Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non-living within the body? If we answer “yes,” then, as we have seen, moiety after moiety is filched from us, till we find ourselves left face to face with a tenuous quasi immaterial vital principle or soul as animating an alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying community of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point in common to render a union between the two possible, or give the one a grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of disembodied spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be listened to, comes back as it would seem, with a scientific imprimatur; if, on the other hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying skin, or hair that is ready to fall off? Are they less living than brain? Answer “yes,” and degrees are admitted, which we have already seen prove fatal; answer “no,” and we must deny that one part of the body is more vital than another—and this is refusing to go as far even as common sense does; answer that these things are not very important, and we quit the ground of equity and high philosophy on which we have given ourselves such airs, and go back to common sense as unjust judges that will hear those widows only who importune us.
As with the non-living so also with the living. Are we to let it pass beyond the limits of the body, and allow a certain temporary overflow of livingness to ordain as it were machines in use? Then death will fare, if we once let life without the body, as life fares if we once let death within it. It becomes swallowed up in life, just as in the other case life was swallowed up in death. Are we to confine it to the body? If so, to the whole body, or to parts? And if to parts, to what parts, and why? The only way out of the difficulty is to rehabilitate contradiction in terms, and say that everything is both alive and dead at one and the same time—some things being much living and little dead, and others, again, much dead and little living. Having done this we have only got to settle what a thing is—when a thing is a thing pure and simple, and when it is only a congeries of things—and we shall doubtless then live very happily and very philosophically ever afterwards.
But here another difficulty faces us. Common sense does indeed know what is meant by a “thing” or “an individual,” but philosophy cannot settle either of these two points. Professor Mivart made the question “What are Living Beings?” the subject of an article in one of our leading magazines only a very few years ago. He asked, but he did not answer. And so Professor Moseley was reported (Times, January 16, 1885) as having said that it was “almost impossible” to say what an individual was. Surely if it is only “almost” impossible for philosophy to determine this, Professor Moseley should have at any rate tried to do it; if, however, he had tried and failed, which from my own experience I should think most likely, he might have spared his “almost.” “Almost” is a very dangerous word. I once heard a man say that an escape he had had from drowning was “almost” providential. The difficulty about defining an individual arises from the fact that we may look at “almost” everything from two different points of view. If we are in a common-sense humour for simplifying things, treating them broadly, and emphasizing resemblances rather than differences, we can find excellent reasons for ignoring recognised lines of demarcation, calling everything by a new name, and unifying up till we have united the two most distant stars in heaven as meeting and being linked together in the eyes and souls of men; if we are in this humour individuality after individuality disappears, and ere long, if we are consistent, nothing will remain but one universal whole, one true and only atom from which alone nothing can be cut off and thrown away on to something else; if, on the other hand, we are in a subtle philosophically accurate humour for straining at gnats and emphasizing differences rather than resemblances, we can draw distinctions, and give reasons for subdividing and subdividing, till, unless we violate what we choose to call our consistency somewhere, we shall find ourselves with as many names as atoms and possible combinations and permutations of atoms. The lines we draw, the moments we choose for cutting this or that off at this or that place, and thenceforth the dubbing it by another name, are as arbitrary as the moments chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter for leaving off beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ready kind.
What else, however, can we do? We can only escape the Scylla of calling everything by one name, and recognising no individual existences of any kind, by falling into the Charybdis of having a name for everything, or by some piece of intellectual sharp practice like that of the shrewd but unprincipled Ulysses. If we were consistent honourable gentlemen, into Charybdis or on to Scylla we should go like lambs; every subterfuge by the help of which we escape our difficulty is but an arbitrary high-handed act of classification that turns a deaf ear to everything not robust enough to hold its own; nevertheless even the most scrupulous of philosophers pockets his consistency at a pinch, and refuses to let the native hue of resolution be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, nor yet fobbed by the rusty curb of logic. He is right, for assuredly the poor intellectual abuses of the time want countenancing now as much as ever, but so far as he countenances them, he should bear in mind that he is returning to the ground of common sense, and should not therefore hold himself too stiffly in the matter of logic.
As with life and death so with design and absence of design or luck. So also with union and disunion. There is never either absolute design rigorously pervading every detail, nor yet absolute absence of design pervading any detail rigorously, so, as between substances, there is neither absolute union and homogeneity, not absolute disunion and heterogeneity; there is always a little place left for repentance; that is to say, in theory we should admit that both design and chance, however well defined, each have an aroma, as it were, of the other. Who can think of a case in which his own design—about which he should know more than any other, and from which, indeed, all his ideas of design are derived—was so complete that there was no chance in any part of it? Who, again, can bring forward a case even of the purest chance or good luck into which no element of design had entered directly or indirectly at any juncture? This, nevertheless, does not involve our being unable ever to ascribe a result baldly either to luck or cunning. In some cases a decided preponderance of the action, whether seen as a whole or looked at in detail, is recognised at once as due to design, purpose, forethought, skill, and effort, and then we properly disregard the undesigned element; in others the details cannot without violence be connected with design, however much the position which rendered the main action possible may involve design—as, for example, there is no design in the way in which individual pieces of coal may hit one another when shot out of a sack, but there may be design in the sack’s being brought to the particular place where it is emptied; in others design may be so hard to find that we rightly deny its existence, nevertheless in each case there will be an element of the opposite, and the residuary element would, if seen through a mental microscope, be found to contain a residuary element of its opposite, and this again of its opposite, and so on ad infinitum, as with mirrors standing face to face. This having been explained, and it being understood that when we speak of design in organism we do so with a mental reserve of exceptis excipiendis, there should be no hesitation in holding the various modifications of plants and animals to be in such preponderating measure due to function, that design, which underlies function, is the fittest idea with which to connect them in our minds.
We will now proceed to inquire how Mr. Darwin came to substitute, or try to substitute, the survival of the luckiest fittest, for the survival of the most cunning fittest, as held by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck; or more briefly how he came to substitute luck for cunning.
Chapter XII
Why Darwin’s Variations were Accidental
Some may perhaps deny that Mr. Darwin did this, and say he laid so much stress on use and disuse as virtually to make function his main factor of evolution.
If, indeed, we confine ourselves to isolated passages, we shall find little difficulty in making out a strong case to this effect. Certainly most people believe this to be Mr. Darwin’s doctrine, and considering how long and fully he had the ear of the public, it is not likely they would think thus if Mr. Darwin had willed otherwise, nor could he have induced them to think as they do if he had not said a good deal that was capable of the construction so commonly put upon it; but it is hardly necessary, when addressing biologists, to insist on the fact that Mr. Darwin’s distinctive doctrine is the denial of the comparative importance of function, or use and disuse, as a purveyor of variations,—with some, but not very considerable, exceptions, chiefly in the cases of domesticated animals.
He did not, however, make his distinctive feature as distinct as he should have done. Sometimes he said one thing, and sometimes the directly opposite. Sometimes, for example, the conditions of existence “included natural selection” or the fact that the best adapted to their surroundings live longest and leave most offspring; [156a] sometimes “the principle of natural selection” “fully embraced” “the expression of conditions of existence.” [156b] It would not be easy to find more unsatisfactory writing than this is, nor any more clearly indicating a mind ill at ease with itself. Sometimes “ants work by inherited instincts and inherited tools;” [157a] sometimes, again, it is surprising that the case of ants working by inherited instincts has not been brought as a demonstrative argument “against the well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck.” [157b] Sometimes the winglessness of beetles inhabiting ocean islands is “mainly due to natural selection,” [157c] and though we might be tempted to ascribe the rudimentary condition of the wing to disuse, we are on no account to do so—though disuse was probably to some extent “combined with” natural selection; at other times “it is probable that disuse has been the main means of rendering the wings of beetles living on small exposed islands” rudimentary. [157d] We may remark in passing that if disuse, as Mr. Darwin admits on this occasion, is the main agent in rendering an organ rudimentary, use should have been the main agent in rendering it the opposite of rudimentary—that is to say, in bringing about its development. The ostensible raison d’être, however, of the “Origin of Species” is to maintain that this is not the case.