Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews Part 24

"Il faudra donc aussi personnifier _l'organisation_, et dire que _l'organisation_ choisit _l'organisation_. _L'election naturelle_ est cette _forme substantielle_ dont on jonait autrefois avec tant de facilite. Aristote disait que 'Si l'art de batir etait dans le bois, cet art agirait comme la nature.' A la place de _l'art de batir_ M. Darwin met _l'election naturelle_, et c'est tout un: l'un n'est pas plus chimerique que l'autre." (P. 31.)

And this is really all that M. Flourens can make of Natural Selection.

We have given the original, in fear lest a translation should be regarded as a travesty; but with the original before the reader, we may try to a.n.a.lyse the pa.s.sage. "For an organized being, Nature is only organization, neither more nor less."

Organized beings then have absolutely no relation to inorganic nature: a plant does not depend on soil or sunshine, climate, depth in the ocean, height above it; the quant.i.ty of saline matters in water have no influence upon animal life; the subst.i.tution of carbonic acid for oxygen in our atmosphere would hurt n.o.body! That these are absurdities no one should know better than M. Flourens; but they are logical deductions from the a.s.sertion just quoted, and from the further statement that natural selection means only that "organization chooses and selects organization."

For if it be once admitted (what no sane man denies) that the chances of life of any given organism are increased by certain conditions (A) and diminished by their opposites (B), then it is mathematically certain that any change of conditions in the direction of (A) will exercise a selective influence in favour of that organism, tending to its increase and multiplication, while any change in the direction of (B) will exercise a selective influence against that organism, tending to its decrease and extinction.

Or, on the other hand, conditions remaining the same, let a given organism vary (and no one doubts that they do vary) in two directions: into one form (a) better fitted to cope with these conditions than the original stock, and a second (b) less well adapted to them. Then it is no less certain that the conditions in question must exercise a selective influence in favour of (a) and against (b), so that (a) will tend to predominance, and (b) to extirpation.

That M. Flourens should be unable to perceive the logical necessity of these simple arguments, which lie at the foundation of all Mr. Darwin's reasoning; that he should confound an irrefragable deduction from the observed relations of organisms to the conditions which lie around them, with a metaphysical "forme substantielle," or a chimerical personification of the powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that other pa.s.sages of his work leave no room for doubt upon the subject.

"On imagine une _election naturelle_ que, pour plus de menagement, on me dit etre _inconsciente_, sans s'apercevoir que le contre-sens litteral est precis.e.m.e.nt la: _election inconsciente_." (P. 52.)

"J'ai deja dit ce qu'il faut penser de _l'election naturelle_. Ou _l'election naturelle_ n'est rien, ou c'est la nature: mais la nature douee _d'election_, mais la nature personnifiee: derniere erreur du dernier siecle: Le xix^e ne fait plus de personnifications." (P. 53.)

M. Flourens cannot imagine an unconscious selection--it is for him a contradiction in terms. Did M. Flourens ever visit one of the prettiest watering-places of "la belle France," the Baie d'Arcachon? If so, he will probably have pa.s.sed through the district of the Landes, and will have had an opportunity of observing the formation of "dunes" on a grand scale. What are these "dunes?" The winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay have not much consciousness, and yet they have with great care "selected," from among an infinity of ma.s.ses of silex of all shapes and sizes, which have been submitted to their action, all the grains of sand below a certain size, and have heaped them by themselves over a great area. This sand has been "unconsciously selected" from amidst the gravel in which it first lay with as much precision as if man had "consciously selected" it by the aid of a sieve. Physical Geology is full of such selections--of the picking out of the soft from the hard, of the soluble from the insoluble, of the fusible from the infusible, by natural agencies to which we are certainly not in the habit of ascribing consciousness.

But that which wind and sea are to a sandy beach, the sum of influences, which we term the "conditions of existence," is to living organisms. The weak are sifted out from the strong. A frosty night "selects" the hardy plants in a plantation from among the tender ones as effectually as if it were the wind, and they, the sand and pebbles, of our ill.u.s.tration; or, on the other hand, as if the intelligence of a gardener had been operative in cutting the weaker organisms down. The thistle, which has spread over the Pampas, to the destruction of native plants, has been more effectually "selected" by the unconscious operation of natural conditions than if a thousand agriculturists had spent their time in sowing it.

It is one of Mr. Darwin's many great services to Biological science that he has demonstrated the significance of these facts. He has shown that--given variation and given change of conditions--the inevitable result is the exercise of such an influence upon organisms that one is helped and another is impeded; one tends to predominate, another to disappear; and thus the living world bears within itself, and is surrounded by, impulses towards incessant change.

But the truths just stated are as certain as any other physical laws, quite independently of the truth, or falsehood, of the hypothesis which Mr. Darwin has based upon them; and that M. Flourens, missing the substance and grasping at a shadow, should be blind to the admirable exposition of them, which Mr. Darwin has given, and see nothing there but a "derniere erreur du dernier siecle"--a personification of Nature--leads us indeed to cry with him: "O lucidite! O solidite de l'esprit Francais, que devenez-vous?"

M. Flourens has, in fact, utterly failed to comprehend the first principles of the doctrine which he a.s.sails so rudely. His objections to details are of the old sort, so battered and hackneyed on this side of the Channel, that not even a Quarterly Reviewer could be induced to pick them up for the purpose of pelting Mr. Darwin over again. We have Cuvier and the mummies; M. Roulin and the domesticated animals of America; the difficulties presented by hybridism and by Palaeontology; Darwinism a _rifacciamento_ of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without a commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, &c. &c. How one knows it all by heart, and with what relief one reads at p. 65--

"Je laisse M. Darwin!"

But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers' attention to his wonderful tenth chapter, "De la Preexistence des Germes et de l'Epigenese," which opens thus:--

"Spontaneous generation is only a chimaera. This point established, two hypotheses remain: that of _pre-existence_ and that of _epigenesis_. The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as the other." (P. 163.)

"The doctrine of _epigenesis_ is derived from Harvey: following by ocular inspection the development of the new being in the Windsor does, he saw each part appear successively, and taking the moment of _appearance_ for the moment of _formation_ he imagined _epigenesis_." (P. 165.)

On the contrary, says M. Flourens (p. 167),

"The new being is formed at a stroke (_tout d'un coup_), as a whole, instantaneously; it is not formed part by part, and at different times. It is formed at once; it is formed at the single _individual_ moment at which the conjunction of the male and female elements takes place."

It will be observed that M. Flourens uses language which cannot be mistaken. For him, the labours of Von Baer, of Rathke, of Coste, and their contemporaries and successors in Germany, France, and England, are non-existent; and, as Darwin "_imagina_" natural selection, so Harvey "_imagina_" that doctrine which gives him an even greater claim to the veneration of posterity than his better known discovery of the circulation of the blood.

Language such as that we have quoted is, in fact, so preposterous, so utterly incompatible with anything but absolute ignorance of some of the best established facts, that we should have pa.s.sed it over in silence had it not appeared to afford some clue to M. Flourens' unhesitating, _a priori_, repudiation of all forms of the doctrine of the progressive modification of living beings. He whose mind remains uninfluenced by an acquaintance with the phaenomena of development, must indeed lack one of the chief motives towards the endeavour to trace a genetic relation between the different existing forms of life. Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate the site of a Roman camp, as aught but part and parcel of the primaeval hill-side. So M. Flourens, who believes that embryos are formed "tout d'un coup," naturally finds no difficulty in conceiving that species came into existence in the same way.

FOOTNOTES:

[65] "Die Radiolarien: eine Monographie," p. 231.

[66] s.p.a.ce will not allow us to give Professor Kolliker's arguments in detail; our readers will find a full and accurate version of them in the _Reader_ for August 13th and 20th, 1864.

[67] If, on the contrary, we follow the a.n.a.logy of the more complex forms of Agamogenesis, such as that exhibited by some _Trematoda_ and by the _Aphides_, the Hyaena must produce, as.e.xually, a brood of as.e.xual Dogs, from which other s.e.xless Dogs must proceed. At the end of a certain number of terms of the series, the Dogs would acquire s.e.xes and generate young; but these young would be, not Dogs, but Hyaenas. In fact, we have _demonstrated_, in Agamogenetic phaenomena, that inevitable recurrence to the original type, which is _a.s.serted_ to be true of variations in general, by Mr. Darwin's opponents; and which, if the a.s.sertion could be changed into a demonstration, would, in fact, be fatal to his hypothesis.

XIV.

ON DESCARTES' "DISCOURSE TOUCHING THE METHOD OF USING ONE'S REASON RIGHTLY AND OF SEEKING SCIENTIFIC TRUTH."

It has been well said that "all the thoughts of men, from the beginning of the world until now, are linked together into one great chain;" but the conception of the intellectual filiation of mankind which is expressed in these words may, perhaps, be more fitly shadowed forth by a different metaphor. The thoughts of men seem rather to be comparable to the leaves, flowers, and fruit upon the innumerable branches of a few great stems, fed by commingled and hidden roots. These stems bear the names of the half-a-dozen men, endowed with intellects of heroic force and clearness, to whom we are led, at whatever point of the world of thought the attempt to trace its history commences; just as certainly as the following up the small twigs of a tree to the branchlets which bear them, and tracing the branchlets to their supporting branches, brings us, sooner or later, to the bole.

It seems to me that the thinker who, more than any other, stands in the relation of such a stem towards the philosophy and the science of the modern world is Rene Descartes. I mean, that if you lay hold of any characteristic product of modern ways of thinking, either in the region of philosophy, or in that of science, you find the spirit of that thought, if not its form, to have been present in the mind of the great Frenchman.

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said, "he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anybody."[68] But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day, and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such an one was Descartes.

Born, in 1596, nearly three hundred years ago, of a n.o.ble family in Touraine, Rene Descartes grew up into a sickly and diminutive child, whose keen wit soon gained him that t.i.tle of "the Philosopher," which, in the mouths of his n.o.ble kinsmen, was more than, half a reproach. The best schoolmasters of the day, the Jesuits, educated him as well as a French boy of the seventeenth century could be educated. And they must have done their work honestly and well, for, before his schoolboy days were over, he had discovered that the most of what he had learned, except in mathematics, was devoid of solid and real value.

"Therefore," says he, in that "Discourse"[69] which I have taken for my text, "as soon as I was old enough to be set free from the government of my teachers, I entirely forsook the study of letters; and determining to seek no other knowledge than that which I could discover within myself, or in the great book of the world, I spent the remainder of my youth in travelling; in seeing courts and armies; in the society of people of different humours and conditions; in gathering varied experience; in testing myself by the chances of fortune; and in always trying to profit by my reflections on what happened.... And I always had an intense desire to learn how to distinguish truth from falsehood, in order to be clear about my actions, and to walk surefootedly in this life."

But "learn what is true, in order to do what is right," is the summing up of the whole duty of man, for all who are unable to satisfy their mental hunger with the east wind of authority; and to those of us moderns who are in this position, it is one of Descartes' great claims to our reverence as a spiritual ancestor, that, at three-and-twenty, he saw clearly that this was his duty, and acted up to his conviction. At two-and-thirty, in fact, finding all other occupations incompatible with the search after the knowledge which leads to action, and being possessed of a modest competence, he withdrew into Holland; where he spent nine years in learning and thinking, in such retirement that only one or two trusted friends knew of his whereabouts.

In 1637 the firstfruits of these long meditations were given to the world in the famous "Discourse touching the Method of using Reason rightly and of seeking scientific Truth," which, at once an autobiography and a philosophy, clothes the deepest thought in language of exquisite harmony, simplicity, and clearness.

The central propositions of the whole "Discourse" are these. There is a path that leads to truth so surely, that if any one who will follow it must needs reach the goal, whether his capacity be great or small. And there is one guiding rule by which a man may always find this path, and keep himself from straying when he has found it. This golden rule is--give unqualified a.s.sent to no propositions but those the truth of which is so clear and distinct that they cannot be doubted.

The enunciation of this great first commandment of science consecrated Doubt. It removed Doubt from the seat of penance among the grievous sins to which it had long been condemned, and enthroned it in that high place among the primary duties, which is a.s.signed to it by the scientific conscience of these latter days. Descartes was the first among the moderns to obey this commandment deliberately; and, as a matter of religious duty, to strip off all his beliefs and reduce himself to a state of intellectual nakedness, until such time as he could satisfy himself which were fit to be worn. He thought a bare skin healthier than the most respectable and well-cut clothing of what might, possibly, be mere shoddy.

When I say that Descartes consecrated doubt, you must remember that it was that sort of doubt which Goethe has called "the active scepticism, whose whole aim is to conquer itself;"[70] and not that other sort which is born of flippancy and ignorance, and whose aim is only to perpetuate itself, as an excuse for idleness and indifference. But it is impossible to define what is meant by scientific doubt better than in Descartes'

own words. After describing the gradual progress of his negative criticism, he tells us:--

"For all that, I did not imitate the sceptics, who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath."

And further, since no man of common sense, when he pulls down his house for the purpose of rebuilding it, fails to provide himself with some shelter while the work is in progress; so, before demolishing the s.p.a.cious, if not commodious, mansion of his old beliefs, Descartes thought it wise to equip himself with what he calls "_une morale par provision_," by which he resolved to govern his practical life until such time as he should be better instructed. The laws of this "provisional self-government" are embodied in four maxims, of which one binds our philosopher to submit himself to the laws and religion in which he was brought up; another, to act, on all those occasions which call for action, promptly and according to the best of his judgment, and to abide, without repining, by the result: a third rule is to seek happiness in limiting his desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them; while the last is to make the search after truth the business of his life.

Thus prepared to go on living while he doubted, Descartes proceeded to face his doubts like a man. One thing was clear to him, he would not lie to himself--would, under no penalties, say, "I am sure" of that of which he was not sure; but would go on digging and delving until he came to the solid adamant; or, at worst, made sure there was no adamant. As the record of his progress tells us, he was obliged to confess that life is full of delusions; that authority may err; that testimony may be false or mistaken; that reason lands us in endless fallacies; that memory is often as little trustworthy as hope; that the evidence of the very senses may be misunderstood; that dreams are real as long as they last, and that what we call reality may be a long and restless dream. Nay, it is conceivable that some powerful and malicious being may find his pleasure in deluding us, and in making us believe the thing which is not, every moment of our lives. What, then, is certain? What even, if such a being exists, is beyond the reach of his powers of delusion? Why, the fact that the thought, the present consciousness, exists. Our thoughts may be delusive, but they cannot be fict.i.tious. As thoughts, they are real and existent, and the cleverest deceiver cannot make them otherwise.

Thus, thought is existence. More than that, so far as we are concerned, existence is thought, all our conceptions of existence being some kind or other of thought. Do not for a moment suppose that these are mere paradoxes or subtleties. A little reflection upon the commonest facts proves them to be irrefragable truths. For example, I take up a marble, and I find it to be a red, round, hard, single body. We call the redness, the roundness, the hardness, and the singleness, "qualities" of the marble; and it sounds, at first, the height of absurdity to say that all these qualities are modes of our own consciousness, which cannot even be conceived to exist in the marble. But consider the redness, to begin with. How does the sensation of redness arise? The waves of a certain very attenuated matter, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity, but with very different velocities, strike upon the marble, and those which vibrate with one particular velocity are thrown off from its surface in all directions. The optical apparatus of the eye gathers some of these together, and gives them such a course that they impinge upon the surface of the retina, which is a singularly delicate apparatus, connected with the termination of the fibres of the optic nerve. The impulses of the attenuated matter, or ether, affect this apparatus and the fibres of the optic nerve in a certain way; and the change in the fibres of the optic nerve produces yet other changes in the brain; and these, in some fashion unknown to us, give rise to the feeling, or consciousness, of redness. If the marble could remain unchanged, and either the rate of vibration of the ether, or the nature of the retina, could be altered, the marble would seem not red, but some other colour. There are many people who are what are called colourblind, being unable to distinguish one colour from another. Such an one might declare our marble to be green; and he would be quite as right in saying that it is green, as we are in declaring it to be red. But then, as the marble cannot, in itself, be both green and red, at the same time, this shows that the quality "redness" must be in our consciousness and not in the marble.

In like manner, it is easy to see that the roundness and the hardness are forms of our consciousness, belonging to the groups which we call sensations of sight and touch. If the surface of the cornea were cylindrical, we should have a very different notion of a round body from that which we possess now; and if the strength of the fabric, and the force of the muscles, of the body were increased a hundredfold, our marble would seem to be as soft as a pellet of bread crumbs.

Not only is it obvious that all these qualities are in us, but, if you will make the attempt, you will find it quite impossible to conceive of "blueness," "roundness," and "hardness" as existing without reference to some such consciousness as our own. It may seem strange to say that even the "singleness" of the marble is relative to us; but extremely simple experiments will show that such is veritably the case, and that our two most trustworthy senses may be made to contradict one another on this very point. Hold the marble between the finger and thumb, and look at it in the ordinary way. Sight and touch agree that it is single. Now squint, and sight tells you that there are two marbles, while touch a.s.serts that there is only one. Next, return the eyes to their natural position, and, having crossed the forefinger and the middle finger, put the marble between their tips. Then touch will declare that there are two marbles, while sight says that there is only one; and touch claims our belief, when we attend to it, just as imperatively as sight does.

But it may be said, the marble takes up a certain s.p.a.ce which could not be occupied, at the same time, by anything else. In other words, the marble has the primary quality of matter, extension. Surely this quality must be in the thing, and not in our minds? But the reply must still be; whatever may, or may not, exist in the thing, all that we can know of these qualities is a state of consciousness. What we call extension is a consciousness of a relation between two, or more, affections of the sense of sight, or of touch. And it is wholly inconceivable that what we call extension should exist independently of such consciousness as our own. Whether, notwithstanding this inconceivability, it does so exist, or not, is a point on which I offer no opinion.

Thus, whatever our marble may be in itself, all that we can know of it is under the shape of a bundle of our own consciousnesses.

Nor is our knowledge of anything we know or feel more, or less, than a knowledge of states of consciousness. And our whole life is made up of such states. Some of these states we refer to a cause we call "self;"

others to a cause or causes which may be comprehended under the t.i.tle of "not-self." But neither of the existence of "self," nor of that of "not-self," have we, or can we by any possibility have, any such unquestionable and immediate certainty as we have of the states of consciousness which we consider to be their effects. They are not immediately observed facts, but results of the application of the law of causation to those facts. Strictly speaking, the existence of a "self"

and of a "not-self" are hypotheses by which we account for the facts of consciousness. They stand upon the same footing as the belief in the general trustworthiness of memory, and in the general constancy of the order of nature--as hypothetical a.s.sumptions which cannot be proved, or known with that highest degree of certainty which is given by immediate consciousness; but which, nevertheless, are of the highest practical value, inasmuch as the conclusions logically drawn from them are always verified by experience.