That creatures have conceived the idea of making themselves like other creatures or objects which it was to their advantage or pleasure to resemble, will be believed by any one who turns to Mr. Mivart’s “Genesis of Species,” where he will find (chapter ii.) an account of some very showy South American butterflies, which give out such a strong odour that nothing will eat them, and which are hence mimicked both in appearance and flight by a very different kind of butterfly; and, again, we see that certain birds, without any particular desire of gain, no sooner hear any sound than they begin to mimick it, merely for the pleasure of mimicking; so we all enjoy to mimick, or to hear good mimicry, so also monkeys imitate the actions which they observe, from pure force of sympathy. To mimick, or to wish to mimick, is doubtless often one of the first steps towards varying in any given direction. Not less, in all probability, than a full twenty per cent. of all the courage and good nature now existing in the world, derives its origin, at no very distant date, from a desire to appear courageous and good-natured. And this suggests a work whose title should be “On the Fine Arts as bearing on the Reproductive System,” of which the title must suffice here.
Against faith, then, and desire, all the “natural selection” in the world will not stop an amœba from becoming an elephant, if a reasonable time be granted; without the faith and the desire, neither “natural selection” nor artificial breeding will be able to do much in the way of modifying any structure. When we have once thoroughly grasped the conception that we are all one creature, and that each one of us is many millions of years old, so that all the pigeons in the one line of an infinite number of generations are still one pigeon only—then we can understand that a bird, as different from a peacock as a pigeon is now, could yet have wandered on and on, first this way and then that, doing what it liked, and thought that it could do, till it found itself at length a peacock; but we cannot believe either that a bird like a pigeon should be able to apprehend any ideal so different from itself as a peacock, and make towards it, or that man, having wished to breed a bird anything like a peacock from a bird anything like a pigeon, would be able to succeed in accumulating accidental peacock-like variations till he had made the bird he was in search of, no matter in what number of generations; much less can we believe that the accumulation of small fortuitous variations by “natural selection” could succeed better. We can no more believe the above, than we can believe that a wish outside a plough-boy could turn him into a senior wrangler. The boy would prove to be too many for his teacher, and so would the pigeon for its breeder.
I do not forget that artificial breeding has modified the original type of the horse and the dog, till it has at length produced the dray-horse and the greyhound; but in each case man has had to get use and disuse—that is to say, the desires of the animal itself—to help him.
We are led, then, to the conclusion that all races have what for practical purposes may be considered as their limits, though there is no saying what those limits are, nor indeed why, in theory, there should be any limits at all, but only that there are limits in practice. Races which vary considerably must be considered as clever, but it may be speculative, people who commonly have a genius in some special direction, as perhaps for mimicry, perhaps for beauty, perhaps for music, perhaps for the higher mathematics, but seldom in more than one or two directions; while “inflexible organisations,” like that of the goose, may be considered as belonging to people with one idea, and the greater tendency of plants and animals to vary under domestication may be reasonably compared with the effects of culture and education: that is to say, may be referred to increased range and variety of experience or perceptions, which will either cause sterility, if they be too unfamiliar, so as to be incapable of fusion with preceding ideas, and hence to bring memory to a sudden fault, or will open the door for all manner of further variation—the new ideas having suggested new trains of thought, which a clever example of a clever race will be only too eager to pursue.
Let us now return to M. Ribot. He writes (p. 14):—“The duckling hatched by 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, before 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 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 uncertainty, and uncertainty is of ignorance or want of consciousness. Intelligence is not yet thoroughly up to its business.
“Instinct advances with a mechanical certainty.”