Part 5 (1/2)
What is this talk that is made about the experience _of the race_, as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner, it nourishes _him_ and not his neighbour; if he learns a difficult art, it is _he_ that can do it and not his neighbour. Yet, practically, we see that the vicarious experience, which seems so contrary to our common observation, does nevertheless appear to hold good in the case of creatures and their descendants. Is there, then, any way of bringing these apparently conflicting phenomena under the operation of one law? Is there any way of showing that this experience of the race, of 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, repeating in a great many different ways certain performances with which it has become exceedingly familiar?
It comes to this--that we must either suppose the conditions of experience to differ during the earlier stages of life from those which we observe them to become during the heyday of any existence--and this would appear very gratuitous, tolerable only as a suggestion because the beginnings of life are so obscure, that in such twilight we may do pretty much whatever we please without fear of being found out--or that we must suppose continuity of life and sameness between living beings, whether plants or animals, and their descendants, to be far closer than we have hitherto believed; so that the experience of one person is not enjoyed by his successor, so much as that the successor is _bona fide_ an elongation of the life of his progenitors, imbued with their memories, profiting by their experiences--which are, in fact, his own until he leaves their bodies--and only unconscious of the extent of these memories and experiences owing to their vastness and already infinite repet.i.tion.
Certainly it presents itself to us as a singular coincidence--
I. That we are _most conscious of_, _and have most control over_, such habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences--which are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely human.
II. That we are _less conscious of_, _and have less control over_, the use of teeth, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing--which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which are still, geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent.
ill. That we are _most unconscious of_, _and have least control over_, our digestion, which we have in common even with our invertebrate ancestry, and which is a habit of extreme antiquity.
There is something too like method in this for it to be taken as the result of mere chance--chance again being but another ill.u.s.tration of Nature's love of a contradiction in terms; for everything is chance, and nothing is chance. And you may take it that all is chance or nothing chance, according as you please, but you must not have half chance and half not chance--which, however, in practice is just what you _must_ have.
Does it not seem as though the older and more confirmed the habit, the more unquestioning the act of volition, till, in the case of the oldest habits, the practice of succeeding existences has so formulated the procedure, that, on being once committed to such and such a line beyond a certain point, the subsequent course is so clear as to be open to no further doubt, and admit of no alternative, till the very power of questioning is gone, and even the consciousness of volition? And this too upon matters which, in earlier stages of a man's existence, admitted of pa.s.sionate argument and anxious deliberation whether to resolve them thus or thus, with heroic hazard and experiment, which on the losing side proved to be vice, and on the winning virtue. For there was pa.s.sionate argument once what shape a man's teeth should be, nor can the colour of his hair be considered as even yet settled, or likely to be settled for a very long time.
It is one against legion when a creature tries to differ from his own past selves. He must yield or die if he wants to differ widely, so as to lack natural instincts, such as hunger or thirst, or not to gratify them.
It is more righteous in a man that he should ”eat strange food,” and that his cheek should ”so much as lank not,” than that he should starve if the strange food be at his command. His past selves are living in unruly hordes within him at this moment and overmastering him. ”Do this, this, this, which we too have done, and found our profit in it,” cry the souls of his forefathers within him. Faint are the far ones, coming and going as the sound of bells wafted on to a high mountain; loud and clear are the near ones, urgent as an alarm of fire. ”Withhold,” cry some. ”Go on boldly,” cry others. ”Me, me, me, revert hitherward, my descendant,”
shouts one as it were from some high vantage-ground over the heads of the clamorous mult.i.tude. ”Nay, but me, me, me,” echoes another; and our former selves fight within us and wrangle for our possession. Have we not here what is commonly called an _internal tumult_, when dead pleasures and pains tug within us. .h.i.ther and thither? Then may the battle be decided by what people are pleased to call our own experience.
Our own indeed! What is our own save by mere courtesy of speech? A matter of fas.h.i.+on. Sanction sanctifieth and fas.h.i.+on fas.h.i.+oneth. And so with death--the most inexorable of all conventions.
However this may be, we may a.s.sume it as an axiom with regard to actions acquired after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the result of long practice, and after having thus acquired perfect mastery over the action in question.
But given the practice or experience, and the intricacy of the process to be performed appears to matter very little. There is hardly anything conceivable as being done by man, which a certain amount of familiarity will not enable him to do, unintrospectively, and without conscious effort. ”The most complex and difficult movements,” writes Mr. Darwin, ”can in time be performed without the least effort or consciousness.” All the main business of life is done thus unconsciously or semi-unconsciously. For what is the main business of life? We work that we may eat and digest, rather than eat and digest that we may work; this, at any rate, is the normal state of things; the more important business then is that which is carried on unconsciously. So again, the action of the brain, which goes on prior to our realising the idea in which it results, is not perceived by the individual. So also all the deeper springs of action and conviction. The residuum with which we fret and worry ourselves is a mere matter of detail, as the higgling and haggling of the market, which is not over the bulk of the price, but over the last halfpenny.
Shall we say, then, that a baby of a day old sucks (which involves the whole principle of the pump, and hence a profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood (millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy discovered oxygen), sees and hears--all most difficult and complicated operations, involving an unconscious knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics, compared with which the conscious discoveries of Newton sink into utter insignificance? Shall we say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly, without being even able to direct its attention to them, and without mistake, and at the same time not know how to do them, and never have done them before?
Such an a.s.sertion would be a contradiction to the whole experience of mankind. Surely the _onus probandi_ must rest with him who makes it.
A man may make a lucky hit now and again by what is called a fluke, but even this must be only a little in advance of his other performances of the same kind. He may multiply seven by eight by a fluke after a little study of the multiplication table, but he will not be able to extract the cube root of 4913 by a fluke, without long training in arithmetic, any more than an agricultural labourer would be able to operate successfully for cataract. If, then, a grown man cannot perform so simple an operation as that, we will say, for cataract, unless he have been long trained in other similar operations, and until he has done what comes to the same thing many times over, with what show of reason can we maintain that one who is so far less capable than a grown man, can perform such vastly more difficult operations, without knowing how to do them, and without ever having done them before? There is no sign of ”fluke” about the circulation of a baby's blood. There may perhaps be some little hesitation about its earliest breathing, but this, as a general rule, soon pa.s.ses over, both breathing and circulation, within an hour after birth, being as regular and easy as at any time during life. Is it reasonable, then, to say that the baby does these things without knowing how to do them, and without ever having done them before, and continues to do them by a series of lifelong flukes?
It would be well if those who feel inclined to hazard such an a.s.sertion would find some other instances of intricate processes gone through by people who know nothing about them, and who never had any practice therein. What _is_ to know how to do a thing? Surely to do it. What is proof that we know how to do a thing? Surely the fact that we can do it.
A man shows that he knows how to throw the boomerang by throwing the boomerang. No amount of talking or writing can get over this; _ipso facto_, that a baby breathes and makes its blood circulate, it knows how to do so; and the fact that it does not know its own knowledge is only proof of the perfection of that knowledge, and of the vast number of past occasions on which it must have been exercised already. As has been said already, it is less obvious when the baby could have gained its experience, so as to be able so readily to remember exactly what to do; _but it is more easy to suppose that the necessary occasions cannot have been wanting_, _than that the power which we observe_, _should have been obtained without practice and memory_.
If we saw any self-consciousness on the baby's part about its breathing or circulation, we might suspect that it had had less experience, or had profited less by its experience, than its neighbours--exactly in the same manner as we suspect a deficiency of any quality which we see a man inclined to parade. We all become introspective when we find that we do not know our business, and whenever we are introspective we may generally suspect that we are on the verge of unproficiency. Unfortunately, in the case of sickly children we observe that they sometimes do become conscious of their breathing and circulation, just as in later life we become conscious that we have a liver or a digestion. In that case there is always something wrong. The baby that becomes aware of its breathing does not know how to breathe and will suffer for his ignorance and incapacity, exactly in the same way as he will suffer in later life for ignorance and incapacity in any other respect in which his peers are commonly knowing and capable. In the case of inability to breathe, the punishment is corporal, breathing being a matter of fas.h.i.+on, so old and long settled that nature can admit of no departure from the established custom, and the procedure in case of failure is as much formulated as the fas.h.i.+on itself. In the case of the circulation, the whole performance has become one so utterly of rote, that the mere discovery that we could do it at all was considered one of the highest flights of human genius.
It has been said a day will come when the Polar ice shall have acc.u.mulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet above the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this ma.s.s will, it is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a ploughshare. In that day the icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten blotting-paper. There is no respect now of Handel nor of Shakespeare; the works of Rembrandt and Bellini fossilise at the bottom of the sea.
Grace, beauty, and wit, all that is precious in music, literature, and art--all gone. In the morning there was Europe. In the evening there are no more populous cities nor busy hum of men, but a sea of jagged ice, a lurid sunset, and the doom of many ages. Then shall a scared remnant escape in places, and settle upon the changed continent when the waters have subsided--a simple people, busy hunting sh.e.l.lfish on the drying ocean beds, and with little time for introspection; yet they can read and write and sum, for by that time these accomplishments will have become universal, and will be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk; but they do so as a matter of course, and without self-consciousness. Also they make the simpler kinds of machinery too easily to be able to follow their own operations--the manner of their own apprentices.h.i.+p being to them as a buried city. May we not imagine that, after the lapse of another ten thousand years or so, some one of them may again become cursed with l.u.s.t of introspection, and a second Harvey may astonish the world by discovering that it can read and write, and that steam-engines do not grow, but are made? It may be safely prophesied that he will die a martyr, and be honoured in the fourth generation.
PERSONAL IDENt.i.tY. (CHAPTER V. OF LIFE AND HABIT.)
”Strange difficulties have been raised by some,” says Bishop Butler, ”concerning personal ident.i.ty, or the sameness of living agents as implied in the notion of our existing now and hereafter, or indeed in any two consecutive moments.” But in truth it is not easy to see the strangeness of the difficulty, if the words either ”personal” or ”ident.i.ty” are used in any strictness.
Personality is one of those ideas with which we are so familiar that we have lost sight of the foundations upon which it rests. We regard our personality as a simple definite whole; as a plain, palpable, individual thing, which can be seen going about the streets or sitting indoors at home; as something which lasts us our lifetime, and about the confines of which no doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable people. But in truth this ”we,” which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and indefinable aggregation of many component parts which war not a little among themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps due to this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound and light is due to the jarring of vibrations. Moreover, as the component parts of our ident.i.ty change from moment to moment, our personality becomes a thing dependent upon time present, which has no logical existence, but lives only upon the sufferance of times past and future, slipping out of our hands into the domain of one or other of these two claimants the moment we try to apprehend it. And not only is our personality as fleeting as the present moment, but the parts which compose it blend some of them so imperceptibly into, and are so inextricably linked on to, outside things which clearly form no part of our personality, that when we try to bring ourselves to book and determine wherein we consist, or to draw a line as to where we begin or end, we find ourselves baffled. There is nothing but fusion and confusion.
Putting theology on one side, and dealing only with the common sense of mankind, our body is certainly part of our personality. With the destruction of our bodies, our personality, as far as we can follow it, comes to a full stop; and with every modification of them it is correspondingly modified. But what are the limits of our bodies? They are composed of parts, some of them so unessential as to be hardly included in personality at all, and to be separable from ourselves without perceptible effect, as hair, nails, and daily waste of tissue.