Cases like the foregoing show the organism affected during its process of transformation by large elemental influences, and the response to these influences is so familiar that often it does not surprise us. We veil the real mystery of the process by talking of the chemical and other physical properties of protoplasm which render this response possible. But when we come to the protective mimicry of stinging insects by stingless ones, of leaves by butterflies, and so forth, these physical explanations manifestly fail us. The explanation which assumes the building up of these extraordinary resemblances bit by bit, through natural selection working upon a multitude of fortuitous variations, fails us as completely. It would be difficult to accept it if only a single species of insect showed these mimetic markings. The unlikelihood of their production by mere chance in the case not of one but of hundreds of species of butterflies, flies, and caterpillars is stupendous, and defies all calculation. It must, we repeat, always be borne in mind that, if chance variations are all we can postulate, these variations must at first be confined to one or few individuals, and that the influence of intercrossing would always be at work to obliterate individual peculiarities before they could develop to the point of affording any protection worth mentioning. We are bound, therefore, so far as I can see, to conclude, first, that these mimetic markings originate not in individuals but in the species as a whole, and are an expression of the communal life of the species; secondly, that they are a real and direct response to the external conditions of danger from attacks of birds, etc., and of protection afforded by deceiving these foes through mimicry of something which they do not care to attack. They can only originate in the dominants of the reproductive cells, and there, where undoubtedly forces and affinities of which we have no conception are ever at work, the initial changes take place. These changes, no doubt, take place by forming new combinations or modifications of existing dominants. The directive force must have something to work on. It does not follow that because some things are possible to it therefore all things are. It is not to be expected, for instance, that human beings, although it would be a great advantage to them to fly, could ever develop wings, like the conventional angels of mediæval art, for that would violate the essential character of the archetypal form. It is true, however, that life is ultimately responsible for the material with which it works as well as the directive agency that breathes through it. This point is of importance and must be made perfectly clear. The view of cosmic action here put forward does not contemplate ‘interventions’ in the order of nature from a source outside it. There never was a moment when, if law prevailed, one result would take place, while another result actually does occur in obedience to some mysterious life-force. No; it is the life-impulse which makes the law, obeys it and utilizes it. One can never say, “Such and such would have happened if the life-force had not been in action, but, as it was, the event was so-and-so”; for if it were not in action nothing would ever happen at all—the Universe would be the Eternal Nothing. One might as well speculate as to what would happen in a game of whist if nobody held a trump. The voluntary limitations under which nature works resemble, in the conception here put forward, the playing of a game, say a game of ‘Patience,’ where there is only one player, who plays the game with himself. There are laws to be obeyed, combinations which are necessary, but a guiding force can take advantage of the conditions as they arise and lead them to a certain end. If there were no laws and conditions there would be no game. If, on the other hand, matter were absolutely plastic life could not realize itself; nature’s game would be finished ere it was begun. A concrete illustration may, while we are on this topic, serve to suggest the kind of limitations under which nature seems to work.[99] During the last century or so the African elephant has been ruthlessly hunted down for its ivory, and since rifles and expanding bullets came into play the process of extermination has been greatly hastened. Elephants are now, I believe, protected by law over a great part of South Africa, but if it were not for this the species would at present be in considerable danger of extinction. The case is very like that of the Kallima butterfly and similar mimetic forms before they acquired their protective markings. Now, how might we expect nature to attempt the protection of the elephant? Doubtless by increased fleetness, cunning, watchfulness, capacity of one kind or another for concealing itself from hostile observation. But could we look for any such development as, for example, a deterioration in the quality of the ivory? Suppose, for example, the interior structure of the tusk were to become spongy and cellular instead of being dense. The tusk, if coated with hard enamel, might be almost if not quite as useful to the elephant, but it would cease to be of any use for most of the purposes to which it is now applied by man. The protection would be most effective; yet we know that nothing of this kind can possibly take place, though intrinsically the process would be far less remarkable than the painting of the butterfly’s wing. It cannot take place because it would either imply a supernatural knowledge on the part of the evolution-dominants of the elephant tribe of the reasons why it is hunted, or a conscious supervising and co-ordinating power above nature, a manlike Deity, omnipotent and omniscient, such as Paley assumed; to both of which explanations the actual processes of nature stand uncompromisingly opposed.
It is much easier to say what the life-impulse is not than what it is. I cannot, for my own part, conceive it as personal or conscious, in the sense in which I feel myself a conscious person. If we ask, Has it or has it not the quality of intelligence? we shall find both the affirmative and the negative answers equally hard to square with the facts. Our own intelligences working in a mysterious relation to a bodily organism are perhaps fundamentally incapable of forming a clear idea of the nature of the cosmic intelligence which is revealed to us in the outside world, “like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, with forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines, and isolated masses.”[100]
But those who find it difficult to believe that anything having the nature of intelligence is at work in the physical world might reflect on the striking analogy which that world offers to a certain sphere where it is quite certain that the human spirit, including its intelligence as well as its appetites and instincts, is the governing power. Social institutions are a product of the human spirit. Yet the development of these institutions is extraordinarily like that of the functions and structures of an animal or vegetable organism. The value of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s philosophic system may be disputed on many points, but his elaborate analysis of the phenomena of social life and his exposition of the minute analogies they exhibit to the processes of evolution in nature must always remain a landmark indicating the conquest of a great territory of human thought.[101] Here, as in nature, we find a principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of inertia. We find all grades of development existing at the same time. We see the gradual progression, by means of all kinds of by-ways, to a goal which one might have expected intelligence to attain simply and directly. We see parallels in human societies to arteries, nerves, to co-ordinating and ruling brain-centres, to the specialization of different members or organs for different tasks; and we see all these things growing up slowly, from point to point, in obedience to immediate and pressing requirements. We find, both in nature and in society, survivals of past structures, whose use is gone, carried forward into new stages of development. A particularly interesting analogy is that of structures which develop to meet one kind of requirement, and, on the cessation of that, persist into a further stage and are then modified to meet quite other requirements. Thus the swim-bladder of the fish became, it is supposed, the lung of the terrestrial animal. We may compare this with the development of municipal institutions. Originally intended to enable bodies of craftsmen and merchants to make head against the aggressions of a feudal aristocracy they have survived the fall of feudalism, and have become more important than ever as independent agencies for carrying on the functions of social administration and education.
Thus, operations in the physical world which certainly do not look as if they were the work of intelligence, as we understand it, are seen to be closely paralleled by transactions in the history of man’s social life. The development of life, in fact, is carried forward when the plane of human consciousness is reached on just the same lines as those which prevailed on the vegetable and the animal plane: there is no breach of continuity in the broad outlines of evolutionary progress. It is difficult to over-estimate the significance of this fact.
Perhaps nothing that man has evolved is so purely a work of mind as Language. Here, the analogy with the phenomena of physical evolution is very close and very illuminating. As in nature, the ultimate origins are obscure—we can only form hypotheses as to how language came to arise from the cries of animals, as we can only form hypotheses how life arose from the play of molecular forces. But when both are once established on the earth we see in them the same general features—unity, in a few leading types, branching out into infinite modifications in subordinate groups. Greek, Erse, German, Russian, Sanskrit are all Aryan tongues and have all a common ancestry. They differ widely among each other, but all alike are marked off from the Semitic or the Mongolian families. So a man, a snake, a bear, a fish are all vertebrates, and belong to a type essentially distinct from that of a lobster or a snail. As in nature, we find all stages of development existing at the same time—some lines of development show a rapid advance, some a very slow one. Some types have, in both cases, perished completely—there are fossil languages as there are fossil species. A new invention, an advance per saltum, without the utilization of existing constituents, is almost as rare in the evolution of language as in that of species. Just as the lung is developed from the swim-bladder, so the human mind, in the development of language, takes hold of whatever existing form will suit its purpose and transforms it to another end, as when it takes a word for ‘breath’ and makes it ‘spirit.’ There are laws governing the development of root-forms, linguistic or physical, in various different orders or species. The same osseous framework yields us in one class of animal a hand, in another a hoof, in another a paw, in another (as in bats) a wing. So in language the same root yields us the words, in different languages, for shining, showing, speaking, proving, a face, a story, whiteness. Another gives us, young, a stepmother, a certain musical string, a messenger.[102] Contrariwise we see both in nature and in language forms which have grown from entirely different roots into a close external and functional similarity. What unlearned observer would suspect that a whale was not a fish, and that it descends from a furry land animal with four legs, or that the Latin Deus and the Greek Theos with their perfect identity of meaning and their almost perfect identity of sound have probably a widely divergent etymological pedigree?[103]
On the other hand, the etymological identity of such words as évêque and bishop is as obscure on the surface as would probably be the relationship of a greyhound with a bull-dog to an anatomist who saw them only in fossil form.
Again we note that languages, like species, when they send out a migratory colony, are capable of gradual transformation to meet new conditions, and of marked divergence from the parent stock. Thus English, as spoken and written in the United States, in spite of the retaining influence of a common literary tradition, is steadily diverging from the English of Great Britain.[104] So with the French of Canada, the Spanish of South America, and the Dutch of the Cape. We note also in both cases that curious phenomenon, the survival of the useless relics of earlier structure, e.g. in the silent letters which reveal the historic origin of innumerable English words, which are paralleled in nature by the vermiform appendix of man, or the splint bones in a horse, or the rudimentary legs of the whale or the python.
But analogies of detail like these, interesting as they are, are not the main thing. The main thing is the organic likeness prevailing between the work of nature and this work of man—the likeness of growing and developing structures, with their response to immediate needs, their development by specialization of function, their lack of a strict logical scheme, their anomalies and capricious variations, and their control of these variations within certain archetypal forms. The substance of language is sound, as the substance of life is protoplasm. Phonetic laws govern the one as mechanical and chemical laws do the other. But phonetic laws and the capability of producing sound could never have made a language. The evolution of language is urged forward by the constant pressure and expansion of human thought; and on human thought, in its turn, it reacts, giving the stimulus and the starting ground for fresh expansion. We have the heart of the analogy before us now. As thought acts on language so the pressure and expansion of the life-impulse acts on the forms of matter. Let us see whither the comparison leads us. Language is a product of the human mind, but not of a mind. When a human mind consciously applies itself to the fashioning of a language it produces Esperanto. If we were living in an Esperanto universe, such as Paley makes out this to be, we might draw Paley’s easy conclusions as to its Maker; but the reality is very unlike that. On the other hand, if mind has produced the natural languages which we see, with all their anomalies, imperfections, and slow organic growth, then the corresponding phenomena in nature, as the evolution doctrine has brought them out, are evidently no bar to the belief that mind has had a part in this work also. I should go farther and say that the facts compel a belief in the existence in nature of something that can only be described in terms of mind. In other words, the universe is, at bottom, rational.
It is true that the cosmic Reason acts not as a single personal being, but more or less independently at a multitude of points. But it must not be forgotten that it is observed, up to a certain point, to act through groups as well as through units. Even the life and structure of a single cell show us distinct parts acting in harmonious subordination to the interests of the whole. An organism composed of many of these cells exhibits a series of syntheses or groupings rising in comprehensiveness and complexity till the individual is complete and the wheel of development has come full circle, beginning with a single unit and ending with a complex unit. But the synthetic movement of cosmic control does not end there,[105] for aggregates of individuals can be collectively animated by it. The numerous cases of co-operation among animals of the same species are an instance of this. All animals which live in communities exhibit this co-operation habitually, and many others do so occasionally. When Professor Eimer, as we have seen, reflected on the phenomena of reproduction and heredity in ants and bees, he was driven, like Oken, to account for them by regarding these creatures as “discontinuous organs” of one being, having the same power of affecting each other as have the distinct, though connected, parts of any single animal or plant.[106] As an illustrative analogy, helping us to understand the invisible bond of the communal life of a species, this conception is of service, but I hardly think that we are in a position at present to affirm it in any exact and literal sense. Can we, however, trace the analogy, as Oken did, beyond species, and show anything of the nature of an adaptation of one order of beings to the use of another? To do so convincingly, it is evident that the adaptation must be of no use to the creature possessing it; for, if it were, we might expect to see it evolved, whether it were incidentally of use to a neighbour species or not. Honey, for instance, though apparently of no direct use to flowers, is secreted by them because it attracts insects, and insects fertilize the flowers. If flowers secreted honey solely for insects’ use, deriving no benefit from their visits, we should have a case of a synthesis of communal life wider than that of the species. Are there such cases, or does every species fight exclusively for its own hand?