Selections from Previous Works Part 12

Mr. Darwin, with characteristic caution, only commits himself to saying that Mr. Wallace has arrived at _almost_ (italics mine) the same general conclusions as he, Mr. Darwin, has done; {223c} but he still, as in 1859, declares that it would be "a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations," {223d} and he still comprehensively condemns the "well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck." {224}

As for the statement in the pa.s.sage quoted from Mr. Wallace, to the effect that Lamarck's hypothesis "has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species," it is a very surprising one. I have searched Evolution literature in vain for any refutation of the Erasmus Darwinian system (for this is what Lamarck's hypothesis really is), which need make the defenders of that system at all uneasy. The best attempt at an answer to Erasmus Darwin that has yet been made is Paley's Natural Theology, which was throughout obviously written to meet Buffon and the Zoonomia. It is the manner of theologians to say that such and such an objection "has been refuted over and over again," without at the same time telling us when and where; it is to be regretted that Mr. Wallace has here taken a leaf out of the theologians'

book. His statement is one which will not pa.s.s muster with those whom public opinion is sure in the end to follow.

Did Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, "repeatedly and easily refute"

Lamarck's hypothesis in his brilliant article in the _Leader_, March 20, 1852? On the contrary, that article is expressly directed against those "who cavalierly reject the hypothesis of Lamarck and his followers." This article was written six years before the words last quoted from Mr.

Wallace; how absolutely, however, does the word "cavalierly" apply to them!

Does Isidore Geoffrey, again, bear Mr. Wallace's a.s.sertion out better? In 1859--that is to say but a short time after Mr. Wallace had written--he wrote as follows:--

"Such was the language which Lamarck heard during his protracted old age, saddened alike by the weight of years and blindness; this was what people did not hesitate to utter over his grave yet barely closed, and what indeed they are still saying--commonly too without any knowledge of what Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at secondhand bad caricatures of his teaching.

"When will the time come when we may see Lamarck's theory discussed--and, I may as well at once say, refuted in some important points {225a}--with at any rate the respect due to one of the most ill.u.s.trious masters of our science? And when will this theory, the hardihood of which has been greatly exaggerated, become freed from the interpretations and commentaries by the false light of which so many naturalists have followed their opinion concerning it? If its author is to be condemned, let it be, at any rate, not before he has been heard." {225b}

In 1873 M. Martin published his edition of Lamarck's _Philosophic Zoologique_. He was still able to say, with, I believe, perfect truth, that Lamarck's theory has "never yet had the honour of being discussed seriously." {225c}

Professor Huxley in his article on Evolution is no less cavalier than Mr.

Wallace. He writes: {225d}--

"Lamarck introduced the conception of the action of an animal on itself as a factor in producing modification."

Lamarck did nothing of the kind. It was Buffon and Dr. Darwin who introduced this, but more especially Dr. Darwin. The accuracy of Professor Huxley's statements about the history and literature of evolution is like the direct interference of the Deity--it vanishes whenever and wherever I have occasion to test it.

"But _a little consideration showed_" (italics mine) "that though Lamarck had seized what, as far as it goes, is a true cause of modification, it is a cause the actual effects of which are wholly inadequate to account for any considerable modification in animals, and which can have no influence whatever in the vegetable world," &c.

I should be very glad to come across some of the "little consideration"

which will show this. I have searched for it far and wide, and have never been able to find it.

I think Professor Huxley has been exercising some of his ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear in the article on Evolution, already so often quoted from. We find him (p. 750) pooh-poohing Lamarck, yet on the next page he says, "How far 'natural selection' suffices for the production of species remains to be seen." And this when "natural selection" was already so nearly of age! Why, to those who know how to read between a philosopher's lines the sentence comes to very nearly the same as a declaration that the writer has no great opinion of "natural selection." Professor Huxley continues, "Few can doubt that, if not the whole cause, it is a very important factor in that operation." A philosopher's words should be weighed carefully, and when Professor Huxley says, "few can doubt," we must remember that he may be including himself among the few whom he considers to have the power of doubting on this matter. He does not say "few will," but "few can" doubt, as though it were only the enlightened who would have the power of doing so.

Certainly "nature"--for that is what "natural selection" comes to--is rather an important factor in the operation, but we do not gain much by being told so. If however, Professor Huxley neither believes in the origin of species, through sense of need on the part of animals themselves, nor yet in "natural selection," we should be glad to know what he does believe in.

The battle is one of greater importance than appears at first sight. It is a battle between teleology and non-teleology, between the purposiveness and the non-purposiveness of the organs in animal and vegetable bodies. According to Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Paley, organs are purposive; according to Mr. Darwin and his followers, they are not purposive. But the main arguments against the system of Dr. Erasmus Darwin are arguments which, so far as they have any weight, tell against evolution generally. Now that these have been disposed of, and the prejudice against evolution has been overcome, it will be seen that there is nothing to be said against the system of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck which does not tell with far greater force against that of Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Wallace.

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. {228a}

I have said on page 96 of this book that the word "heredity" may be a very good way of stating the difficulty which meets us when we observe the reappearance of like characteristics, whether of body or mind, in successive generations, but that it does nothing whatever towards removing it.

It is here that Mr. Herbert Spencer, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, and Mr.

Romanes fail. Mr. Herbert Spencer does indeed go so far in one place as to call instinct "organised memory," {228b} and Mr. G. H. Lewes attributes many instincts to what he calls the "lapsing of intelligence."

{228c} So does Mr. Herbert Spencer, {228d} whom Mr. Romanes should have known that Mr. Lewis was following. Mr. Romanes, in his recent work, Mental Evolution in Animals (November, 1883), endorses this, and frequently uses such expressions as "the lifetime of the species," {228e} "hereditary experience," {228f} and "hereditary memory and instinct,"

{228g} but none of these writers (and indeed no writer that I know of except Professor Hering of Prague, for a translation of whose address on this subject I must refer the reader to my book Unconscious Memory) has shown a comprehension of the fact that these expressions are unexplained so long as "heredity," whereby they explain them, is unexplained; and none of them sees the importance of emphasizing Memory, and making it as it were the keystone of the system.

Mr. Spencer may very well call instinct "organised memory" if he means that offspring can remember--within the limitations to which all memory is subject--what happened to it while it was yet in the person or persons of its parent or parents; but if he does not mean this, his use of the word "memory," his talk about "the experience of the race," and other expressions of kindred nature, are delusive. If he does mean this, it is a pity he has nowhere said so.

Professor Hering does mean this, and makes it clear that he does so. He does not catch the ball and let it slip through his fingers again, but holds it firmly. "It is to memory," he says, "that we owe almost all that we have or are; our ideas and conceptions are its work; our every thought and movement are derived from this source. Memory connects the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole, and as our bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not held together by the cohesion of matter, so our consciousness would be broken up into as many moments as we had lived seconds, but for the binding and unifying force of Memory." {229} And he proceeds to show that Memory persists between generations exactly as it does between the various stages in the life of the individual. If I could find any such pa.s.sage as the one I have just quoted, in Mr. Herbert Spencer's, Mr.

Lewes's, or Mr. Romanes' works, I should be only too glad to quote it, but I know of nothing comparable to it for definiteness of idea, thoroughness and consistency.

No reader indeed can rise from a perusal of Mr. Herbert Spencer's, or Mr.

G. H. Lewes', work with an adequate--if indeed with any--impression that the phenomena of heredity are in fact phenomena of memory; that heredity, whether as regards body or mind, is only possible because each generation is linked on to and made one with its predecessor by the possession of a common and abiding memory, in as far as bodily existence was common--that is to say, until the substance of the one left the substance of the other; and that this memory is exactly of the same general character as that which enables us to remember what we did half an hour ago--strong under the same circ.u.mstances as those under which this familiar kind of memory is strong, and weak under those under which it is weak. Mr.

Spencer and Mr. Lewes have even less conception of the connection between heredity and memory than Dr. Erasmus Darwin had at the close of the last century. {230}

Mr. Lewes' position was briefly this. He denied that there could be any knowledge independent of experience, but he could not help seeing that young animals come into the world furnished with many organs which they use with great dexterity at a very early age. This looks as if they are acting on knowledge acquired independently of experience. "No," says Mr.

Lewes, "not so. They are born with the organs--I cannot tell how or why, but heredity explains all that, and having once got the organs, the objects that come into contact with them in daily life naturally produce the same effect as on the parents, just as oxygen coming into contact with the right quant.i.ty of hydrogen will make water; hence even the first time the offspring come into contact with any given object they act as their parents did." The idea of the young having got their experience in a past generation does not seem to have even crossed his mind.

"What marvel is there," he asks, "that constant conditions acting upon structures which are similar should produce similar results? It is in this sense that the paradox of Leibnitz is true, and we can be said 'to acquire an innate idea;' only the idea is not acquired independently of experience, but through the process of experience similar to that which originally produced it." {231a}

The impression left upon me is that he is all at sea for want of the clue with which Professor Hering would have furnished him, and that had that clue been presented to him a dozen years or so earlier than it was he would have adopted it.

As regards Mr. Romanes the case is different. His recent work, Mental Evolution in Animals, {231b} shows that he is well aware of the direction which modern opinion is taking, and in several places he so writes as to warrant me in claiming his authority in support of the views which I have been insisting on for several years past.

Thus Mr. Romanes says that the a.n.a.logies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily life and hereditary memory "are so numerous and precise" as to justify us in considering them to be of essentially the same kind. {232a}

Again he says that although the memory of milk shown by new-born infants is "at all events in large part hereditary, it is none the less memory"

of a certain kind. {232b}

Two lines lower down he writes of "hereditary memory or instinct,"

thereby implying that instinct is "hereditary memory." "It makes no essential difference," he says, "whether the past sensation was actually experienced by the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by its ancestors. {232c} For it makes no essential difference whether the nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the lifetime of the individual or during that of the species, and afterwards impressed by heredity on the individual."

Lower down on the same page he writes:--

"As showing how close is the connection between hereditary memory and instinct," &c.

And on the following page:--

"And this shows how closely the phenomena of hereditary memory are related to those of individual memory: at this stage . . . it is practically impossible to disentangle the effects of hereditary memory from those of the individual."

Again:--

"Another point which we have here to consider is the part which heredity has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their power of perception already largely developed. . . . The wealth of ready-formed information, and therefore of ready-made powers of perception, with which many newly-born or newly-hatched animals are provided, is so great and so precise that it scarcely requires to be supplemented by the subsequent experience of the individual." {233a}

Again:--

"Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or other of two principles.

"I. The first mode of origin consists in natural selection or survival of the fittest, continuously preserving actions, &c. &c. . .

"II. The second mode of origin is as follows:--By the effects of habit in successive generations, actions which were originally intelligent become as it were stereotyped into permanent instincts.

Just as in the lifetime of the individual adjustive actions which were originally intelligent may by frequent repet.i.tion become automatic, so in the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repet.i.tion and heredity so write their effects on the nervous system that the latter is prepared, even before individual experience, to perform adjustive actions mechanically which in previous generations were performed intelligently. This mode of origin of instincts has been appropriately called (by Lewes--see Problems of Life and Mind {233b}) the 'lapsing of intelligence.'" {233c}

Later on:--

"That 'practice makes perfect' is a matter, as I have previously said, of daily observation. Whether we regard a juggler, a pianist, or a billiard-player, a child learning his lesson or an actor his part by frequently repeating it, or a thousand other ill.u.s.trations of the same process, we see at once that there is truth in the cynical definition of a man as a 'bundle of habits.' And the same of course is true of animals." {234a}