Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification

by Samuel Butler

It may be said that, seeing the result is a joint one, inasmuch as both “res” and “me,” or both luck and cunning, enter so largely into development, neither factor can claim pre-eminence to the exclusion of the other. But life is short and business long, and if we are to get the one into the other we must suppress details, and leave our words pregnant, as painters leave their touches when painting from nature. If one factor concerns us greatly more than the other, we should emphasize it, and let the other go without saying, by force of association. There is no fear of its being lost sight of; association is one of the few really liberal things in nature; by liberal, I mean precipitate and inaccurate; the power of words, as of pictures, and indeed the power to carry on life at all, vests in the fact that association does not stick to the letter of its bond, but will take the half for the whole without even looking closely at the coin given to make sure that it is not counterfeit. Through the haste and high pressure of business, errors arise continually, and these errors give us the shocks of which our consciousness is compounded. Our whole conscious life, therefore, grows out of memory and out of the power of association, in virtue of which not only does the right half pass for the whole, but the wrong half not infrequently passes current for it also, without being challenged and found out till, as it were, the accounts come to be balanced, and it is found that they will not do so.

Variations are an organism’s way of getting over an unexpected discrepancy between its resources as shown by the fly-leaves of its own cheques and the universe’s passbook; the universe is generally right, or would be upheld as right if the matter were to come before the not too incorruptible courts of nature, and in nine cases out of ten the organism has made the error in its own favour, so that it must now pay or die. It can only pay by altering its mode of life, and how long is it likely to be before a new departure in its mode of life comes out in its own person and in those of its family? Granted it will at first come out in their appearance only, but there can be no change in appearance without some slight corresponding organic modification. In practice there is usually compromise in these matters. The universe, if it does not give an organism short shrift and eat it at once, will commonly abate something of its claim; it gets tricked out of an additional moiety by the organism; the organism really does pay something by way of changed habits; this results in variation, in virtue of which the accounts are cooked, cobbled, and passed by a series of those miracles of inconsistency which was call compromises, and after this they cannot be reopened—not till next time.

Surely of the two factors which go to the making up of development, cunning is the one more proper to be insisted on as determining the physical and psychical well or ill being, and hence, ere long, the future form of the organism. We can hardly open a newspaper without seeing some sign of this; take, for example, the following extract from a letter in the Times of the day on which I am writing (February 8, 1886)—“You may pass along a road which divides a settlement of Irish Celts from one of Germans. They all came to the country equally without money, and have had to fight their way in the forest, but the difference in their condition is very remarkable; on the German side there is comfort, thrift, peace, but on the other side the spectacle is very different.” Few will deny that slight organic differences, corresponding to these differences of habit, are already perceptible; no Darwinian will deny that these differences are likely to be inherited, and, in the absence of intermarriage between the two colonies, to result in still more typical difference than that which exists at present. According to Mr. Darwin, the improved type of the more successful race would not be due mainly to transmitted perseverance in well-doing, but to the fact that if any member of the German colony “happened” to be born “ever so slightly,” &c. Of course this last is true to a certain extent also; if any member of the German colony does “happen to be born,” &c., then he will stand a better chance of surviving, and, if he marries a wife like himself, of transmitting his good qualities; but how about the happening? How is it that this is of such frequent occurrence in the one colony, and is so rare in the other? Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis. True, but how and why? Through the race being favoured? In one sense, doubtless, it is true that no man can have anything except it be given him from above, but it must be from an above into the composition of which he himself largely enters. God gives us all things; but we are a part of God, and that part of Him, moreover, whose department it more especially is to look after ourselves. It cannot be through luck, for luck is blind, and does not pick out the same people year after year and generation after generation; shall we not rather say, then, that it is because mind, or cunning, is a great factor in the achievement of physical results, and because there is an abiding memory between successive generations, in virtue of which the cunning of an earlier one enures to the benefit of its successors?

It is one of the commonplaces of biology that the nature of the organism (which is mainly determined by ancestral antecedents) is greatly more important in determining its future than the conditions of its environment, provided, of course, that these are not too cruelly abnormal, so that good seed will do better on rather poor soil, than bad seed on rather good soil; this alone should be enough to show that cunning, or individual effort, is more important in determining organic results than luck is, and therefore that if either is to be insisted on to the exclusion of the other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is more correctly said to be the main means of the development of capital—Luck? or Cunning? Of course there must be something to be developed—and luck, that is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable, enters everywhere; but is it more convenient with our oldest and best-established ideas to say that luck is the main means of the development of capital, or that cunning is so? Can there be a moment’s hesitation in admitting that if capital is found to have been developed largely, continuously, by many people, in many ways, over a long period of time, it can only have been by means of continued application, energy, effort, industry, and good sense? Granted there has been luck too; of course there has, but we let it go without saying, whereas we cannot let the skill or cunning go without saying, inasmuch as we feel the cunning to have been the essence of the whole matter.

Granted, again, that there is no test more fallacious on a small scale than that of immediate success. As applied to any particular individual, it breaks down completely. It is unfortunately no rare thing to see the good man striving against fate, and the fool born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Still on a large scale no test can be conceivably more reliable; a blockhead may succeed for a time, but a succession of many generations of blockheads does not go on steadily gaining ground, adding field to field and farm to farm, and becoming year by year more capable and prosperous. Given time—of which there is no scant in the matter of organic development—and cunning will do more with ill luck than folly with good. People do not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of whist running, if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves. Cunning, if it can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere luck unaided by cunning, no matter what start luck may have had, if the race be a fairly long one. Growth is a kind of success which does indeed come to some organisms with less effort than to others, but it cannot be maintained and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, for, as a general rule, unless the variation has so much connection with the organism’s past habits and ways of thought as to be in no proper sense of the word “fortuitous,” the organism will not know what to do with it when it has got it, no matter how favourable it may be, and it is little likely to be handed down to descendants. Indeed the kind of people who get on best in the world—and what test to a Darwinian can be comparable to this?—commonly do insist on cunning rather than on luck, sometimes perhaps even unduly; speaking, at least, from experience, I have generally found myself more or less of a failure with those Darwinians to whom I have endeavoured to excuse my shortcomings on the score of luck.

It may be said that the contention that the nature of the organism does more towards determining its future than the conditions of its immediate environment do, is only another way of saying that the accidents which have happened to an organism in the persons of its ancestors throughout all time are more irresistible by it for good or ill than any of the more ordinary chances and changes of its own immediate life. I do not deny this; but these ancestral accidents were either turned to account, or neglected where they might have been taken advantage of; they thus passed either into skill, or want of skill; so that whichever way the fact is stated the result is the same; and if simplicity of statement be regarded, there is no more convenient way of putting the matter than to say that though luck is mighty, cunning is mightier still. Organism commonly shows its cunning by practising what Horace preached, and treating itself as more plastic than its surroundings; those indeed who have had the greatest the first to admit that they had gained their ends more by reputation as moulders of circumstances have ever been shaping their actions and themselves to suit events, than by trying to shape events to suit themselves and their actions. Modification, like charity, begins at home.

But however this may be, there can be no doubt that cunning is in the long run mightier than luck as regards the acquisition of property, and what applies to property applies to organism also. Property, as I have lately seen was said by Rosmini, is a kind of extension of the personality into the outside world. He might have said as truly that it is a kind of penetration of the outside world within the limits of the personality, or that it is at any rate a prophesying of, and essay after, the more living phase of matter in the direction of which it is tending. If approached from the dynamical or living side of the underlying substratum, it is the beginning of the comparatively stable equilibrium which we call brute matter; if from the statical side, that is to say, from that of brute matter, it is the beginning of that dynamical state which we associate with life; it is the last of ego and first of non ego, or vice versâ, as the case may be; it is the ground whereon the two meet and are neither wholly one nor wholly the other, but a whirling mass of contradictions such as attends all fusion.

What property is to a man’s mind or soul that his body is also, only more so. The body is property carried to the bitter end, or property is the body carried to the bitter end, whichever the reader chooses; the expression “organic wealth” is not figurative; none other is so apt and accurate; so universally, indeed, is this recognised that the fact has found expression in our liturgy, which bids us pray for all those who are any wise afflicted “in mind, body, or estate;” no inference, therefore, can be more simple and legitimate than the one in accordance with which the laws that govern the development of wealth generally are supposed also to govern the particular form of health and wealth which comes most closely home to us—I mean that of our bodily implements or organs. What is the stomach but a living sack, or purse of untanned leather, wherein we keep our means of subsistence? Food is money made easy; it is petty cash in its handiest and most reduced form; it is our way of assimilating our possessions and making them indeed our own. What is the purse but a kind of abridged extra corporeal stomach wherein we keep the money which we convert by purchase into food, as we presently convert the food by digestion into flesh and blood? And what living form is there which is without a purse or stomach, even though it have to job it by the meal as the amœba does, and exchange it for some other article as soon as it has done eating? How marvellously does the analogy hold between the purse and the stomach alike as regards form and function; and I may say in passing that, as usual, the organ which is the more remote from protoplasm is at once more special, more an object of our consciousness, and less an object of its own.

Talk of ego and non ego meeting, and of the hopelessness of avoiding contradiction in terms—talk of this, and look, in passing, at the amœba. It is itself quâ maker of the stomach and being fed; it is not itself quâ stomach and quâ its using itself as a mere tool or implement to feed itself with. It is active and passive, object and subject, ego and non ego—every kind of Irish bull, in fact, which a sound logician abhors—and it is only because it has persevered, as I said in “Life and Habit,” in thus defying logic and arguing most virtuously in a most vicious circle, that it has come in the persons of some of its descendants to reason with sufficient soundness. And what the amœba is man is also; man is only a great many amœbas, most of them dreadfully narrow-minded, going up and down the country with their goods and chattels like gipsies in a caravan; he is only a great many amœbas that have had much time and money spent on their education, and received large bequests of organised intelligence from those that have gone before them.

The most incorporate tool—we will say an eye, or a tooth, or the closed fist when used to strike—has still something of the non ego about it in so far as it is used; those organs, again, that are the most completely separate from the body, as the locomotive engine, must still from time to time kiss the soil of the human body, and be handled and thus crossed with man again if they would remain in working order. They cannot be cut adrift from the most living form of matter (I mean most living from our point of view), and remain absolutely without connection with it for any length of time, any more than a seal can live without coming up sometimes to breathe; and in so far as they become linked on to living beings they live. Everything is living which is in close communion with, and interpermeated by, that something which we call mind or thought. Giordano Bruno saw this long ago when he made an interlocutor in one of his dialogues say that a man’s hat and cloak are alive when he is wearing them. “Thy boots and spurs live,” he exclaims, “when thy feet carry them; thy hat lives when thy head is within it; and so the stable lives when it contains the horse or mule, or even yourself;” nor is it easy to see how this is to be refuted except at a cost which no one in his senses will offer.