The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 10

General deduction that we never do anything in this unconscious or semi-conscious manner unless we know how to do it exceedingly well and have had long practice.

Also that consciousness is a vanishing quant.i.ty and that as soon as we know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of it-- consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty--and hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it when we do not know of our knowledge.

2. Whatever we do in this way is all one and the same in kind--the difference being only in degree. Playing [almost?] unconsciously-- writing, more unconsciously (as to each letter)--reading, very unconsciously--talking, still more unconsciously (it is almost impossible for us to notice the action of our tongue in every letter)--walking, much the same--breathing, still to a certain extent within our own control--heart's beating, perceivable but beyond our control--digestion, unperceivable and beyond our control, digestion being the oldest of the . . . habits.

3. A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and has only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of considerations, in the same way as a man who goes into the City to buy Great Northern A Shares . . . It is only unconscious of these operations because it has done them a very large number of times already. A man may do a thing by a fluke once, but to say that a foetus can perform so difficult an operation as the growth of a pair of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how to do it, and without ever having done it before, is to contradict all human experience. Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before. Its unconsciousness (or speedy loss of memory) is simply the result of over-knowledge, not of under-knowledge. It knows so well and has done it so often that its power of self-a.n.a.lysis is gone. If it knew what it was doing, or was conscious of its own act in oxidising its blood after birth, I should suspect that it had not done it so often before; as it is I am confident that it must have done it more often- -much more often--than any act which we perform consciously during our whole lives.

4. When, then, did it do it? Clearly when last it was an impregnate ovum or some still lower form of life which resulted in that impregnate ovum.

5. How is it, then, that it has not gained perceptible experience?

Simply because a single repet.i.tion makes little or no difference; but go back 20,000 repet.i.tions and you will find that it has gained in experience and modified its performance very materially.

6. But how about the ident.i.ty? What is ident.i.ty? Ident.i.ty of matter? Surely no. There is no ident.i.ty of matter between me as I now am, and me as an impregnate ovum. Continuity of existence? Then there is ident.i.ty between me as an impregnate ovum and my father and mother as impregnate ova. Drop out my father's and mother's lives between the dates of their being impregnate ova and the moment when I became an impregnate ovum. See the ova only and consider the second ovum as the first two ova's means not of reproducing themselves but of continuing themselves--repeating themselves--the intermediate lives being nothing but, as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye to the place where it will grow its next tuber.

7. Given a single creature capable of reproducing itself and it must go on reproducing itself for ever, for it would not reproduce itself, unless it reproduced a creature that was going to reproduce itself, and so on ad infinitum.

Then comes Descent with Modification. Similarity tempered with dissimilarity, and dissimilarity tempered with similarity--a contradiction in terms, like almost everything else that is true or useful or indeed intelligible at all. In each case of what we call descent, it is still the first reproducing creature identically the same--doing what it has done before--only with such modifications as the struggle for existence and natural selection have induced. No matter how highly it has been developed, it can never be other than the primordial cell and must always begin as the primordial cell and repeat its last performance most nearly, but also, more or less, all its previous performances.

A begets A' which is A with the additional experience of a dash. A'

begets A'' which is A with the additional experiences of A' and A''; and so on to A(n) but you can never eliminate the A.

8. Let A(n) stand for a man. He begins as the primordial cell-- being verily nothing but the primordial cell which goes on splitting itself up for ever, but gaining continually in experience. Put him in the same position as he was in before and he will do as he did before. First he will do his tadpoles by rote, so to speak, on his head, from long practice; then he does his fish trick; then he grows arms and legs, all unconsciously from the inveteracy of the habit, till he comes to doing his man, and this lesson he has not yet learnt so thoroughly. Some part of it, as the breathing and oxidisation business, he is well up to, inasmuch as they form part of previous roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, the power of speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble--for he is very stupid--a regular dunce in fact. Then comes his newer and more complex environment, and this puzzles him--arrests his attention--whereon consciousness springs into existence, as a spark from a horse's hoof.

To be continued--I see it will have to be more than 30 pp. It is still foggy in parts, but I must clear it a little. It will go on to show that we are all one animal and that death (which was at first voluntary, and has only come to be disliked because those who did not dislike it committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only phases of the ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies daily.

Always very truly yours, S. BUTLER.

IV--MEMORY AND DESIGN

Clergymen and Chickens

[Extract from a lecture On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of Heredity delivered by Butler at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, on Sat.u.r.day, 2nd December, 1882.]

Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg which egg can become a chicken in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a twelvemonth, while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs but give birth to a baby which will take three-and-twenty years before it can become another clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient, it is not cheap, it is not free from danger, it is not only not perfect but is so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes, or as the cuckoo perhaps observes it.

The explanation usually given is that it is a law of nature that children should be born as they are, but this is like the parched pea which St. Anthony set before the devil when he came to supper with him and of which the devil said that it was good as far as it went.

We want more; we want to know with what familiar set of facts we are to connect the one in question which, though in our midst, at present dwells apart as a mysterious stranger of whose belongings, reason for coming amongst us, antecedents, and so forth, we believe ourselves to be ignorant, though we know him by sight and name and have a fair idea what sort of man he is to deal with.

We say it is a phenomenon of heredity that chickens should be laid as eggs in the first instance and clergymen born as babies, but, beyond the fact that we know heredity extremely well to look at and to do business with, we say that we know nothing about it. I have for some years maintained this to be a mistake and have urged, in company with Professor Hering, of Prague, and others, that the connection between memory and heredity is so close that there is no reason for regarding the two as generically different, though for convenience sake it may be well to specify them by different names. If I can persuade you that this is so, I believe I shall be able to make you understand why it is that chickens are hatched as eggs and clergymen born as babies.

When I say I can make you understand why this is so, I only mean that I can answer the first "why" that any one is likely to ask about it, and perhaps a "why" or two behind this. Then I must stop. This is all that is ever meant by those who say they can tell us why a thing is so and so. No one professes to be able to reach back to the last "why" that any one can ask, and to answer it. Fortunately for philosophers, people generally become fatigued after they have heard the answer to two or three "whys" and are glad enough to let the matter drop. If, however, any one will insist on pushing question behind question long enough, he will compel us to admit that we come to the end of our knowledge which is based ultimately upon ignorance.

To get knowledge out of ignorance seems almost as hopeless a task as to get something out of any number of nothings, but this in practice is what we have to do and the less fuss we make over it the better.

When, therefore, we say that we know "why" a thing is so and so, we mean that we know its immediate antecedents and connections, and find them familiar to us. I say that the immediate antecedent of, and the phenomenon most closely connected with, heredity is memory. I do not profess to show why anything can remember at all, I only maintain that whereas, to borrow an ill.u.s.tration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quant.i.ties, it is now one of only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.

Memory

i

Memory is a kind of way (or weight--whichever it should be) that the mind has got upon it, in virtue of which the sensation excited endures a little longer than the cause which excited it. There is thus induced a state of things in which mental images, and even physical sensations (if there can be such a thing as a physical sensation) exist by virtue of a.s.sociation, though the conditions which originally called them into existence no longer continue.

This is as the echo continuing to reverberate after the sound has ceased.

ii

To be is to think and to be thinkable. To live is to continue thinking and to remember having done so. Memory is to mind as viscosity is to protoplasm, it gives a tenacity to thought--a kind of pied a terre from which it can, and without which it could not, advance.

Thought, in fact, and memory seem inseparable; no thought, no memory; and no memory, no thought. And, as conscious thought and conscious memory are functions one of another, so also are unconscious thought and unconscious memory. Memory is, as it were, the body of thought, and it is through memory that body and mind are linked together in rhythm or vibration; for body is such as it is by reason of the characteristics of the vibrations that are going on in it, and memory is only due to the fact that the vibrations are of such characteristics as to catch on to and be caught on to by other vibrations that flow into them from without--no catch, no memory.

Ant.i.theses

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die. Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death. So with light and darkness, heat and cold, you never can get either all the light, or all the heat, out of anything. So with G.o.d and the devil; so with everything. Everything is like a door swinging backwards and forwards. Everything has a little of that from which it is most remote and to which it is most opposed and these ant.i.theses serve to explain one another.

Unconscious Memory

A man at the Century Club was falling foul of me the other night for my use of the word "memory." There was no such thing, he said, as "unconscious memory"--memory was always conscious, and so forth. My business is--and I think it can be easily done--to show that they cannot beat me off my unconscious memory without my being able to beat them off their conscious memory; that they cannot deny the legitimacy of my maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be phenomena of memory without my being able to deny the legitimacy of their maintaining the recollection of what they had for dinner yesterday to be a phenomenon of memory. My theory of the unconscious does not lead to universal unconsciousness, but only to pigeon-holing and putting by. We shall always get new things to worry about. If I thought that by learning more and more I should ever arrive at the knowledge of absolute truth, I would leave off studying. But I believe I am pretty safe.

Reproduction and Memory

There is the reproduction of an idea which has been produced once already, and there is the reproduction of a living form which has been produced once already. The first reproduction is certainly an effort of memory. It should not therefore surprise us if the second reproduction should turn out to be an effort of memory also. Indeed all forms of reproduction that we can follow are based directly or indirectly upon memory. It is only the one great act of reproduction that we cannot follow which we disconnect from memory.

Personal Ident.i.ty

We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers; they ate the sour grapes before they were born: true, they have forgotten the pleasure now, but so has a man with a sick headache forgotten the pleasure of getting drunk the night before.

Sensations

Our sensations are only distinguishable because we feel them in different places and at different times. If we feel them at very nearly the same time and place we cannot distinguish them.

Cobwebs in the Dark