IV.—Continuity in Evolution
Under the head of organic behaviour, in the widest acceptation of the term, fall the whole of physiology, the whole of embryological development, nay, more, the whole of organic evolution; while mental evolution, in all its stages, may be regarded as the psychological aspect of that which, from the physiological aspect, is the evolution of nervous systems. Life itself is the behaviour of a particular kind of substance which is found more or less abundantly under natural conditions. No other known substance behaves in this way, and so ignorant are we as to the conditions of its natural origin, that it is useless to guess at a scientific explanation. And even if we knew all the antecedents and conditions of its origin we should be no nearer a comprehension of why protoplasm has the peculiar properties which we find it to possess. That is a question to which science can give no answer. Who knows why a certain compound of oxygen and hydrogen in certain proportions has the properties of that which we call water?
Let us note the distinction between saying, as we said above, that life is the behaviour of protoplasm, and asserting that life is the cause of this behaviour. The one is a scientific statement of observed fact, the other an explanation of the fact in metaphysical terms, a reference of the fact to its underlying cause. So long as we quite clearly understand that we are talking the language of metaphysics, we may speak of life as a cause of organic behaviour; but let us be careful to remember that the statement has no more value for science than the assertion that aqueosity is the cause of the behaviour of water.
Leaving on one side, then, the natural origin of protoplasm, the conditions of which are unknown, we find that, as a matter of observation, every bit of living substance, the history of which has been traced, is a fragment detached from some other bit which behaved in the same way. This is the basal fact of the continuity of organic evolution. But such a detached fragment has the property of increasing by taking up from the environment more of those elementary materials from which it is itself compounded in subtle synthesis. Nay, further, every fragment of which we know the history is found to increase in such a way as to reach, in form, structure, and idiosyncracies of behaviour, the likeness of the organism—plant or animal—from which it was derived. In the higher plants and animals the separated fragments or cells are the ova and sperms, or their equivalents, which unite, with fusion or coalescence of their nuclear matter, and thus give rise to a new individual in the course of embryological development.
Now, as we have already seen, much modern biological discussion centres round the question whether the detached reproductive fragment, ovum or sperm as the case may be, is derived from the whole body of the parent, by what Darwin termed pangenesis or in some other way, or only from germinal substance set apart in development for this end. And we have provisionally accepted the hypothesis that it is the direct descendant of other reproductive cells; and that, throughout a long ancestry, stretching back into the far past, there never occurs in the direct line of genealogical sequence, any highly differentiated cell, such as a gland-cell, muscle-cell, nerve-cell; never, with certain reservations into which we need not enter, is found the representative of any tissue save that to which the reproductive function is restricted. In technical phraseology, the continuity of organic evolution is due to the continuity of the germinal substance.
During embryological development the fertilized ovum—consisting of two fused fragments of this germinal substance—gives rise to a host of ordered and marshalled cells, which are divisible into two groups: the one forms the body with its muscles, bones, glands, digestive system, skin, sense-organs, nerve-centres, and so forth; the other forms a reserve store of germinal substance, from which are derived the ova and sperms. The former take no direct share in reproduction; they are off the line of continuous descent; they die without issue. But they protect and minister to the reproductive function of the second group—the potential ancestors of the races to follow. But all instinctive and intelligent behaviour is the outcome of the orderly working of the nervous system, is initiated through sensory stimulation, and is executed by the motor organs; and all the structural parts, through which such behaviour is possible, belong to the body—that which dies without issue. How, then, can instinct and intelligence be inherited? In a sense they are not inherited. The nervous system which is their organic basis begets no heirs. But it is begotten of germinal substance, which not only produced the body of which the nervous system is a part, but also handed on, with that body, samples of the same germinal substance capable of reproducing a similar body and a like nervous system. Herein lies the basis of heredity.
The stress of the struggle for existence falls upon the body; and instinctive or intelligent behaviour is a means to its preservation in the struggle for existence. According as it survives or not, will the samples of germinal substance it contains fulfil their biological end or perish with it. Natural selection secures the survival of those animals which bear the seed from which their like will be developed.
On this view all variation arises within the germinal substance, but it is manifested in the body which is its product. How variations arise we do not know with any exactness of detail. That the germinal substance is influenced in its nutrition and in other ways by the surrounding tissues is highly probable; and this influence may lead to changes which are the source of variations; but it is very doubtful whether such influence can be what we before termed “homœopathic.”[202] It is improbable that the formation of the nerve-connections involved in intelligent behaviour which has grown habitual through repetition, can so influence the germinal cells as to give rise to variations of like nature. In other words, acquired habit is probably not a direct determinant of an inherited variation of like nature in instinctive behaviour. Apart from such influence the only source of variations which can be assigned is either the differential division of nuclei in preparation for the process of fertilization,[203] or the process of fertilization itself. The union of perhaps differentiated germinal substance from two distinct parents affords the opportunities for the admixture and compounding of hereditary qualities in the two samples, from which variations favourable or the reverse may arise.
It is now generally recognized, however, that the origin of variations is a problem quite distinct from that of the survival of those whose direction is favourable to that end. The theory of natural selection, as such, does not pretend to offer any explanation of the manner in which variations arise; though of course a complete theory of organic evolution must assign the antecedents and conditions of organic progress in all its varied phases. We know that variations do occur; we know, too, that more individuals are born than survive to procreate their kind; and, on the theory of natural selection, we draw from these data the conclusion that, on the average, the animals that escape elimination are those in which the variations are of such a nature as to conduce to this end.
It will be seen that, on the hypothesis of organic heredity, thus briefly sketched, continuity can, in strictness and, as we may phrase it, in its first intent, only be predicated of the germinal substance; but that this substance gives rise to products—active vigorous animals behaving in certain ways, each after his kind—which hold similar germinal substance in trust for future use. Natural selection deals with the trustees; and if they succumb, that which they hold in trust is lost. To put the matter in another way: Nature says to the germinal substance, “By your products you must be judged in accordance with the criterion of utility and efficiency.” Practical use in the give and take of active life is the touchstone of all behaviour which makes for survival. This being secured, there may be a balance of behaviour for other purposes. But in animals the balance is not of large amount, and other purposes have not taken form and direction. It should be clearly noticed that, on the hypothesis we are considering, use is the test of survival, and though it is not the direct cause of variations, it affords their sanction in survival. That animal escapes elimination whose behaviour is of practical use; and it holds in trust for the future a store of germinal substance from which is produced a successor capable of behaving in like manner.
The whole drama of organic evolution may be regarded as the realization in a succession of individuals of the evolving potentiality of continuous lines of germinal substance. The successive individuals die—but the germinal substance lives on in their heirs, if they have any. In virtue of what intimate and hidden structure or disposition of parts the germ possesses this potentiality we do not know. The ovum of a dog is a microscopic speck less than one-hundredth of an inch in diameter; the sperm is far more minute. They unite, and their nuclei coalesce. The cellular product divides and subdivides. The cell colony absorbs nutriment from the maternal tissues. Division proceeds apace, and the cells are marshalled and ordered in embryological development; definite tissues are formed; the stages of their genesis can be predicted with accuracy; and in due time a puppy is born which shall grow to the likeness of its parents and behave as they behaved. We can trace the succession of events; we see that they form a related series; we have good reason for believing that the state of matters at any one moment is the antecedent condition of the state of matters at the succeeding moment. More than this science cannot say. The underlying cause is, for science, hidden in the mists of the unknown. Even for metaphysics it is but part of the force that beats through the universe and makes it not a chaos but a cosmos—a force known to us only in its effects.
It will thus be seen that the conception of continuity in organic evolution has, broadly considered, a threefold aspect. First, there is the continuity of the germinal substance through whose reproductive behaviour under the appropriate conditions embryological development occurs; secondly, there is continuity in this embryological development, stage by stage, from the fertilized ovum to the adult which is its final product and expression; thirdly, there is continuity in these final products, in the animals whose organic, instinctive, and intelligent behaviour lie open to our study and investigation. The first is germinal, the second developmental, the third evolutional continuity.
Before attempting to summarize some of the contributions afforded by our inquiry towards the doctrine of continuity in the last of these three aspects, we must pause for a moment to consider how far and in what sense continuity can be predicated of mental development.
We have regarded the conscious situation as the psychical aspect of a nerve-situation in the sensorium; and the nervous system, capable of behaving in this way, is in developmental continuity with the germinal substance of the fertilized ovum. But what shall we say with regard to the psychical aspect? Two hypotheses seem open to us, each of which presents difficulties, but of different kinds. The first is, that when the organic development of the nervous system reaches a certain level and order of complexity consciousness emerges, how and whence we know not. The second is, that consciousness is developed from sentience, which is the concomitant of all organic behaviour; which accompanies life wherever it occurs and therefore shares the continuity of the germinal substance.
The difficulty inseparable from the first hypothesis, is that it is contrary to the analogy of all that we know or infer elsewhere throughout the realm of nature. Huxley[204] likened its emergence to the production of heat when an iron bar is struck by repeated blows of the hammer. But this analogy will not hold; for heat is a mode of energy, and only emerges through the transformation of other and pre-existing modes of energy. A certain amount of the energy of motion in the massive hammer-head is transferred to the iron rod, and assumes the form of that molecular vibration which we call heat. And by what amount the one is the gainer, by that amount is the other the loser. But we have no reason to suppose that the like takes place in the origin of the mental concomitants of neural changes. No portion of the brain’s store of physical energy is drained off to form the rivulet of consciousness. Now, whenever we speak of a product elsewhere in nature, we mean a specialized bit of something pre-existent. Water is the product of pre-existing oxygen and hydrogen. Heat is the product of other forms of energy. But this is not so on the first hypothesis, according to which consciousness emerges when the functional activity of the nervous system reaches a certain level and order of complexity. The mental concomitants are not “products,” in the recognized sense of the term. Furthermore, although on this hypothesis we may still speak of what was termed above evolutional continuity in the mental concomitants, there is nothing analogous to either developmental or germinal continuity.
On the second hypothesis, according to which sentience is the concomitant of all organic behaviour, such developmental and germinal continuity, or their analogues in the psychical order of being, are rendered conceivable. Consciousness is regarded as a developed form of sentience. But the sentience is wholly hypothetical. It is at best a “may be,” and its existence is incapable of proof. And science is rightly impatient of hypotheses the validity of which cannot in any way be verified. Our safest course, therefore, is to accept that which is common to both hypotheses, evolutional continuity, and for the rest to be content with a confession of ignorance.
We have already drawn attention to the fact that mere sentience, if it exists, has no power of guidance over organic behaviour; but consciousness, when it emerges, is a concomitant of nervous processes which determine the nature and direction of such nerve-changes as are the antecedents of intelligent behaviour. The steps by which this control is established are unknown. It is, indeed, probable that conscious guidance arises as an accompaniment of the differentiation of controlling centres from the automatic centres of the nervous system; but of how this takes place we are as ignorant as we are of many other differentiations in the course of embryological development and evolutional progress. Of those nervous arrangements within the brain which are the physiological concomitants of the far later mental processes of reflection, abstraction, generalization, and the formation of ideals, we are, if it be possible, even yet more profoundly ignorant. Nor would it serve any good purpose to indulge in speculation where there are not even the data to enable us so much as to hazard a probable guess. The utmost we are justified in attempting is to show how organic behaviour leads up to and affords the requisite data for the exercise of intelligence, and how both supply the necessary preliminary stages in the development and evolution of what, following Dr. Stout, we have termed ideational process. This we have endeavoured to do in preceding pages; and all that is now required is to conclude our inquiry with a brief summary by which the results, as affording some basis for evolutional continuity, may be focussed.
We regard reflex action and instinctive behaviour, broadly considered, as genetically prior to that which is intelligent. Their development in the individual and their evolution in the race are reached by the differentiation and integration of nerve-centres. In the abdominal region of the crayfish, for example, special centres are differentiated for the behaviour of each pair of swimmerets; but these are so integrated that the whole series of like abdominal appendages swing rhythmically with co-ordinated movements. Now, when a sensorium is developed, it does not have to group by an act of conscious selection and deliberate arrangement the multiplicity of scattered sensory data which it receives; it does not have to organize from diverse and hitherto unrelated elements some sort of system in experience: it receives them as a physiological heritage already grouped, and to some extent organized. Stimulus and response are organically linked; and within the response inherited co-ordinations, often exceedingly complex, afford a correlated group of sensory data. Just in so far as organic heredity has provided a working system of bodily parts, does consciousness receive systematic information of their orderly working. No doubt it is true that the development and evolution of the sensorium proceeds pari passu with the development and evolution of reflex actions compounded and co-ordinated to give rise to instinctive behaviour. No doubt the progress of the one is in close touch and relation with the progress of the other; for such relation receives the emphatic sanction of utility. Still it is none the less true that in individual development, as in racial evolution, the organic takes the lead. What is intelligently acquired is something added to that which has been engrained, through natural selection or otherwise, as a potentiality of the germinal substance. What we have first to note, then, is that organic evolution provides ready-grouped data to consciousness.
The second point is, that the germs of abstraction and generalization, or rather processes which are the precursors of abstraction and generalization, arise, and cannot fail to arise, in the genesis of experience from the performance of inherited responses, and from the coalescence of their results into a conscious situation. To a quite young chick I gave pieces of yellow orange peel, which were found to be distasteful and rejected. In Dr. Stout’s phraseology, they acquired meaning in experience. Can one doubt that the colour and taste were thus rendered predominant, and that the shape, size, and other qualities of the bits of orange peel remained practically unnoticed? Shortly afterwards the chick was given chopped and crumbled egg; the fragments of “white” were eaten, but the bits of hard-boiled yolk were untouched. They possessed a sufficient general resemblance to the orange peel to carry the same meaning. In many ways particular qualities of objects are emphasized in so far as they incite to behaviour; they form centres of biological interest, just as the abstract quality of ideational thought is the centre of rational interest on a higher plane of mental development. And in many ways objects presenting certain salient features in common, amid differences which remain unnoticed, are unconsciously grouped as the starting-points of similar perceptual situations, just as in the generalization of ideational thought similar relationships are deliberately grouped as the starting-points of like conceptual situations. Both are purposive and have an end, which we as investigators are able to assign; but only for reflection and conceptual thought are they also purposeful—the end being foreseen and realized, not only by the investigators, but by the agent concerned. And the purpose or end itself is in the two cases different. In the one case it is the biological end of practical behaviour; in the other case it is the rational end of explanation—abstraction and generalization being deliberately used as a means to this latter end. The question has again and again been asked: Do animals reason? And different answers are given by those who are substantially in agreement as to the facts and their interpretation, but are not in agreement as to their use of the word “reason.” Perhaps, if the question assume the form—Are animals capable of explaining their own acts and the causes of phenomena?—the position of those who find the evidence of their doing so insufficient may be placed in a clearer light. This is what is generally meant by the statement that animals have probably not reached the level of rational beings.
But even if they have not reached this level, their perceptual processes supply the antecedent conditions which are necessary if this level is to be attained in the course of further evolution. We have seen that, even in relatively simple cases, where conscious situations mark only the beginnings of intelligence, there is a biological emphasis of some, rather than others, among what we call the qualities of objects, and there is a grouping, on biological grounds, of certain things which have some quality in common—such, for example, as being fit for food. Here we have at the outset of perceptual development the germs of processes which are the precursors of the abstraction and generalization of ideational thought. And in the more complex conscious situations of the higher animals these processes attain to such degree of development as is necessary to secure more difficult and more remote biological ends, until all that is necessary, for their rational use, is the quickening touch of a new purpose, that of explanation.
We have seen that, through what Dr. Stout terms “manipulation,” and Professor Groos “experimentation”—names applied to a type of behaviour widely exemplified among the higher animals,—things, as the nuclei of conscious situations, become differentiated from the environment. One can hardly question that a fly to the trout, a ball to the kitten, a bone to the puppy are things distinguished from their surroundings, and that they become marked off as special centres of interest. Here on the perceptual plane is a process which is the antecedent of the conception of quasi-independent objects on the ideational plane. For rational thought the thing, as object, is not only the centre of a practical situation leading to behaviour of direct or indirect biological value, but is the nucleus around which we build all the qualities which are ascertained by more elaborate manipulation and experimentation carried out deliberately and of set purpose for rational ends. It becomes capable of definition with the aim of explaining what are its characteristics as an object.
There can be little doubt that the higher animals become intimately and practically acquainted with their environment. The dog who accompanies his master in many a ramble, the horse who carries him again and again over all the surrounding country, has a good perceptual knowledge of a somewhat extended environment. And this, again, is the precursor of the far more extended conceptual knowledge which leads up at last to a rational conception of the universe of objects in their varied relationships. But only through the concentration of thought rendered possible by much true abstraction and generalization,—only through disentangling the relationships and regrouping them for the purpose of framing an ideal scheme,—only, in short, by explanation and for the sake of explanation is this difficult process brought to a more or less successful issue.
Again, there can be little doubt that the higher animals, in the course of experience begotten of behaviour, reach a perceptual sensing of the bodily self, through experience derived from the non-projecting senses, in pain and sickness, and often, we may hope, in the sense of well-being, and the joy of existence. They do not probably set this self in antithesis to the not-self. That comes with reflection, and is the result of ideal construction based on the analysis of experience, with a view to reaching some explanation of the genesis of experience. But in their perceptual awareness of the embodied self, they have that kind of consciousness which affords the necessary data, for the later conception of the self—when experience is polarized into its subjective and objective aspects and thus is explained, so far as science can explain it; suggesting, indeed, long ere science has attained this end, metaphysical explanations by reference to underlying causes—too often accepted as an easy substitute for the difficult tracing out of the antecedent conditions which science endeavours painfully and by slow steps to formulate.
It is unnecessary to do more than remind the reader that we have found that such processes as attention and imitation pass through instinctive and intelligent stages which are the precursors of the ideational stage, where they reach a higher expression as deliberately conscious acts. In the young bird that instinctively pecks at some small, perhaps moving, thing, which forms the starting point of a piece of responsive behaviour, we have attention in the germ. When experience has caused the thing to acquire meaning, attention passes into a succeeding intelligent phase; but only when we desire to explain this meaning, and attention thus has a deliberate purpose, do we find it entering upon its higher ideational career. So, too, as we have seen, imitation is at first a specialized form of instinctive behaviour, where the response is seen to resemble that which stimulates it. Later it becomes intelligent when the repetition of the imitative behaviour is due to the satisfaction it introduces into the conscious situation. Then, at last, it reaches the ideational stage, where reflection gives rise to an ideal, which is to be realized in conduct. The imitation by the child of its older companions is at first probably intelligent; but when the child begins to consider why it imitates these and not those among its companions, he is passing to the ideal stage, and imitation becomes the sincerest form of hero-worship. The boy who merely imitates his elder brothers playing at soldiers because he gets satisfaction from so doing, becomes the subaltern who has his ideal soldier, and will face death firmly rather than fall below his conception of how such a soldier should behave.
We need not again attempt to indicate how among animals we have the perceptual precursors of the æsthetic and ethical concepts. But we may remind the reader that we endeavoured to show that intercommunication had its foundation in instinctive sounds; and that it passed into the intelligent stage in the perceptual life, when these sounds acquired meaning, and hence became guides to behaviour. This is especially instructive from our present standpoint, since it is probable that the passage of communication from the indicating to the descriptive stage afforded the conditions under which rational thought was evolved. For such thought it is essential that attention should be focussed on the relationships of things. And no description is possible without making distinctly present to consciousness these relationships, in time and space, the data for which are abundantly present in the perceptual life, though lurking in the background, and needing something to fix them and to aid consciousness in distinguishing them clearly. In descriptive communication parts of speech, or their initial equivalents, afford fixation points for these relationships, and serve to render them distinct. If the reader will try to describe even the simplest occurrence without introducing the symbols for the relations which the events bear to each other, his failure will serve to bring home how essential a feature this is. In social communication, then, we probably have the key to the passage from perceptual to ideational process; and in this passage description is the antecedent of, and affords the conditions to, explanation. Words, moreover, as we have already said, form the pegs upon which we can hang up, for ready reference, the products of abstraction and generalization, or, to modify the analogy, they form the bodies of which these products are the rational soul.
If we are ever to trace the passage from the instinctive through the indicating stage of communication, and so onwards through the beginnings of description to its higher levels, and thus to the use of language as a medium of explanation, it must be through child-study. In every normal human child the passage does actually take place, though, no doubt, in a condensed and abbreviated form as an epitomized recapitulation in individual development, of the steps of evolutional progress. Thus we may obtain a key to the solution of one of the most difficult problems in evolution by continuous process—that of the transition from animal behaviour to human conduct.