Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

"The universal law, that, other things equal, the cohesion of psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which they have followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of the so-called 'forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by the law that habitual psychical successions entail some hereditary tendency to such successions, which, under persistent conditions, will become cumulative in generation after generation. We saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions called instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organized into correspondence with outer relations. We have now to observe that the establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of space and time, is comprehensible on the same principle.

"For, if, even to external relations that are often experienced during the life of a single organism, answering internal relations are established that become next to automatic—if such a combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage in hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so organized as to be performed almost without thought of the processes of adjustment gone through—and if skill of this kind is so far transmissible that particular races of men become characterized by particular aptitudes, which are nothing else than partially organized psychical connections; then, if there exist certain external relations which are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives—relations which are absolutely constant, absolutely universal—there will be established answering internal relations that are absolutely constant, absolutely universal. Such relations we have in those of space and time. The organization of subjective relations adjusted to these objective relations has been cumulative, not in each race of creatures only, but throughout successive races of creatures; and such subjective relations have, therefore, become more consolidated than all others. Being experienced in every perception and every action of each creature, these connections among outer existences must, for this reason, too, be responded to by connections among inner feelings that are, above all others, indissoluble. As the substrata of all other relations in the non-ego, they must be responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other relations in the ego. Being the constant and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements of thought—the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid of—the 'forms of intuition.'

"Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation between the experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendentalists, neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties are presented by the Kantian doctrine (as we shall hereafter see); and the antagonist doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties that are equally insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified assertion that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the questions: Whence comes the power of organizing experiences? Whence arise the different degrees of that power possessed by different races of organisms, and different individuals of the same race? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, why is not a horse as educable as a man? Should it be said that language makes the difference, then why do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? Understood in its current form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a definitely organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment—a fact not needing to be taken into account! Yet it is the all-important fact—the fact to which, in one sense, the criticisms of Leibnitz and others pointed—the fact without which an assimilation of experiences is inexplicable.

"Throughout the animal kingdom in general the actions are dependent on the nervous structure. The physiologist shows us that each reflex movement implies the agency of certain nerves and ganglia; that a development of complicated instincts is accompanied by complication of the nervous centers and their commissural connections; that the same creature in different stages, as larva and imago, for example, changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes; and that, as we advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase in the size and in the complexity of the nervous system takes place. What is the obvious inference? It is that the ability to co-ordinate impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies the pre-existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What is the meaning of the human brain? It is that the many established relations among its parts stand for so many established relations among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections among the fibers of the cerebral masses answers to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. Just as the organized arrangement subsisting between the sensory nerves of the nostrils and the motor nerves of the respiratory muscles not only makes possible a sneeze, but also, in the newly born infant, implies sneezings to be hereafter performed, so, all the organized arrangements subsisting among the nerves of the infant's brain not only make possible certain combinations of impressions, but also imply that such combinations will hereafter be made, imply that there are answering combinations in the outer world, imply a preparedness to cognize these combinations, imply faculties of comprehending them. It is true that the resulting compound psychical changes do not take place with the same readiness and automatic precision as the simple reflex action instanced; it is true that some individual experiences seem required to establish them. But, while this is partly due to the fact that these combinations are highly involved, extremely varied in their modes of occurrence, made up, therefore, of psychical relations less completely coherent, and hence need further repetitions to perfect them, it is in a much greater degree due to the fact that at birth the organization of the brain is incomplete, and does not cease its spontaneous progress for twenty or thirty years afterward. Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely constructed brain, their position would be less untenable. But, as the case stands, the gradually increasing intelligence displayed throughout childhood and youth is more attributable to the completion of the cerebral organization than to the individual experiences—a truth proved by the fact that in adult life there is sometimes displayed a high endowment of some faculty which, during education, was never brought into play. Doubtless, experiences received by the individual furnish the concrete materials for all thought. Doubtless, the organized and semi-organized arrangements existing among the cerebral nerves can give no knowledge until there has been a presentation of the external relations to which they correspond. And, doubtless, the child's daily observations and reasonings aid the formation of those involved nervous connections that are in process of spontaneous evolution, just as its daily gambols aid the development of its limbs. But saying this is quite a different thing from saying that its intelligence is wholly produced by its experiences. That is an utterly inadmissible doctrine—a doctrine which makes the presence of a brain meaningless—a doctrine which makes idiocy unaccountable.

"In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment, there is truth in the doctrine of 'forms of intuition'—not the truth which its defenders suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to absolute external relations, there are established in the structure of the nervous system absolute internal relations—relations that are potentially present before birth in the shape of definite nervous connections, that are antecedent to, and independent of, individual experiences, and that are automatically disclosed along with the first cognitions. And, as here understood, it is not only these fundamental relations which are thus predetermined, but also hosts of other relations of a more or less constant kind, which are congenitally represented by more or less complete nervous connections. But these predetermined internal relations, though independent of the experiences of the individual, are not independent of experiences in general: they have been determined by the experiences of preceding organisms. The corollary here drawn from the general argument is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or, rather, during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant—which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates, and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations; and thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thus it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakespeares."[150]

The learned philosopher has here dealt with two hypotheses, neither of which he considers tenable by itself. The first is that the individual mind, anterior to experience, is a blank; that at birth there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, which become organized into intelligence by experience. The other hypothesis is that of the transcendental school, which attributes the growth of intelligence wholly to implanted intuitions, which become expanded by the increase of mental power. His argument is put thus: If at birth the mind of the individual is a blank, and it becomes capable of thought or possessed of intelligence by experience, beginning with a passive receptivity of impressions, and going on to their organization into intelligence by the repetition of experiences and their increasing complexity—why, he asks, is not a horse as educable as a man? Why do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household and hearing human beings use language every moment of their lives, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? In the first place, as a matter of fact, many animals are educable beyond their natural capacity of intelligence, or beyond the point at which they would arrive without such education, to a very remarkable degree. I have heard a credible description of a dog which would ascend to a chamber and bring down an article that he had been told to bring. Many repetitions of the command and the performance had taught the animal to associate the name of the article which he was to bring down with the act which he was to perform. While I am writing, a bear beneath my window is going through performances, at the word of command, of very considerable varieties; actions which he would not do if he had not been trained to do them. The trained war-horse knows the meaning of the different airs played on the bugle upon the battle-field or the parade-ground, and instantly charges or wheels about, without waiting to be prompted by the bit or the spur. Insects can be trained, to some extent, in the same way; birds to a much greater extent. Is the explanation of these capacities to be found in a definitely organized nervous system as the all-important fact without which an assimilation of experiences is inexplicable? Grant that, as we advance from creatures of very low to creatures of very high intelligence, we find a vast increase in the size and complexity of the nervous system taking place through the series, until we arrive at its highest and most complex development in man. What is the hypothesis which explains the difference in mental power between man and all the other creatures below him in the capability of co-ordinating impressions and performing the appropriate actions? It is, according to Mr. Spencer, that the capability implies the existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way; that where this arrangement does not exist the capability is not found; and where it exists in only a low degree the capability exists only in the same degree. As two parallel and concurring facts these may be conceded. But why are not these facts entirely consistent with another hypothesis, namely, that to each creature, along with its specially organized nervous system, there has been given by divine appointment a certain degree of innate mental power, to explain which we must follow the impressions produced in the nervous system into their transmutation into intelligence, until we arrive at the limit of that intelligence? Mr. Spencer's answer to this inquiry is twofold: first, that the experience-hypothesis, in the case of the individual creature, or the constant repetition of the impressions and the appropriate actions, is insufficient to account for what takes place, without recognizing the fact that the actions are dependent on the nervous structure, without which the impressions would not be followed by the actions; second, that the nervous structure in the different races of animals has come to be what it is in each race by gradual modifications and increments through the process of evolution of organisms out of one another, and that these accumulations have resulted in the human brain, which has the highest power of co-ordinating the impressions and performing the appropriate actions. Then he puts, with an air of final solution, the question, "What is the human brain?" which he answers in his own way.

His mode of answering this question is that the brain is an organ with established relations among its parts, which stand for so many established relations among the psychical changes. I understand this to mean, that as the human brain, in the process of animal evolution, has come to have certain constant connections among the fibers of the cerebral masses, each of these connections answers to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. His corollary is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received by the race during the evolution of life, or during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. Each infant of the human race, to whom has descended this improved and perfect brain, has latent in that organ a high capacity for intelligence. This it begins to exercise and strengthen and further complicate as life goes on, and at the end of twenty or thirty years the individual brain is fully developed, and this development, or capacity for development, the individual bequeaths with minute additions, principal and interest, to future generations. In different races of men the cubic bulk of the brain varies greatly, according to the size transmitted from ancestors; and so certain faculties which scarcely exist in some races become congenital in others; and whereas the remote ancestors of all of us were savages, incapable even of conceiving of numbers, and possessing but the rudest elements of language, there have at length arisen our Newtons and Shakespeares.

This hypothesis leads me to ask a question and to state a fact. The question is, What is it in the infant of the most developed and cultivated race that constitutes the high intelligence which is said to lie latent in his brain? In other words, is there nothing in that infant, or in the adult which he becomes, but a brain and a nervous system of a highly organized and complex physical structure adapted to receive impressions on itself from without? Are the experiences which have been enjoyed by the progenitors of the human infant or by preceding organisms registered in his brain, and is his capacity of intelligence dependent on his having inherited the same or nearly the same volume of brain as that which was possessed by his progenitors? And does the intelligence consist, in degree or in kind, in nothing but a repetition of the same experiences as those through which his progenitors were carried, or is there a something in him to which his individual experiences contribute the mental food by which the mind is nourished and by the assimilation of which its individual intellectual growth becomes possible?

It is not necessary to question the fact that individuals of great intellect, the Newtons and the Shakespeares, have had or may have had large brains; or the fact that, as between races of men, the most intelligent have brains of greater cubic measure than the less intelligent. But it has not always been found that individuals of superior intellect have had comparatively larger brains than other individuals, nor that those who have had very large brains have transmitted them to their children. The important fact to which I meant to advert is that, since we have known much about the human brain and the nervous system connected with it, it has not been found that, in its several parts and in the action of the nerves connected with it, it has been differently organized and acted upon in the lowest savages from what we know of it in the European and the most civilized races. There is a difference in volume, but not in the organization or the office of the brain in different races of men, as there is in different individuals of the same race. The fact that all men, since they became a completed type of animal, however they originated and became men, have possessed a capacity to become in different degrees intelligent and thinking beings, points strongly to the conclusion that while in each individual there is a nervous system so organized as to transmit impressions from external objects to the central physical organ called the brain, there must be another existence in that individual, of a spiritual and intellectual nature, of a substance that is not physical, to which the brain supplies the materials of thought, thought being mental cognition of an idea. If I am asked for the proof of such an existence, I answer that the proof is consciousness, as I define it, and this I conceive is the highest kind of proof.

One may appeal to the convictions of mankind for an answer to the question, What is the highest and most satisfactory kind of knowledge that any of us possess? The most intelligent man may be mistaken in that part of self-knowledge that relates to his own character or motives. Others may see him very differently from the light in which he sees himself, and they may be right and he may be wrong. He may think, too, that he knows a great deal that he does not know; but no intelligent man is mistaken or in any way deluded when he believes in his own existence. No man in his waking moments and in his right mind ever confounded his own identity, as we have seen that Lady Macbeth did when she was walking in her sleep, with the identity of another person. No man in his right mind loses the constant, ever-present sense of himself as a being and as one distinct from all other beings. The reason is that his own existence is certified to him by the most unerring of witnesses, one who can not lie, because the fact of one's own existence is the fact of which that witness must speak. Of all other facts the witness may speak falsely. The mind can not speak falsely when it speaks to us of our own existence, for the witness who speaks and the person spoken to are one and the same. The falsehood, if there could be a falsehood, would be instantly detected.