, each one of which is wholly, or at any rate nearly unconscious of its con- nection with the other members, instead of having grown up into a huge polyp, or as it were coral reef or compound animal over the whole world, which should be conscious but of its own one single existence ; how it is that the daily waste of this creature should be carried on by the conscious death of its individual members, instead of by the unconscious waste of tissue which goes on in the bodies of each individual (if in- deed the tissue which we waste daily in our own bodies is so unconscious of its birth and death as we suppose); how, again, that the daily repair of this huge creature life should have become decentralised, and be carried on by conscious reproduction on the part of its com- ponent items, instead of by the unconscious nutrition of the whole from a single centre, as the nutrition of our own bodies would appear (though perhaps falsely) to be carried on ; these are matters upon which I dare not speculate here,, but on which some reflections may follow in subsequent chapters. •vr. { ii6 ) li'i INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY. (chapter XI. OF LIFE AND HABIT.) OBVIOUSLY the memory of a habit or experience will not commonly be transmitted to offspring in that perfection which is called " instinct," till the habit or experience has been repeated in several generations with mo:e or less uniformity ; for otherwise the im- pression made will not be strong enough to endure through the busy and difficult task of reproduction. This of course involves that the habit shall have at- tained, as it were, equilibrium with the creature's sense of its own needs, so that it shall have long seemed the best course possible, leaving upon the whole and under ordinary circumstances littlo further to be desired, and hence that it should have been little varied during many generations, We should expect that it would be transmitted in a more or less partial, varying, im- perfect, and intelligent condition before equilibrium had been attained ; it would, however, continually tend towards equilibrium. Wheii this stage has been reached, as regards any habit, the creature will cease trying to improve ; on which the repetition of the habit will become stable, and hence capable of more unerring transmission — but at the same time improvement will cease ; the habit will become fixed, and be perhaps transmitted at I. INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY. H7 an earlier and earlier age, till it has reached that date of manifestation which shall be found most agreeable to the other habits of the creature. It will also be manifested, as a matter of course, without further con- sciousness or reflection, for people cannot be always opening up settled questions ; if they thought a matter iiU over yesterday they cannot think it all over again to-day, what they thought then they will think now, and will act upon their opinion ; and this, too, even in spite sometimes of misgiving, that if they were to think still further they could find a still better course. It is not, therefore, to be expected that " instinct " should show signs of that hesitating and tentative action which results from knowledge that is still so imperfect as to be actively self-conscious ; nor yet that it should grow or vary perceptibly unless under such changed con- ditions as shall baffle memory, and present the alterna- tive of either invention — that is to say, variation — or death. But every instinct must have passed through the laboriously intelligent stages through which human civilisations and mechanical inventions are now passing ; and he who would study the origin of an instinct with its development, partial transmission, further growth, further transmission, approach to more unreflecting stability, and finally, ics perfection as an unerring and unerringly transmitted instinct, must look to laws, cus- toms, and machinery as his best instructors. Customs and machines are instincts and organs now in process of development ; they will assuredly one day reach the unconscious state of equilibrium which we observe in the structures and instincts of bees and ants, and an approach to which may be found among some savage nations. We may reflect, however, not without plea- il8 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. I il ■•I i1 sure, that this condition — the true millennium — is still distant. Nevertheless the ants and bees seem happy ; perhaps more happy than when so many social ques- tions were in as hot discussion among them as other and not dissimilar ones will one day be amongst our- selves. And this, as will be apparent, opens up the whole question of the stability of species, which we cannot follow further here, than to say, that according to the balance of testimony, many plants and animals do appear to have reached a phase of being from which they are hard to move — that is to say, they will die sooner than be at the pains of altering their habits — true martyrs to their convictions. Such races refuse to see changes in their surroundings as long as they can, hut when compelled to recognise them, they throw up the game because they cannot and will not, or will not and cannot, invent. This is perfectly intelligible, for a race is nothing but a long-lived individual, and like any individual, or tribe of men whom we have yet observed, will have its special capacities and its special limitations, though, as in the case of the individual, so also with the race, it is exceedingly hard to say what those limitations are, and why, having been able to go so far, it should go no further. Every man and every race is capable of education up to a certain point, but not to the extent of being made from a sow's ear into a silk purse. The proximate cause of the limitation seems to lie in the absence of the wish to go further ; the presence or ab- sence of the wish will depend upon the nature and surroundings of the individual, which is simply a way of saying that one can get no further, but that as the song (with a slight alteration) says : — III INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY. 119 '• Some breeds do, and some breeds don't, Some breeds will, but this breed won't : I tried very often to see if it would. But it said it really couldn't, and I don't think it could." • •••••• M. Uibot in his work on Heredity'"" writes (p. 14): — " The duckling hatched hy the hen makes straight for water." In what conceivable way can we account for this, except on the supposition that the duckling knows perfectly well what it can and what it cannot do with water, owing to its recollection of what it did when it was still one individuality with its parents, and hence, when it was a duckling before ? " The squirrel, belbre it knows anything of winter, lays up a store of nuts. A bird when hatched in a cage will, when given its freedom, build for itself a nest like that of its parents, out of the same materials, and of the same shape." If this is not due to memory, " even an imperfect " explanation of what else it can be due to, " would," to quote from Mr. Darwin, " be satisfactory." " Intelligence gropes about, tries this way and that, misses its object, commits mistakes, and corrects them," Yes. Because intelligence is of consciousness, and consciousness is of attention, and attention is of uncer- tainty, and uncertainty is of ignorance or want of con- sciousness. Intelligence is not yet thoroughly up to its business. " Instinct advances with a mechanical certainty, hence comes its unconscious character. It knows no- thing either of ends, or of the means of attaining them : it implies no comparison, judgment, or choice." This is assumption. What is certain is that instinct does not betray signs of self-consciousness as to its own * Kegan Paul, 1875. ■'.\ 120 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. knowledge. It has dismissed reference to first prin- ciples, and is no longer under the law, but under the grace of a settled conviction. " All scorns directed by thought." Yes ; because all has hccn in earlier existences directed by thought. " Without ever arriving at thoui,dit." Because it has got past thought, and though " directed by thought " originally, is now travelling in exactly the opposite direction. It is not likely to reach thought again, till people get to know worse and worse how to do things, the oftener they practise them. " And if this phenomenon appear strange, it must be observed that analogous states occur in ourselves. All that u'c do from habit — icalking, writing, or practis- ing a mechanical act, for instance — all these and many other vc. ij complex acts are performed without conscious- ness. " Instinct appears stationary. It does not, like intelligence, seem to grow and decay, to gain and to lose. It does not improve." Naturally. For improvement can only as a general rule be looked for along the line of latest development, that is to say, in matters concerning which the creature is being still consciously exercised. Older questions are settled, and the solution must be accepted as final, for the question of living at all would be reduced to an absurdity, if everything decided upon one day was to be undecided again the next ; as with painting or music, so with life and politics, let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, for decision with wrong will be commonly a better policy than indecision — I had almost added with right ; and a firm purpose with risk will be better than an infirm one with temporary ,■■■& INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY. lai exemption from disaster. Every race has made its <,'reat blunders, to which it has nevertlieless adhered, inasmucli as the corresponding moditication of other structures and instincts was found preferable to the revolution which would be caused by a radical change of structure, with consequent havoc among a legion of vested interests, liudimentary organs are, as has been often said, the survivals of these interests — the signs of their peaceful and gradual extinction as living faiths; they are also instances of the difiiculty of breaking through any cant or trick which we have long practised, and which is not sufficiently troublesome to make it a sericus object with us to cure ourselves of the habit. "If it does not remain perfectly invariable, at least it only varies within very narrow limits ; and though this question has been warmly debated in our day and is yet unsettled, we may yet say that in instinct immutability is the law, variation the exception." This is quite as it should be. Genius will occasion- ally rise a little above convention, but with an old convention immutability will be the rule. " Such," continues M. Eibot, " are the admitted characters of instinct." Yes ; but are they not also the admitted characters of habitual actions that are due to memory ? M. Ribot says a little further on : " Originally man had considerable trouble in taming the animals which are now domesticated ; and his work would have been in vain had not heredity " (memory) " come to his aid. It may be said that after man has modified a wild animal to his will, there goes on in its progeny a silent conflict between two heredities " (memories), " the one tending to fix the acquired modifications and the other 122 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. 11 ' i ' III !, i l;iUr to preserve the primitive instincts. Tiie latter often get the mastery, and only after several generations is training sure of victory. But we may see that in either case heredity " (memory) " always asserts its ri-lits." How marvellously is the above passage elucidated and made to fit in with the results of our recognised experience, by the simple substitution of the word " memory " for heredity. I cannot refrain from bringing forward a few more instances of wliat I think must be considered by every reader as hereditary memory. Sydney Smith writes : — " Sir James Hall hatched some chickens in an oven. Within a few minutes after the shell was broken, a spider was turned loose before this very youthful brood ; the destroyer of flies liad hardly proceeded more than a few inches, before he was descried by one of these oven-born chickens, and, at one peck of his bill, immediately devoured. This cert; inly was not imitation. A female goat very near aeiivery died ; Galen cut out the young kid, and placed before it a bundle of hay, a bunch of fruit, and a pan of milk ; the young kid smelt to them all very attentively, and then began to lap the milk. This was not imitation. And what is commonly and rightly called instinct, cannot be explained away under • the notion of its being imitation." (Lecture xvii. on Moral Philo- sophy.) It cannot, indeed, be explained away under the notion of its being imitation, but I think it may well be so under that of its being memory. Again, a little further on in the same lecture as that above quoted from, we find : — INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY. "3 " Ants and beavers lay up magazines. "Where do tliey get their knowledge that it will not be so easy to collect food in rainy weather us it is in summer ? Men and women know these things, because their grandjjapas and grandmammas have told them so. Ants hatched from the egg artilicially, or birds hatched in this manner, have all this knowledge by intuition, witliout the smallest communication with any of their relations. Now observe what the solitary wasp does ; she digs several holes in the sand, in each of which she deposits an egg, though she certainly knows not (?) that an animal is deposited in that egg, and still less that this animal must be nourished with other animals. She collects a few green Hies, rolls th^.m up neatly in several parcels (like IJologna sausages), and stuffs one parcel into each hole where an egg is deposited. When the wasp worm is hatched, it finds a store of provision ready made ; and what is most curious, the quantity allotted to each is exactly sufficient to support it, till it attains the period of wasphood, and can provide for itself. This instinct of the parent wasp is the more remarkable as it does not feed upon flesh itself. Here the little creature has never seen its parent ; for by the time it is born, the parent is always eaten by sparrows ; and yet, without the slightest education, or previous experience, it does everything that the parent did before it. Now the objectors to the doctrine of instinct may say what they please, but young tailors have no intui- tive method of making pantaloons ; a new-born mer- cer cannot measure diaper ; nature teaches a cook's daughter nothing about sippets. All these things re- quire with us seven years' apprenticeship ; but insects are like Moliere's persons of quality — they know every- thing (as Moliere says) without having learnt any- •' ' II ■ f^ III •» ! i I P PI 124 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. Les gens de quality saveiit tout, sans avoir thing. rien appris.' " How completely all difficulty vanishes from the facts so pleasantly told in this passage when we bear in mind the true nature of personal identity, the ordinary working of memory, and the vanishing tendency of con- sciousness concerning what we know exceedingly well. My last instance I take from M. Eibot, who writes: — " Gratiolet, in his Anatomic Compar^e du Si/steme Ner- veiix, states that an old piece of wolf's skin, with the hair all worn away, when set before a little dog, threw the animal into convulsions of fear by the slight scent attaching to it. The dog had never seen a wolf, and we can only explain this alarm by the hereditary trans- mission of certain sentiments, coupled with a certain perception of the sense of smell." (" Heredity ,'' p. 43.) I should prefer to say " we can only explain the alarm by supposing tliat the smell of the wolf's skin " — the sense of smell being, as we all know, more powerful to recall the ideas that have been associated with it than any other sense — " brought up the ideas with which it had been associated in the dog's mind during many previous existences " — he on smelling the wolf's skin remembering all about wolves perfectly well. IS avoir ( 125 ) CONCLUDING REMARKS. (from chapter XV. OF LIFE AND HABIT.) 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 assistance from the v^riticisms 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} gods, 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 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 * It is now (January 1 884) more than six years since Life and Habit was published, but I have come across nothing which makes me wish to alter it to any material extent. '■nr i V ill Bll i:- ; Ife I'll !?i ii 'I 1 125 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. hen's eg^ 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 tlie phenomena exhibited by heredity to be so like those of memory, and to be so inexplicable on any otlier supposition than that they were modes of memory, 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 identity," 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 con- cerning personality altogether. We therefore assumed that the phenomena of here- dity, whether as regards instinct or structure, were due to memory of past experiences, accumulated and fused till they had become automatic, or quasi automatic, much in the same way as after a long life — . . . " Old experience doth 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 principal 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 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 127 in with actual facts in a sufficiently satisfactory manner. We found not a few matters, as, for example, the sterility of hybrids, the principle underlying longevity, the phenomena of old age, and puberty 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. Most indeed of these phenomena have been left hitherto without even an attempt at an explanation. "^Ve considered the most unportant difficulty in the way of instinct as hereditary habit, namely, the struc- ture and instincts of neuter insects ; these are very unlike those of their parents, and cannot, apparently, be transmitted to offspring by individuals of the pre- vious generation, in whom such structure and instincts appeared, inasnmch as these creatures are sterile. I do rot 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 memory on the part of offspring, of habits contracted in the persons of its ancestors. ■*"' * It must be remembered that the late Mr. C. Darwin expressly denied that instinct and inherited habit are generally to be con- nected. — See Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species," end of chapter viii., where he expresses his surprise that no one has hitherto adduced the instincts of neuter insects "against the well-known doctrine of in- herited habit as advanced by Lamarck." Mr. Romanes, in his " Mental Evolution in Animals " (November, 1S83), refers to this passage of Mr. Darwin's, and endorses it with approbation (p. 297). 128 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. ^ '8 We then iiKiuired wliat was the great principle un- derlying 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 accumulation of variations, which in time amounted to specific and generic difl'erences, was due to intelligence and memory on the part of the creature varying, rather than to the operation of wdiat Mr. Dar- win lias Cidled " natural selection." At the same time we ad milted 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 uo to the wall. Ikit we denied that this part of the course of nature would lead to much, if any, accumulation of variation, unless the \ariation was directed mainly by intelli- gent sense of need, with continued personality and memory. We conclude, therefore, that the small, apparently 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 i&3ued 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 re- membered at all. Each step of normal development will lead the im- pregnate 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 passage, are led up to each successive H 'i CONCLUDING REMARKS. 129 sentence by the sentence which has immediately pre- ceded it. And for this reason, namely, that as it takes two people " to tell " a tiling — a speaker and a comprehend- ing listener, without which last, though mucli 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 ln°*- 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 the being possessed of memory. We are all the same stuff to start with ; plants and animals only differ from one another because they remember different things ; they grow up in the shapes they bear because these shapes are the embodiments of their ideas concerning their own past history ; they are forms of faith or faiths of form whichever the reader chooses. 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 assume to be the most important part of nature. A living creature well supported by a mass of healthy ancestral memory is a young and growing creature, free «2rjw mv '! II si ■:f[ 1 130 SELECTIONS FROM LIFE AND HABIT. from aclie or pain, and thoroughly acquainted wiih its business so far, but with much yet to be reminded of. A creature which finds itself nnd itf 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 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, even- tually, in the utter impotence of death. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of little children. SELECTIONS FROM EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW/ IMPOTENCE OF PALEY'S CONCLUSION. TELEOLOGY OF THE EVOLUTIONIST. THE (from chapter III. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.) TF we conceive of ourselves as looking simultaneously •*- upon a real foot, and upon an admirably constructed artificial one, placed by the side of it, tlie idea of design, and design by an intelligent living being with a body and soul (without which, the use of the word design is delusive), will present itself str9ngly to our minds in connection both with the true foot and with the model ; but we find another idea asserting itself with even greater strength, namely, that the design of the true foot is infinitely more intricate, and yet is carried into execution in far more masterly manner than that of the model. We not only feel that there is a wider difference between the ability, time, and care which have been lavished on the real foot and upon the model, than there is between the skill and the time taken to produce Westminster Abbey, and that be- stowed upon a gingerbread cake stuck with sugar plums so as to represent it, but also that these two objects must have been manufactured on different principles. We do not for a moment doubt that the re?! foot was designed, but we are so astonished ut the dexterity of * Evolution, Old and New, was published in May, 1879. i i 1 r ! 1 i III 1 , ^ |; i ki B ' 1. . ' 133 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. the designer that we are at a loss for some time to think who could have designed it, where he can live, in what manner he studied, for how long, and by what processes he carried out his design, when matured, into actual practice. Until recently it was thought that there was no answer to many of these questions, more especially to those which bear upon the mode of manu- facture. For the last hundred years, however, the importance of a study has been recognised which does actually reveal to us in no small degree the processes by which the human foot is manufactured, so that in our endeavour to lay our hands upon the points of difference between the kind of design with which the foot itself is designed, and the design of the model, we turn naturally to the guidance of those who have made this study their specialty ; and a very wide differ- ence does this study, embryology, at once reveal to us. Writing of the successive changes through which each embryo is forced to pass, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes says that " none of these phases have any adaptation to the future state of the animal, but are in positive contradiction to it or are simply purposeless ; v hereas all show stamped on them the unmistakable characters of ancestral adaptation, and the progressions of organic evolution. What does the I'act imply ? There is not a single known example of a complex organism which is not developed out of simpler forms. Before it can attain the complex structure which distinguishes it, there must be an evolution of forn ^ s'.milar to those which distinguish the structure of organisms lower in the series. On the hypothesis of a plan which pre- arranged the organic world, nothing could be more unworthy of a supreme intelligence than this inability to construct an organism at once, without making several m TELEOLOGY OF THE EVOLUTIONIST. 133 ])revious tentative efforts, undoing to-day what was so carefully done yesterday, and rcpmtinf/ for centuries the saive tentatives in the same succession. Do not let us blink this consideration. There is a traditional phrase much in vogue among the anthropomorphists, which arose naturally enough from a tendency to take human methods as an explanation of the Divine phrase which becomes a sort of argument — ' The . cat Archi- tect.' But if we are to admit the human point of view, a glance at the facts of embryology must produce very uncomfortable reflections. For what should we say to an architect who was unable, or being able was obstinately unwilling, to erect a palace except by first using his materials in the shape of a hut, then pulling them down and rebuilding them as a cottage, then adding story to story and room to room, not with any reference to the ultimate purposes of the palace, but wholly with reference to the way in which houses were constructed in ancient times ? What should we say to the architect who could not form a museum out of bricks and mortar, but was forced to begin as if going to construct a mansion, and after proceeding some way in this direction, altered his plan into a palace, and that again into a museum ? Yet this is the sort of succession on which organisms are constructed. The fact has long been familiar ; how has it been reconciled with infinite wisdom ? Let the following passage answer for a thousand : — ' The embryo is nothing like the miniature of the adult. For a long while the body in its entirety and in its details, presents the strangest of spectacles. Day by day and hour by hour, the aspect of the scene changes, and this instability is ex- hibited by the most essential parts no less than by the accessory parts. One would say that nature feels her 1^4 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. I way, and only reaches the goal after many times miss- ing the path ' (on dirait que la nature tutonne et ne conduit son CEUvre k bon tin, qu'apres s'etre souvent tromp^e)." '"' The above passage does not, I think, affect the evi- dence for design whicli we adduced in the preceding chapter.t However strange the process of manufacture may appear, when the work conies to be turned out the design is too manifest to be doubted. If the reader were to come upon some lawyer's deed which dealt with matters of such unspeakable intricacy that it baffled his imagination to conceive how it could ever have been drafted, and if in spite of this he were to find the intricacy of the provisions to be made, ex- ceeded only by the oe and simplicity with which the deed providing for them was found to work in practice ; and after this, if he were to discover that the deed, by whomsoever drawn, had nevertheless been drafted upon principles which at first seemed very foreign to any according to which he was in the habit of drafting deeds himself, as for example, that the draftsman had begun to draft a will as a marriage settlement, and so forth — 'yet an observer would not, I take it, do either of two things. He would not in the face of the result deny the design, making himself judge rather of the method of procedure than of the achievement. Nor yet after insisting in the manner of Paley, on the wonderful proofs of intention and on the exquisite pro- visions which were to be found in every syllable — thus leading us up to the highest pitch of expectation — * Quatrefages, "Metamorphoses de I'Homme et des Aniniaux," 186:?, p. 42 ; G. H. Lewes, "Physical Basis of Mind," 1877, p. 83. + I have been unable, through want of space, to give this chapter here. TELEOLOGY OF THE EVOLUTIONIST. '35 would he present us with such an impotent conclusion as that the designer, though a living person and a true designer, was yet immaterial and intangible, a some- thing, in fact, which proves to be a nothing ; an omni- scient and omnipotent vacuum. Our observer would feel he need not have been at such pains to establish his design if this was to be the upshot of his reasoning. He would therefore admit the design, and by consequence the designer, but would probably ask a little time for reflection before he ventured to say who, or what, or where the designer was. Then gaining some insight into . the manner in which tlie deed had been drawn, he would conclude that the draftsman was a specialist who had had long practice in this particular kind of work, but who now worked almost as it niiglit be said automatically and without consciousness, and found it difiicult to depart from a habitual method of procedure. We turn, then, on Paley, and say to him : " We have admitted your design and your designer. Where is he ? Show him to us. If you cannot show him to us as flesh and blood, show him as flesh and sap ; show him as a living cell ; show him as protoplasm. Lower than this we should not fairly go ; it is not in the bond or nexus of our ideas that something utterly inanimate and inorganic should scheme, design, contrive, and elaborate structures which can make mistakes : it may elaborate low unerring thing!?, like crystals, but it can- not elaborate those which have the power to err. Kevertheless, we will commit such abuse with our understandings as to waive this point, and we will ask you to show him to us as air which, if it cannot be seen yet can be felt, weighed, handled, transferred from place to i)lace, be judged by its efiects, and so forth ; or i;,6 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. i I 'li .;:! I • if tin's may not Le, give us half a pmin of hydrogen, diflused through all space and invested with some of the minor attributes of matter ; or if you cannot do this, give us an imponderable like electricity, or even the higher mathematics, but give us something or throw off the mask and tell us fairly out that it is your paid profession to hoodwink us on this matter if you can, and that you are but doing your best to earn an honest living." We may fancy Paley as turning the tables upon us and as saying ; " liut you too have admitted a designer — you too then must mean a designer with a body and soul, who must be somewhere to be found in space, and who must live in time. Where is this your designer ? Can you show him more than I can ? Can you lay your finger on him and demonstrate him so that a child shall see him and know him, and find what was hereto- fore an isolated idea concerning him, combine itself instantaneously with the idea of the designer, we will say, of the human foot, so that no power on earth shall henceforth tear those two ideas asunder ? Surely if you cannot do this, you too are trifling with words, and abusing your own mind and that of your reader. Where, then, is your designer of man ? Who made him ? And where, again, is your designer of beasts and birds, of fishes and of plants ? " Our answer is simple enough ; it is that we can and do point to a living tangible person with flesh, blood, eyes, nose, ears, organs, senses, dimensions, who did of his own cunning after infinite proof of every kind of hazard and experiment scheme out and fashion each organ of the human body. This is the person whom we claim as the designer and artificer of that body, and he is the one of all others the best fitted for the task ft ■' TELEOLOGY OF THE EVOLUTIONIST. •37 by liis antecedents, and his practical knowledge of the requirements of the case — for he is man himself. Not man, the individual of any given generation, but man in the entirety of his existence from the dawn of life onwards to the present moment. In like manner we say that the desijjner of all organisms is so incorporate with the organisms themselves — so lives, moves, and has its being in those organisms, and is so one with them — they in it, and it in them — that it is more consistent with reason and the common use of words to see the designer of each living form in the living form itself, than to look for its designer in some other place or person. Thus we have a third alternative presented to us. Mr. Charles Darwin and his followers deny design, as having any appreciable share in the formation of organism at all. Paley and the theologians insist on design, but upon a designer outside the universe and the organism. The third opinion is that suggested in the first instance and carried out to a very high degree of development by Buffon. It was improved, and indeed, made almost perfect by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, but too much neg- lected by him after he had put it forward. It was bor- rowed, as I think we may say with some confidence, from Dr. Darwin by Lamarck, and was followed up by him ardently thenceforth, during the remainder of his life, though somewhat less perfectly comprehended by him than it had been by Dr. Darwin. It is that the design which has designed organisms, has resided within, and been embodied in, the organisms themselves. ( 138 ) ; ,1 I jl ; ii -if FAILURE OF THE FIRST EVOLUTIONISTS TO SEE THEIR POSITION AS TELEOLOGICAL. (chapter IV. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.) TT follows from the doctrine of Dr. Erasmus Darwin -L and Lamarck, if not from that of Buffbn himself, that the majority of organs are as purposive to the evolutionist as to the theologian, and far more intel- ligibly so. Circumstances, however, prevented these writers from acknowledging this fact to the world, and perhaps even to themselves. Their criix was, as it still is to so many evolutionists, the presence of rudimentary organs, and the processes of embryological development. Tliey would not admit that rudimentary and therefore useless organs were designed by a Creator to take their place once and for ever as part of a scheme whose main idea was, that every animal structure ''^\t,s to serve some useful end in connection vitli its possessor. This was the doctrine of final causes as then com- monly held ; in the face of rudimentary organs it was absurd. Buffon was above all things else a plain matter of fact thinker, who refused to go far beyond the obvious. Like all other profound writers, he was, if I may say so, profoundly superficial. He felt that the aim of research does not consist in the knowing this or that, but in the easing of the desire to know or understand more completely — in the peace of mind which passeth all understanding. His was the perfection of a healthy CRUX OF THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS. 139 mental organism by which over effort is felt to be as vicious and contemptible as indolence. He knew this too well to know the grounds of his knowledge, but we smaller people who know it less completely, can see that such felicitous instinctive tempering together of the two great contradictory principles, love of effort and love of ease, has underlain every healthy step of all healthy growth, whether of vegetable or animal, from the earliest conceivable time to the present moment. Nothing is worth looking at which is seen either too obviously or with too much difficulty. Nothing is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly easily, and some little deficiency of ehort is more par- donable than any very perceptible excess, for virtue has ever erred on the side of self-indulgence rather than of asceticism. According to Buffon, then — as also according to Dr. Darwin, who was just such another practical and genial thinker, and who was distinctly a pupil of Buffon, though a most intelligent and original one — if an organ after a reasonable amount of inspection appeared to be useless, it was to be called useless without more ado, and theories were to be ordered out of court if they were troublesome. In like manner, if animals breed freely inter se before our eyes, as for example the horse and ass, the fact was to be noted, but no animals were to be classed as capable of inter- breeding until they had asserted their right to such classification by breeding with tolerable certainty. If, again, an animal looked as if it felt, that is to say, if it moved about pretty quickly or made a noise, it must be held to feel ; if it did neither of these things it did not look as if it felt, and therefore it must be said not to feel. Be Twn apparentibvs et non cxistentihus eadcm est i I40 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. Iji II lex was one of the chief axioms of their philosophy ; no writers have had a greater horror of mystery or of ideas that have not become so mastered as to be, or to have been, superficial. Lamarck was one of those men of whom I believe it has been said that they have brain upon the brain. He had his theory that an animal could not feel unless it had a nervous system, and at least a spinal marrow — and that it could not think at all without a brain — all his facts, therefore, have to be made to square with this. With Buffon and Dr. Darwin we feel safe that however wrong they may sometimes be, their conclusions have always been arrived at on that fairly superficial view of things in which, as I have elsewhere said, our nature alone permits us to be com- forted. To these writers, then, the doctrine of final causes for rudimentary organs was a piece of mystification and an absurdity ; no less fatal to any such doctrine were the processes of embryological development. It was plain that the commonly received teleology must be given up ; but the idea of design or purpose was so associated in their minds with theological design that they avoided it altogether. They seem to have forgotten that an internal purpose is as much purpose as an external one ; hence, unfortunately, though their whole theory of development is intciisely purposive, it is the fact rather than the name of teleology which has hitherto been insisted upon, even by the greatest writers on evolution — the name having been most persistently denied even by those who were most insisting on the thing itself. It is easy to understand the difficulty felt by the fathers of evolution when we remember how much had to be seen before the facts could lie well before them. CRUX OF THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS. 141 It was necessary to attain, firstly, to a perception of the unity of person between parents and offspring in successive generations ; secondly, it must be seen that an organism's memory (within the limitations to which all memory is subject) goes back for generations beyond its birth, to the first beginnings in fact, of which we know anything whatever ; thirdly, the latency of that memory, as of memory generally, till the associated ideas are reproduced, must be brought to bear upon the facts of heredity ; and lastly, the unconsciousness with which habitual actions come to be performed, must be assigned as the explanation of the unconscious- ness with which we grow and discharge most of our natural functions. Buffbn was too busy with the fact that animals descended with modification at all, to go beyond the development and illustration of this great truth. I doubt whether he ever saw more than the first, and that dimly, of the four considerations above stated. Dr. Darwin was the first to point out the first two considerations ; he did so with some clearness, but can hardly be said to have understood their full importance : the two latter ideas do not appear to have occurred to him. Lamarck had little if any perception of any one of the four. When, however, they are firmly seized and brought into their due bearings one upon another, the facts of heredity become as simple as those of a man making a tobacco pipe, and rudimentary organs are seen to be essentially of the same character as the little rudimentary protuberance at the bottom of the pipe to which I referred in * Erewhon.' * These organs are now no longer useful, but they * Page 210, first edition. 142 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. :' I ;!l ' I '■ once were so, and were therefore once purposive, though not so now. The^ are the expressions of a bygone use- fuhiess ; sayings, as it were, about which there was at one time infinite wrangling, as to what both the mean- ing and the expression should best be, so that they then had living significance in the mouths of those who used them, though they have become such mere shib- boleths and cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more of their meaning than we do of Julius Ccesar in the month of July. . They continue to be reproduced through the force of habit, and through indisposition to get out of any familiar groove of action until it becomes too unpleasant for us to remain in it any longer. It has long been felt that embryology and rudimentary structures indicated community of descent. Dr. Darwin and Lamarck insisted on this, as have all subsequent writers on evolution ; but the explanation why and how the structures come to be repeated — namely, that they are simply examples of tlie force of habit — can only be perceived intelligently by those who admit such unity between parents and offspring as that the self- development of the latter can be properly called habitual (as being a repetition of an act by one and the same individual), and can only be fully sympa- thised with by those who recognise that if habit be admitted as the key to the fact ^t all, the unconscious manner in which the habit comet> to be repeated is only of a piece with all our other observations concerning habit. For the fuller development of the foregoing, I must refer the reader to my work " Life and Habit." The purposiveness, which even Dr. Darwin (and Lamarck still less) seems never to have quite recog- nised in spite of their having insisted so much on what amounts to the same thing, now comes into full view. r I CRUX OF THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS. H3 It is seen that the organs external to the body, and those internal to it, are the second as much as the first, things which we have made for our own convenience, and with a prevision that we shall have need of them ; the main difference between the manufacture of these two classes of organs being, that we have made the one kind so often that we can no longer follow the processes whereby we make them, while the others are new things which we must make introspectively or not at all, and which are not yet so incorporate with our vitality as that we should think they grow instead of being manufactured. The manufacture of the tool, and the manufacture of the living organ prove therefore to be but two species of the same genus, which, though widely differentiated, have descended as it were from one common filament of desire and inventive faculty. The greater or less complexity of the organs goes for very little. It is only a question of the amount of intelligence and voluntary self-adaptation which we must admit, and this must be settled rather by an appeal to what we find in organism, and observe con- cerning it, than by what we may have imagined d priori. Given a small speck of jelly with some power of slightly varying its actions in accordance with slightly varying circumstances and desires — given such a jelly- speck with a power of assimilating other matter, and thus of reproducing itself, given also that it should be possessed of a memory and a reproductive system, and we can show how the whole animal world can have descended it may be from an amceba without inter- ference Irom without, and how every organ in every creature is designed at first roughly and tentatively but finally fashioned with the most consummate 144 EVOLUTION OLD AND NEW. I! llMli s:!! iJ: I perfection, by the creature which lias had need of that organ, which best knew what it wanted, and was never satisfied till it had got that which was the best suited to its varying circumstances in their entirety. We can even show how, if it becomes worth the Ethiopian's while to try and change his skin, or the leopard's to change his spots, they can assuredly change them within a not unreasonable time and adapt their cover- ing to their own will and convenience, and to that of none other ; thus what is commonly conceived of as direct creation by God is moved back to a time and space inconceivable in their remoteness, while the aim and design so obvious in nature are shown to be still at work around us, growing ever busier and busier, and advancing from day to day both in knowledge and power. It was reserved for Mr. Charles Darwin and for those who have too rashly followed him to deny pur- pose as having had any share in the development of animal and vegetable organs; to see no evidence of design in those wonderful provisions which have been the marvel and delight of observers in all ages. The one who has drawn our attention more than perhaps any other living writer to those very marvels of co- adaptation, is the foremost to maintain that they are the result not of desire and design, either within the creature or without it, but of blind chance, working no whither, and due but to the accumulation of innum- erable lucky accidents. " There are men," writes Professor Tyndal in the Nineteenth Century for last November,'"" "and by no means the minority, who, however wealthy in regard to facts, can nevei rise into the region of principles ; * 1878. 1^ ■ I CRUX OF THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS. 145 and they are sometimes intolerant of those that can. They are formed to plod meritoriously on in the lower levels of thought ; unpossessed of the pinions necessary to reach the heights, they cannot realise the mental act — the act of inspiration it might well be called — by which a man of genius, after long pondering and proving, reaches a theoretic conception which unravels and illuminates the tangle of centuries of observation and experiment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, who, at the present moment, stand in this relation to Mr. Darwin." The more rhapsodical parts of the above must go for what they are worth, but I should be sorry to think that what remains conveyed a censure which might fall justly on myself. As I read the earlier part of the passage I confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very different from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older men and also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had " unravelled and illuminated " a tangled skein, but believed him, on the contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in great part, if not wholly, plain. "With the older writers, I had felt as though in the hands of men who wished to understand themselves and to make their reader under- stand them with the smallest possible exertion. The older men, if not in full daylight, at any rate saw in what quarter of the sky the dawn was breaking, and were looking steadily towards it. It is not they who have put their hands over their own eyes and ours, and who are crying out that there is no light, but chance and blindness everywhere. 11 ''' 1 n m ' ii 1 1 A ( '46 ) THE TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. (chapter v. of evolution, old and new.) I HAVE stated the foregoing in what I take to be an extreme logical development, in order that the reader may more easily perceive the consequences of those premises which I am endeavouring to re-establish. But it must not be supposed that an animal or plant has ever conceived the idea of .«ome organ widely dif- ferent from any it was yet possassed of, and has set itself to design it in detail and grow towards it. The small jelly-speck, which we call the amoeba, has no organs save what it can extemporise as occasion arises. If it wants to get at anything, it thrusts out part of its jelly, wliich thus serves it as an arm or hand : wlien the arm has served its purpose, it is absorbed into the rest of the jelly, and has now to do the duty of a stomach by helping to wrap up what it has just purveyed. The small round jelly-speck spreads itself out and envelops its food, so that the whole creature is now a stomach, and nothing but a stomach. Having digested its food, it again becomes a jelly-speck, and is again ready to turn part of itself into hand or foot as its next convenience may dictate. It is not to be believed that such a creature as this, which is probably just sensitive to light and nothing more, should be able to form any conception of an eye I 9<' TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. 147 7 OF w.) 1 to be an that the aences of ■establish. . or plant idely dif- 1 has set it. amoeba, I occasion rusts out arm or )se, it is ow to do up what ly-speck that the ig but a becomes of itself dictate. as this, nothing )f an eye and set itself to work to grow one, any more than it is believable that he who first observed the magnify- ing power of a dew-drop, or even he who first con- structed a rude lens, should have had any idea in his mind of Lord Eosse's telescope with all its parts and appliances. Nothing could be well conceived more foreign to experience and common sense. Animals and plants have travelled to their present forms as a man has travelled to any one of his own most compli- cated inventions. Slowly, step by step, through many blunders and mischances which have worked together for good to those that have persevered in elasticity. They have travelled as man has travelled, with but little perception of a want till there was also some per- ception of a power, and with but little perception of a power till there was a dim sense of wane ; want stimu- lating power, and power stimulating want ; and both so based upon each other that no one can say which is the true foundation, but rather that they must be both baseless and, as it were, meteoric in mid air. They have seen very little ahead of a present power or need, and have been then most moral, when most inclined to pierce a little into futurity, but also when most obstinately declining to pierce too far, and busy mainly with the present. They have been so far blindfolded that they could see but for a few steps in front of them, yet so far free to see that those steps were taken with aim and definitely, and not in the dark. " Plus il a su," says Buffon, speaking of man, " plus il a pu, mais aussi moins il a fait, moins il a su.' This holds good wherever life holds good. Wherevei there is life there is a moral government of rewards and punishments understood by the amoeba neiilier 1^' T\< 148 EVOLUTION, OLP AND NEW. I'W'W' 'i\\ hi better nor worse than by man. The history of organic development is the history of a moral struggle. As for the origin of a creature able to feel want and I)Ower and as to what want and power spring from, we know nothing as yet, nor does it seem worth while to go into this question until an understanding has been come to as to whether the interaction of want and l)Ower in some low form or forms of life which could assimilate matter, reproduce themselves, vary their actions, and be capable of remembering, will or vvill not suffice to explain the development of the varied organs and desires which ' e see in the higher vertebralt-s and man. When this question has been settled, then it will be time to push our inquiries farther back. But given such a low form of life as here postulated, and there is no force in Paley's pretended objection to the Darwinism of his time. " Give our philosopher," he says, " appetencies ; give him a portion of living irritable matter (a nerve or the clipping of a nerve) to work upon ; give also to his in- cipient or progressive Ibrms the power of propagating their like in every stage of their alteration ; and if he is to be believed, he could replenish the world with all the vegetable and animal productions which we now see in it.""^^" After meeting this theory with answers which need not detain us, he continues : — " The senses of animals appear to me quite incapable of receiving the explanation of their origin which this theory affords. Including under the word ' sense ' the organ and the perception, we have no account of either. How will our philosopher get at vision or make an eye ? Or, suppose the eye formed, would the perception * "Nat. Theol." ch. xxiii. III! TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF 0RGANI3M. 149 les ; s'lve follow ? The same of the other senses. And this ob- jection holds its force, ascribe what you will to the hand of time, to the power of habit, to changes too slow to be observed by man, or brought withia any comparison which he is able to make of past things with the present. Concede what you please to these arbitrary and unat- tested superstitions, how will they help you ? Here is no inception. No laws, no course, no powers of nature which prevail at present, nor any analogous to these would give commencement to a new sense ; and it is in vain to inquiic how that might proceed which woulil never begin." In answer to this, let us suppose that some inhabi- tants of another world were to see a modern philoso- pher so using a microscope that they should believe it to be a part of the philosopher's own person, which he could cut off from and join again to himself at pleasure, and suppose there were a controversy as to how this microscope had originated, and that one party main- tained the man had made it little by little because he wanted it, while the other declared this to be absurd and impossible ; I ask, would this latter party be justi- fied in arguing that microscopes could never have been perfected by degrees through the preservation of and ac- cumulation of small successive improvements inasmuch as men could not have begun to want to use microscopes until they had had a microscope which should show them that such an instrument would be useful to them, and that hence there is nothing to account for the beginning, of microscopes, which might indeed make some progress when once originated, but which could never originate? It might be pointed out to such a reasoner, firstly, that as regards any acquired power the various stages ISO EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. ;i^ ! ill! I^Ulv it in the acquisition of which he might be supposed able to remember, he would find that logic notwithstanding, the wish did originate the power, and yet was originated by it, both coming up gradually out of something which was not recognisable as either power or wish, and advancing through vain beating of the air, to a vague effort, and from this to definite efff 't with failure, and from this to definite effort with success, and from this to success with little consciousness of effort, and from this to success with such complete absence of effort that he now acts unconsciously and without power of intro- spection, and that, do what he will, he can rarely or never draw a sharp dividing line whereat anything shall be said to begin, though none less certain that there has been a continuity in discontinuity, and a dis- continuity in continuity between it and certain other past things ; moreover, that his opponents postulated so much beginning of the microscope as that there should be a dew-drop, even as our evolutionists start with a sense of touch, of which sense all the others are modifications, so that not one of them, but is resolvable into touch by more or less easy stages ; and secondly, that the question is one of fact and of the more evident deductions therefrom, and should not be carried back to those remote beginnings where the nature of the facts is so purely a matter of conjecture and inference. No plant or animal, then, according to our view, would be able to conceive more than a very slight im- provement on its organisation at a given time, so clearly as to make the efforts towards it that would result in growth of the required modification ; nor would these efforts be made with any far-sighted perception of what next and next and after, but only of what next ; while many of the happiest thoughts would come like all other TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. 151 happy thoughts — tlioughtlessly ; by a chain of reason- ing too swift and subtle for conscious analysis by the individual. Some of these modifications would be noticeable, but tlie mnjority would involve no more noticeable diflerence that can be detected between tlie length of the shortest day, and that of tlie shortest but one. Thus a bird whose toes were not webbed, but who had under force of circumstances little by little in the course of many generations learned to swim, either from having lived near a lake, and having learnt the art owing to its fishing habits, or from wading about in shallow pools by the sea- side at low water and finding itself sometimes a little out of its depth and just managing to scramble over the intermediate yard or so between it and safety — such a bird did not probably conceive the idea of swimming on the water and set itself to learn to do so, and then conceive the idea of webbed feet and set itself to get webbed feet. The bird found itself in some small difficulty, out of which it either saw, or at any rate found that it could ex- tricate itself by striking out vigorously with its feet and extending its toes as far as ever it could ; it thus began to learn the art of swimming and conceived the idea of swimming synchronously, or nearly so ; or per- haps wishing to get over a yard or two of deep water, and trying to do so without being at the trouble of rising to fly, it would splash and struggle its way over the water, and thus practically swim, though without much perception of what it had been doing. Finding that no harm had come to it, the bird would do the same again and again ; it would thus presently lose fear, and would be able to act nore calmly ; then it would begin to find out that it could swim a little, and ■ 4 I m ^*! I .. I! ■pi i VtM ' ■ ' :*i!^ '.' i' 152 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. if its food lay much in the water so that it would be of great advantage to it to be able to alight and rest without being forced to return to land, it would begin to make a practice of swimming. It would now dis- cover that it could swim the more easily according as its feet presented a more extended surface to the water; it would therefore keep its toes extended wherever it swam, and as far as in it lay, would make the most of whatever skin was already at the base of its toes. After many generations it would become web-footed, if doincj as above described should have been found con- tinuously convenient, so that the bird should have con- tinuously used the skin about its toes as much as possible in this direction. For there is a margin in every organic structure (and perhaps more than we imagine in things inor- ganic also), which will admit of references, as it were, side notes, and glosses upon the original text. It is on this margin that we may err or wander — the greatness of a mistake depending rather upon the extent of the departure from the original text, than on the direction that the departure takes. A little error on the bad side is more pardonable, and less likely to hurt the organ- ism than a too great departure upon the right one. This is a fundamental proposition in any true system of ethics, the question what is too much or too sudden being decided by much the same higgling as settles the price of butter in a country market, and being as invisible as the link which connects the last moment of desire with the first of power and performance, and with the material result achieved. It is on this margin that the fulcrum is to be found, M'hereby we obtain the little purchase over our struc- ture, that enables us to achieve great results if we use A ^\ TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. i 55 aid be of and rest Id begin low dis- L'ding as le water; srever it he most its toes, 'ooted, if md con- ave con- nuch as tructure gs inor- it were, It is on reatness of the irection jad side organ- ht one. system sudden settles leing as noment ce, and I found, struc- \ve use it steadily, with judgment, and with neither too little effort nor too much. It is by employing this tliat those who have a fancy to move their ears or toes witliout moving otiier organs learn to do so. There is a man at the Agricultural Hall now '"' playing the violin with his toes, and playing it, as I am told, sufficiently well. The eye of the sailor, the wrist of the conjuror, the toe of the professional medium, are all found capable of development to an astonishing degree, even in a single lifetime ; but in every case success has been attained by the simple process of making the best of whatever power a man has had at any given time, and by being on the look-out to take advantage of accident, and even of misfortune. If a man would learn to paint, he must not theorise concerning art, nor think much what he would do beforehand, but he must do something — whatever under the circumstances will come handiest and easiest to him; and he must do that something as well as he can. This will presently open the door for something else, and a way will show itself which no conceivable amount of searching would have discovered, but which yet could never have been discovered by sitting still and taking no pains at all. "Dans I'animal," says Buffon, "il y a moins de juge- nient que de sentiment." f It may appear as though this were blowing hot and cold with the same breath, inasmuch as I am insisting that important modifications of structure have been always purposive ; and at the same time am denying that the creature modified has had any far-seeing pur- pose in the greater part of all those actions which have at length modified both structure and instinct. Thus I say that a bird learns to swim without having * 1878. + " Oiseaux," vol. i. p. 5. 154 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 11 I i u Ml « il '■( ii i If ^1 lii any purpose of learning to swim before it set itself to make those movements which have resulted in its being able to do so. At the same time I maintain that it has only learned to swim by trying to swim, and tliis involves the very purpose wliich I have just denied. The reconciliation of these two apparently irreconcilable contentions must be found in the con- sideration that the bird was not the less trying to swim, merely because it did not know the name we have chosen to give to the art which it was trying to master, nor yet how great were the resources of that art. A person, who knew all about swimming, if from some bank he could watch our supposed bird's first attempt to scramble over a short space of deep water, would at once declare that the bird was trying to swim — if not actually swimming. Provided then that there is a very little perception of, and prescience con- cerning, the means whereby the next desired end may be attained, it matters not how little in advance that end may be of present desire or faculties ; it is still reached through purpose, and must be called purposive. Again, no matter how many of these small steps be taken, nor how absolute was the want of purpose or prescience concerning a!iy but the one being actually taken at any given moment, this does not bar the result from having been arrived at through design and purpose. If each one of the small steps is purposive the result is purposive, though there was never purpose extended over more than one, two, or perhaps at most three steps at a time. Eeturning to the art of painting for an example, are we to say that the proficiency which such a student as was supposed above will certainly attain, is not due to design, merely because it was not until he had already TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. 155 ig become three parts excellent that he knew the full pur- port of all that he had been doing ? When he began he had but vague notions of what he would do. He had a wish to learn to represent nature, but the line into which he has settled down has probably proved very different from that which he proposed to himself originally. Because he has taken advantage of his accidents, is it, therefore, one whit the less true that, his success is the result of his desires and his design ? The Times pointed out some time ago that the theory which now associates meteors and comets in the most unmistakable manner, was suggested by one accident, and confirmed by another. But the writer added well that " such acciuents happen only to the zealous student of nature's secrets." In the same way the bird that is taking to the habit of swimming, and of making the most of whatever skin it already has between its toes, will have doubtless to thank accidents for no small part of its progress ; but they will be such accidents as could never have happened to or been taken advantage of by any creature which was not zealously trying to make the most of itself — and between such accidents as this, and design, the line is hard to draw ; for if we go deep enough we shall find that most of our design resolves itself into as it were a shaking of the bag to see what will come out that will suit our purpose, and yet at the same time that most of our shaking of the bag resolves itself into a design that the bag shall con- tain only such and such things, or thereabouts. Again, the fact that animals are no longer conscious of design and purpose in much thui they do, but act unreflectingly, and as we sometimes say concerning ourselves " automatically " or " mechanically " — that they have no idea whatever of the steps, wliereby they ill- ■'SI m\ !l '.:.\' )l.l* ! ■: !::^! 156 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. have travelled to their present state, and show no sign of doubt about what must have been at one time the subject of all manner of doubts, difficulties, and discus- sions — that whatever sign of reflection they now exhibit is to be found only in case of some novel feature or diffi- culty presenting itself ; these facts do not bar that the results achieved should be attributed to an inception •in reason, design and purpose, no matter how rapidly and as we call it instinctively, the creatures may now act. For if we look closely at such an invention as the steam engine in its latest and most complicated develop- ments, about which there can be no dispute but that they are achievements of reason, purpose and design, we shall find them present us with examples of all those features the presence of which in the handiwork of animals is too often held to bar reason and purpose from having had any share therein. Assuredly such men as the Marquis of Worcester and Captain Savery had very imperfect ideas as to the up- shot of their own action. The simplest steam » v; " ' now in use in England is probably a marvel of inge.. : as compared with the highest development which c ; peared possible to these two great men, while ou; newest and most highly complicated engines would seem to them more like living beings than machines. Many, again, of the steps leading to the present deve- lopment have been due to action which had but little heed of the steam engine, being the inventions of attendants whose desire was to save themselves the trouble of turning this or that cock, and who were in- different to any other end than their own immediate convenience. No step in fact along the whole route was ever taken with much perception of what would m' 1. ! now TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. 157 be the next step after the one being taken at any given moment. Nor do we find that an engine made after any old and well-known pattern is now made with much more consciousnesss of design than we can suppose a bird's nest to be built with. The greater number of the parts of any such engine, are made by the gross as it were like screw and nuts, which are turned out by machinery, and in respect of which the labour ot design is now no more felt than is the design of him who first invented tlie wheel. It is only when circumstances require any modification in the article to be manufactured that thought and design will come into play again ; but I take it few will deny that if circumstances compel a bird either to give up a nest three-parts built altogether, or to make some trifling deviation from its ordinary practice, it will in nine cases out of ten make such deviation as shall show that it had thought the matter over, and had on the whole concluded to take such and such a course, that is to say, that it had reasoned and had acted with such purpose as its reason had dictated. And I imagine that this is the utmost that any one can claim even for man's own boasted powers. Set the man who has been accustomed to make engines of one type, to make engines of another type without any intermediate course of training or instruction, and he will make no better figure with his engines than a thrush would do if commanded by her mate to make a nest like a blackbird. It is vain then to contend that the ease and certainty with which an action is performed, even though it may have now become matter of such fixed habit that it cannot be suddenly and seriously modified without rendering the whole performance abortive, is any argument against that iiifl i;8 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. action having been an acliivement of design and reason in respect of each one of the steps that have led to it; ' and if in respect of each one of the steps then as re- gards the entire action ; for we see our own most reasoned actions become no le&s easy, unerring, auto- matic, and unconscious, than the actions which we call instinctive when they have been repeated a sufficient number of times. n ■ If the foregoing be granted, and it be admitted that the unconsciousness and seeming automatism with which any action may be performed is no bar to its having a foundation in memory, reason, and at one time con- sciously recognised effort — and this I believe to be the chief addition which I have ventured to make to the theory of Buffon and Dr. Erasmus Darwin — then the wideness of the difference between the Darwinism of eighty years ago and the Darwinism of to-day becomes immediately apparent, and it also becomes apparent, how important and interesting is the issue which is raised between them. According to the older Darwinism the lungs are just as purposive as the corkscrew. They, no less than the corkscrew, are a piece of mechanism designed and gradually improved upon and perfected by an intelli- gent creature for the gratification of its own needs. True there are many important differences between mechanism which is part of the body, and mechanism wliich is no such part, but the differences are such as do not affect the fact that in each case the result, whether, for example, lungs or corkscrew, is due to desire, invention, and design. And now I will ask one more question, which may seem, perhaps, to have but little importance, but which TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. 159 I find personally interesting. I have been told by a reviewer, of whoi>i upon the whole I have little reason to complain, that the theory I put forward in " Life and Habit," and which I am now again insisting on, is pessimism — pure and simple. I have a very vague idea what pessimism means, but I should be sorry to believe that I am a pessimist. Which, I would ask, is the pessimist ? He who sees love of beauty, design, steadfastness of purpose, intelligence, courage, and every quality to which success has assigned the name of " worth " as having drawn the pattern of every leaf and organ now and in all past time, or he wiio sees nothing in the world of natur: but a chapter of acci- dents and of forces interacting blindly ? ( i6o ) nilli ON— MEMOIR. !:1 li mi: r I (CIIAI'TEIl VIII. OF EVOj.UTIOX, OLD AND NEW.) BUFFON, says M. Flourens, was born at Montbar, on the 7th of September 1 707 ; he died in Paris, at the Jardin du lloi, on the i6th of April 1788, aged 8 I years. More than fifty of these years, as lie used himself to say, he had passed at his writing-desk. His iatlier was a councillor of the parliament of Burgundy. His mother was celebrated for her wit, and Butfon cherished her memory. He studied at Dijon with much Mat, and shortly after leaving became accidentally acquainted with the Duke of Kingston, a young Englishman of his own age, who was travelling abroad with a tutor. The three travelh^d together in France and Italy, and Buffon then passed some months in England. Eeturniiig to France, he translated Hales's Vegetable Statics and Newton's Treatise on Fluxions. He refers to several English writers on natural history in the course of his work, but I see he repeated spells the English name Willoughby, " Willulghby." He was appointed superintendent of the Jardin du Eoi in 1739, and from thenceforth devoted himself to science. In 1 7 5 2 Bulfon married Mdlle de Saint Bolin, whose beauty and charm of manner were extolled by all her contemporaries. One son was born to him, who entered the army, became a colouel, and I grieve to say, was B UFFON— MEMOIR. i6i guillotined at the age of twenty-nine, a few days only before the extinction of the Eeign of Terror. Of this youth, who inherited the personal comeliness and ability of his father, little is recorded except tlio following story. Having fallen into the water and been nearly drowned when he was about twelve years old, he was afterwards accused of having been afraid : " I was so little afraid," he answered, " that thoug^^ T had been offered the hundred years which my grandfai er lived, I would have died then and there, if I uld have added one year to the life of my father : ' ta rr thinking for a minute, a flush suffused his face am. iie added, " but I should petition for one quarter of an hour in which to exult over the thought of wha. i was about to do." On the scaffold he showed much composure, smil- ing half proudly, half reproachfully, yet wholly kindly upon the crowd in front of him. " Citoyens," he said, " Je me nomme Buffon," and laid his head upon the block. The noblest outcome of the old and decaying order, overwhelmed in the most hateful birth frenzy of the new. So in those cataclysms and revolutions which take place in our own bodies during their development, when we seem studying in order to become fishes and suddenly make, as it were, different arrangements and resolve on becoming men — so, doubtless, many good cells must go, and their united death cry comes up, it may be, in the pain which an infant feels on teething. But to return. The man who could be father of such a son, and who could retain that son's affection, as it is well known that Buffon retained it, may not perhaps ahvays be strictly accurate, but it will be as well to pay attention to whatever he may think fit to L I 62 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. W r\\V- I II t!| nj tell us. These are the only people whom it h worth while to look to and study from. " Glory," said liufTon, after speaking,' of the hours during which he had laboured, " glory comes always after labour if she can — and she gencralhf can." But in his case she could not well help herself. " He was conspicuous," says M. Flourens, " for elevation and fcjrce of charfi.cter, for a love of greatness and true magni- ficence in all he did. His great wealth, his handsome person, and graceful manners seemed in correspondence with the &})len(lour of his genius, so that of all the gifts which Fortune has in it her power to bestow she had denied him nothing." Many of his epigrammatic sayings have passed into proverbs : for example, that " genius is but a supreme capacity for taking jiains." Another and still more celebrated passage shall be given in its entirety and with its original setting. ** Style," says Buffbn, " is the only passport to pos- terity. It is not range of information, nor mastery of some little known branch of science, nor yet novelty of matter that will ensure immortality. "Works that can claim all this will yet die if they are conversant about trivial objects only, or written without taste, genius, and true nobility of mind ; for range of infor- mation, knowledge of details, novelty of discovery are of a volatile essence and fly off readily into other hands that know better how to treat them. The mat*:er is foreign to the man, and is not of him; the manner is the man himself.""^ " Le style, c'est I'homme meme." Elsewhere he tells us what true style is, but I quote from memory and cannot be sure of the passage. " Le style," he says * "Discours de Reception k I'Acaddmie Fran^aise." B UFFON— MEMOIR. 163 " est comme le bonheur ; il vient de la douceur de lame." Is it possible not to think of the following ? — " But whether there be prophecies they shall fail ; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away .... and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three ; but the greatest of these is charity." * * I Cor. xiii. 8, 13. ( 164 ) BUFFO N'S METHOD— THE IRONICAL CHARACTER OF HIS WORK. (chapter IX. OK EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.) "DUFFON'S idea of a method amounts almost to the ■^ denial of the possibility of method at all. " The true method," he writes, " is the complete description and exact history of each particular object," "'' and later on he asks, " is it not more simple, more natural and more true to call an ass an ass, and a cat a cat, than to say, without knowing why, that an ass is a horse, and a cat a lynx ? " t He admits such divisions as between animals and vegetables, or between vegetables and minerals, but that done, he rejects all others that can be founded on the nature of things themselves. He concludes that one who could see living forms as a whole and without jjreconceived opinions, would classify animals according to the relations in which he found himself standinu' towards them : — " Those which he finds most necessary and useful to him will occupy the first rank ; thus he will give the precedence among the lower animals to the dog and the horse ; he will next concern himself with those which without being domesticated, nevertheless occupy the 3ame country and climate as himself, as for example * Tom. i. p. 24, 1749. t Tom. i. p. 40, 1749. IRONICAL CHARACTER OF BUFFON'S WORK. 165 stags, hares, and all wild 'vnimals ; nor will it be till after he has familiarised himself with all these that curiosity will lead him to inquire what inhabitants there may be in foreign climates, such as elephants, dromedaries, &c. The same will hold good for tislies, birds, insects, shells, and for all nature's other productions ; he will study them in proportion to the profit which he can draw from them ; he will consider them in that order in which they enter into his daily life ; he will arrange them in his head according to this order, which is in fact that in which he has become acquainted with them, and in which it concerns him to think about them, This order — the most natural of all — is the one which I have thought it well to follow in this volume. My classification has no more mystery in it than the reader has just seen ... it is preferable to the most pro- found and ingenious that can be conceived, for there is none of all the classifications which ever have been made or ever can be, which has not more of an arbitrary character than this has. Take it for all in all," he concludes, " it is more easy, more agreeable, and more useful, to consider things in their relation to ourselves than from any other standpoint." '" " Has it not a better effect not only in a treatise on natural history, but in a picture or any work of art to arrange oLj cts in the order and place in which they are commonly tuimd, than to force them into association in virtue of sonii theory of our own ? Is it not better to let the dog which has toes, come after the horse which has a single hoof, in the same way as we see him follow the horse in daily life, than to follow up the horse by the zebra, an animal which is little known to us, and Vol. i. p. 34, 1749. i66 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. II' I m m ii. i m\ ft :',i ll:! which has no other connection with the horse than the fact that it nas a single hoof V ''' Can we suppose that Buffon really saw no more con- nection than this ? The writer whom we shall pre- sently find t declining to admit any essential difference between the skeletons of man and of the horse, can here see no resemblance between the zebra and the horse, except that they each have a single hoof. Is he to be taken at his' word ? It is perhaps necessary to tell the reader that Buffon carried the foregoing scheme into practice as nearly as he could in the first fifteen volumes of his Natural History. He begins with man — and then goes onto the horse, the ass, the cow, sheep, goat, pig, dog, &c. One would be glad to know whether he found it always more easy to know in what order of familiarity this or that animal would stand to the majority of his readers than other classifiers have found it to know whether an individual more resembles one species or another; probably he never gave the matter a thought after he hf..d gone through the first dozen most familiar animals, but settled generally down into a classification which becomes more and more specific — as when he treats of the apes and monkeys — till he reaches the birds, when he openly abandons his original idea, in deference, as he says, to the opinion of " le peuple des naturalistes." Perhaps the key to this piece of apparent extra- vagance is to be f(jund in the word " mysterieuse." J Buffon wished to raise a standing protest against mysteiy mongeving. Or perhaps more probably, he wished at once to turn to animals under domestication, so as to insist early on the main object of his work — the plasticity of animal forms. * Tom. i. p. 36. t See p. 173. + Tom. i. p. 33. IRONICAL CHARACTER OF BUFFON'S WORK. 167 I am inclined to think that a vein of irony pervades the whole or much the greater part of Buffon's \York, and that he intended to convey one meiining to one set of readers, and another to another ; indeed, it is often impossible to believe that he is not writing between his lines for the discerning, what the undiscerning were not intended to see. It must be remembered that his Natural History has two sides, — a scientific and a popular one. May we not imagine that Buffon would be unwilling to debar himself from speaking to those who could understand him, and yet would wish like Handel and Shakespeare to address the many, as well as the few ? But the only manner in which these seemingly irreconcilable ends could be attained, would be by the use of language which should be self-adjusting to the capacity of the reader. So keen an observer can hardly have been blind to the signs of the times which were already close at hand. Free-thinker though he was, he was also a powerful member of the aristocracy, and lictle likely to demean himself — for so he would doubtless hold it — by playing the part of Voltaire or Ilousseau. He would help those who could see to see still further, but he would not dazzle eyes that were yet imperfect with a light brighter than they could stand. He would therefore impose upon people, as much as he thought was lor their good ; but, on the other hand, he would not allow inferior men to mys- tify them. " In the private character of Buffon," says Sir William Jardine in a characteristic passage, " we regret there is not much to praise ; his disposition was kind and benevolent, and he was generally beloved by his inferiors, followers, and dependants, which were numerous over his extensive property ; he was strictly honourable, V ii m ^ '.^bl! ;ll "^ ■■m m ♦ it/ !^ i'^t It j'i* ir^i 1 68 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. youth he and was an affectionate parent. In ea: entered into the pleasures and dissipations of life, and licentious habits seem to have been retained to the end. But the great blemish in such a mind was his declared infidelity ; it presents one of those exceptions among the persons who have been devoted to the study of nature ; and it is not easy to imagine a mind apparently with such powers, scarcely acknowledging a Creator, and when noticed, only by an arraignment for what appeared wanting or defective in His great works. So openly, indeed, was the freedom of his religious opinions expressed, that the indignation of the Sorbonne was provoked. He had to enter into an explanation which he in some way rendered satisfactory ; and while he after- wards attended to the outward ordinances of religion, he considered them as a system of faith for the multitude, and regarded those most impolitic who most opposed them." ^'' This is partly correct and partly not. Buffon was a free-thinker, and as I have sufficiently explained, a decided opponent of the doctrine that rudimentary and therefore n eless organs were designed by a Creator in order to serve some useful end throughout all time to the creature in which they are found. He was not, surely, to hide the magnificent con- ceptions which he had been the first to grasp, from those who were worthy to receive them ; on the other hand he would not tell the uninstructed what they would interpret as a licence to do whatever they p' eased, inasmuch as there was no God. What he did was to point so irresistibly in the right direction, that a reader of any intelligence should be in no doubt as to the road he ought to take, and then to contradict himself * The Naturalist's Library, vol. ii. p. 23. Edinburgh, 1843. IRONICAL CHARACTER OF BUFFON'S WORK. 169 SO flatly as to reassure those who would be shocked by a truth for which they were not yet ready. If I am right in the view which I have taken of Buffon's work, it is not easy to see how he could have formed a finer scheme, nor have carried it out more finely. I should, however, warn the reader to be on his guard against accepting my view too hastily. So far as I know I stand alone in taking it. Neither Dr. Darwin, nor Flourens, nor Isidore Geoffroy, nor Mr. Charles Darwin see any subrisive humour in Buffon's pages ; but it must be remembered that Flourens was a strong opponent of mutability, and probably paid but little heed to what Buffon said on this question; Isidore Geoffroy is not a safe guide, few men indeed less so. Mr. Charles Darwin seems to have adopted the one half of Isidore Geoffrey's conclusions without verifying either; and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who has no small share of a very pleasant conscious humour, yet some- times rises to such heights of unconscious humour, that Buffon's puny labour may well have been invisible to him. Dr. Darwin wrote a great deal of poetry, some of which was about the common pump. Miss Seward tells us, that he " illustrated this familiar object with a picture of Maternal Beauty administering sustenance to her infant." Buffon could not have done anything like this. Buffon never, then, " arraigned the Creator for what was wanting or defective in His works ; " on the con- trary, whenever he was led up by an irresistible chain of reasoning to conclusions which should make men recast their ideas concerning the Deity, he invariably retreats under cover of an appeal to revelation. Natu- rally enough, the Sor'^onne objected to an artifice which even Buffon could not conceal completely. They did i ■1 'i 11 i'm W^' m ■|'; "} '^' k 11 i 4 1 170 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. not like being undermined ; like Buffon himself, they preferred imposing upon the people, to seeing others do so. Buffon made his peace with the Sorbonne immediately, and, peril aps, from that time forward, contradicted himself a little more impudently than heretofore. It is probably for the reasons above suggested that Buffon did not propound a connected scheme of evolu- tion or descent with modification, but scattered his theory in fragments up and down his work in the pre- fatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface tc- an unin- teresting animal ; and the more interesting the animal, the more evolution will there be commonly f<,)UD