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

by Samuel Butler

I will take the present opportunity of insisting upon a suggestion which I made in “Alps and Sanctuaries” (New edition, pp. 152, 153), with which Mr. Tylor was much pleased, and which, at his request, I made the subject of a few words that I ventured to say at the Linnean Society’s rooms after his paper had been read. “Admitting,” I said, “the common protoplasmic origin of animals and plants, and setting aside the notion that plants preceded animals, we are still faced by the problem why protoplasm should have developed into the organic life of the world, along two main lines, and only two—the animal and the vegetable. Why, if there was an early schism—and this there clearly was—should there not have been many subsequent ones of equal importance? We see innumerable sub-divisions of animals and plants, but we see no other such great subdivision of organic life as that whereby it ranges itself, for the most part readily, as either animal or vegetable. Why any subdivision?—but if any, why not more than two great classes?”

The two main stems of the tree of life ought, one would think, to have been formed on the same principle as the boughs which represent genera, and the twigs which stand for species and varieties. If specific differences arise mainly from differences of action taken in consequence of differences of opinion, then, so ultimately do generic; so, therefore, again, do differences between families; so therefore, by analogy, should that greatest of differences in virtue of which the world of life is mainly animal, or vegetable. In this last case as much as in that of specific difference, we ought to find divergent form the embodiment and organic expression of divergent opinion. Form is mind made manifest in flesh through action: shades of mental difference being expressed in shades of physical difference, while broad fundamental differences of opinion are expressed in broad fundamental differences of bodily shape.

Or to put it thus:—

If form and habit be regarded as functionally interdependent, that is to say, if neither form nor habit can vary without corresponding variation in the other, and if habit and opinion concerning advantage are also functionally interdependent, it follows self-evidently that form and opinion concerning advantage (and hence form and cunning) will be functionally interdependent also, and that there can be no great modification of the one without corresponding modification of the other. Let there, then, be a point in respect of which opinion might be early and easily divided—a point in respect of which two courses involving different lines of action presented equally-balanced advantages—and there would be an early subdivision of primordial life, according as the one view or the other was taken.

It is obvious that the pros and cons for either course must be supposed very nearly equal, otherwise the course which presented the fewest advantages would be attended with the probable gradual extinction of the organised beings that adopted it, but there being supposed two possible modes of action very evenly balanced as regards advantage and disadvantages, then the ultimate appearance of two corresponding forms of life is a sequitur from the admission that form varies as function, and function as opinion concerning advantage. If there are three, four, five, or six such opinions tenable, we ought to have three, four, five, or six main subdivisions of life. As things are, we have two only. Can we, then, see a matter on which opinion was likely to be easily and early divided into two, and only two, main divisions—no third course being conceivable? If so, this should suggest itself as the probable source from which the two main forms of organic life have been derived.

I submit that we can see such a matter in the question whether it pays better to sit still and make the best of what comes in one’s way, or to go about in search of what one can find. Of course we, as animals, naturally hold that it is better to go about in search of what we can find than to sit still and make the best of what comes; but there is still so much to be said on the other side, that many classes of animals have settled down into sessile habits, while a perhaps even larger number are, like spiders, habitual liers in wait rather than travellers in search of food. I would ask my reader, therefore, to see the opinion that it is better to go in search of prey as formulated, and finding its organic expression, in animals; and the other—that it is better to be ever on the look-out to make the best of what chance brings up to them—in plants. Some few intermediate forms still record to us the long struggle during which the schism was not yet complete, and the halting between two opinions which it might be expected that some organisms should exhibit.

“Neither class,” I said in “Alps and Sanctuaries,” “has been quite consistent. Who ever is or can be? Every extreme—every opinion carried to its logical end—will prove to be an absurdity. Plants throw out roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind of locomotion; and, as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a tendril without regarding it as a melancholy and unprincipled compromise” (New edition, p. 153).

Having called attention to this view, and commended it to the consideration of my readers, I proceed to another which should not have been left to be touched upon only in a final chapter, and which, indeed, seems to require a book to itself—I refer to the origin and nature of the feelings, which those who accept volition as having had a large share in organic modification must admit to have had a no less large share in the formation of volition. Volition grows out of ideas, ideas from feelings. What, then, is feeling, and the subsequent mental images or ideas?

The image of a stone formed in our minds is no representation of the object which has given rise to it. Not only, as has been often remarked, is there no resemblance between the particular thought and the particular thing, but thoughts and things generally are too unlike to be compared. An idea of a stone may be like an idea of another stone, or two stones may be like one another; but an idea of a stone is not like a stone; it cannot be thrown at anything, it occupies no room in space, has no specific gravity, and when we come to know more about stones, we find our ideas concerning them to be but rude, epitomised, and highly conventional renderings of the actual facts, mere hieroglyphics, in fact, or, as it were, counters or bank-notes, which serve to express and to convey commodities with which they have no pretence of analogy.

Indeed we daily find that, as the range of our perceptions becomes enlarged either by invention of new appliances or after use of old ones, we change our ideas though we have no reason to think that the thing about which we are thinking has changed. In the case of a stone, for instance, the rude, unassisted, uneducated senses see it as above all things motionless, whereas assisted and trained ideas concerning it represent motion as its most essential characteristic; but the stone has not changed. So, again, the uneducated idea represents it as above all things mindless, and is as little able to see mind in connection with it as it lately was to see motion; it will be no greater change of opinion than we have most of us undergone already if we come presently to see it as no less full of elementary mind than of elementary motion, but the stone will not have changed.