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

by Samuel Butler

“Is there any way,” I continued, “of showing that this experience of the race about which so much is said without the least attempt to show in what way it may, or does, become the experience of the individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, who repeats on a great many different occasions, and in slightly different ways, certain performances with which he has already become exceedingly familiar?”

I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the expression in question, that it was fallacious till this was done. When I first began to write “Life and Habit” I did not believe it could be done, but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were, of my cu de sac, I saw the path which led straight to the point I had despaired of reaching—I mean I saw that personality could not be broken as between generations, without also breaking it between the years, days, and moments of a man’s life. What differentiates “Life and Habit” from the “Principles of Psychology” is the prominence given to continued personal identity, and hence to bonâ fide memory, as between successive generations; but surely this makes the two books differ widely.

Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost any direction, if the change is brought about gradually and in accordance with the rules of all development. As in music we may take almost any possible discord with pleasing effect if we have prepared and resolved it rightly, so our ideas will outlive and outgrow almost any modification which is approached and quitted in such a way as to fuse the old and new harmoniously. Words are to ideas what the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore it—only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak, whereas ideas are unseen until they don the robe of words which reveals them to us; the words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit each other and stick to one another in our minds as soon as they are brought together, or the ideas will fly off, and leave the words void of that spirit by the aid of which alone they can become transmuted into physical action and shape material things with their own impress. Whether a discord is too violent or no, depends on what we have been accustomed to, and on how widely the new differs from the old, but in no case can we fuse and assimilate more than a very little new at a time without exhausting our tempering power—and hence presently our temper.

Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de minimis non curat lex,—though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,—yet too sudden a change in the manner in which our ideas are associated is as cataclysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are material convulsions, or too violent revolutions in politics. This must always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, and the only lawful home of the miracle is in the microscopically small. Here, indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and ever shall be, but we are deadened if they are required of us on a scale which is visible to the naked eye. If we are told to work them our hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If we are required to believe them—which only means to fuse them with our other ideas—we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to cease to work them is to die. And by miracle I do not merely mean something new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension—I mean something which violates every canon of thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing. This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life and death.

Claude Bernard says, Rien ne nait, rien ne se crée, tout se continue. La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune création, elle est d’une éternelle continuation; [35a] but surely he is insisting upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another which is just as real, and just as important; he might have said, Rien ne se continue, tout nait, tout se crée. La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune continuation. Elle est d’une éternelle création; for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and, indeed, the two stand or fall together. True, discontinuity, where development is normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the difference between looking at distances on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have even the smallest change without a small partial corresponding discontinuity; on a small scale—too small, indeed, for us to cognise—these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our understanding goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out. Creations, then, there must be, but they must be so small that practically they are no creations. We must have a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by flying in the face of every rule that professors of the art of thinking have drawn up for our instruction. These rules may be good enough as servants, but we have let them become the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy is made for man, not man for philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—nor has confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its own way both living and saving.

All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is miraculous. It is the two in one, and at the same time one in two, which is only two and two making five put before us in another shape; yet this fusion—so easy to think so long as it is not thought about, and so unthinkable if we try to think it—is, as it were, the matrix from which our more thinkable thought is taken; it is the cloud gathering in the unseen world from which the waters of life descend in an impalpable dew. Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into the seen again—provided we do not look back, and provided also we do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time. To think is to fuse and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed. We can all feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can fuse ideas; or we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can feed; we know not which comes first, the food or the ideas, but we must not overtax our strength; the moment we do this we taste of death.

It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food fine before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large lumps will choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again, that that which is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas. Food is very thoughtful: through thought it comes, and back through thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and comprehension within our own system is mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross—that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale. Granted that no one can draw a clear line and define the limits within which a miracle is healthy working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he can prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute our food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and that at all times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass themselves, still we know as a general rule near enough, and find that the strongest can do but very little at a time, and, to return to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two such hitherto unassociated ideas as race and experience was a miracle beyond our strength.

Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter to the Athenæum above referred to, we were not in the habit of thinking of any one as able to remember things that had happened before he had been born or thought of. This notion will still strike many of my non-readers as harsh and strained; no such discord, therefore, should have been taken unprepared, and when taken it should have been resolved with pomp and circumstance. Mr Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never either prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words “experience of the race” sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the result that his words were barren. They were barren because they were incoherent; they were incoherent because they were approached and quitted too suddenly. While we were realising “experience” our minds excluded “race,” inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea “race,” for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded experience. We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien to one another, without having had those other ideas presented to us which would alone flux them. The absence of these—which indeed were not immediately ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them—made nonsense of the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer’s pages, only to find that they had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we put down his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know what to do with his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly while he chastised us with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, according to our temperaments.

I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are one in principle—the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas—that is to say, into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as their neighbours do.

If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race are bonâ fide united by a common personality, and that in virtue of being so united each generation remembers (within, of course, the limits to which all memory is subject) what happened to it while still in the persons of its progenitors—then his order to Professor Hering and myself should be immediately obeyed; but this was just what was at once most wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the passages given above—passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself—this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made it—put continued personality and memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to be discovered “by implications,” and then such expressions as “accumulated experiences” and “experience of the race” become luminous; till this had been done they were Vox et præterea nihil.