Part 8 (2/2)
If the foregoing be granted, and it be admitted that the unconsciousness and seeming automatism with which any action may be performed is no bar to its having a foundation in memory, reason, and at one time consciously recognised effort--and this I believe to be the chief addition which I have ventured to make to the theory of Buffon and Dr. Erasmus Darwin--then the wideness of the difference between the Darwinism of eighty years ago and the Darwinism of to-day becomes immediately apparent, and it also becomes apparent, how important and interesting is the issue which is raised between them.
According to the older Darwinism the lungs are just as purposive as the corkscrew. They, no less than the corkscrew, are a piece of mechanism designed and gradually improved upon and perfected by an intelligent creature for the gratification of its own needs. True there are many important differences between mechanism which is part of the body, and mechanism which is no such part, but the differences are such as do not affect the fact that in each case the result, whether, for example, lungs or corkscrew, is due to desire, invention, and design.
And now I will ask one more question, which may seem, perhaps, to have but little importance, but which I find personally interesting. I have been told by a reviewer, of whom upon the whole I have little reason to complain, that the theory I put forward in ”Life and Habit,” and which I am now again insisting on, is pessimism--pure and simple. I have a very vague idea what pessimism means, but I should be sorry to believe that I am a pessimist. Which, I would ask, is the pessimist? He who sees love of beauty, design, steadfastness of purpose, intelligence, courage, and every quality to which success has a.s.signed the name of ”worth” as having drawn the pattern of every leaf and organ now and in all past time, or he who sees nothing in the world of nature but a chapter of accidents and of forces interacting blindly?
BUFFON--MEMOIR. (CHAPTER VIII. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)
Buffon, says M. Flourens, was born at Montbar, on the 7th of September 1707; he died in Paris, at the Jardin du Roi, on the 16th of April 1788, aged 81 years. More than fifty of these years, as he used himself to say, he had pa.s.sed at his writing-desk. His father was a councillor of the parliament of Burgundy. His mother was celebrated for her wit, and Buffon cherished her memory.
He studied at Dijon with much _eclat_, and shortly after leaving became accidentally acquainted with the Duke of Kingston, a young Englishman of his own age, who was travelling abroad with a tutor. The three travelled together in France and Italy, and Buffon then pa.s.sed some months in England.
Returning to France, he translated Hales's Vegetable Statics and Newton's Treatise on Fluxions. He refers to several English writers on natural history in the course of his work, but I see he repeated spells the English name Willoughby, ”Willulghby.” He was appointed superintendent of the Jardin du Roi in 1739, and from thenceforth devoted himself to science.
In 1752 Buffon married Mdlle de Saint Belin, whose beauty and charm of manner were extolled by all her contemporaries. One son was born to him, who entered the army, became a colonel, and I grieve to say, was guillotined at the age of twenty-nine, a few days only before the extinction of the Reign of Terror.
Of this youth, who inherited the personal comeliness and ability of his father, little is recorded except the following story. Having fallen into the water and been nearly drowned when he was about twelve years old, he was afterwards accused of having been afraid: ”I was so little afraid,” he answered, ”that though I had been offered the hundred years which my grandfather lived, I would have died then and there, if I could have added one year to the life of my father;” then thinking for a minute, a flush suffused his face and he added, ”but I should pet.i.tion for one quarter of an hour in which to exult over the thought of what I was about to do.”
On the scaffold he showed much composure, smiling half proudly, half reproachfully, yet wholly kindly upon the crowd in front of him.
”Citoyens,” he said, ”Je me nomine Buffon,” and laid his head upon the block.
The n.o.blest outcome of the old and decaying order, overwhelmed in the most hateful birth frenzy of the new. So in those cataclysms and revolutions which take place in our own bodies during their development, when we seem studying in order to become fishes and suddenly make, as it were, different arrangements and resolve on becoming men--so, doubtless, many good cells must go, and their united death cry comes up, it may be, in the pain which an infant feels on teething. But to return. The man who could be father of such a son, and who could retain that son's affection, as it is well known that Buffon retained it, may not perhaps always be strictly accurate, but it will be as well to pay attention to whatever he may think fit to tell us. These are the only people whom it is worth while to look to and study from.
”Glory,” said Buffon, after speaking of the hours during which he had laboured, ”glory comes always after labour if she can--_and she generally can_.” But in his case she could not well help herself. ”He was conspicuous,” says M. Flourens, ”for elevation and force of character, for a love of greatness and true magnificence in all he did. His great wealth, his handsome person, and graceful manners seemed in correspondence with the splendour of his genius, so that of all the gifts which Fortune has in it her power to bestow she had denied him nothing.”
Many of his epigrammatic sayings have pa.s.sed into proverbs: for example, that ”genius is but a supreme capacity for taking pains.” Another and still more celebrated pa.s.sage shall be given in its entirety and with its original setting.
”Style,” says Buffon, ”is the only pa.s.sport to posterity. It is not range of information, nor mastery of some little known branch of science, nor yet novelty of matter that will ensure immortality. Works that can claim all this will yet die if they are conversant about trivial objects only, or written without taste, genius, and true n.o.bility of mind; for range of information, knowledge of details, novelty of discovery are of a volatile essence and fly off readily into other hands that know better how to treat them. The matter is foreign to the man, and is not of him; the manner is the man himself.” {162}
”Le style, c'est l'homme memo.” Elsewhere he tells us what true style is, but I quote from memory and cannot be sure of the pa.s.sage. ”Le style,” he says ”est comme le bonheur; il vient de la douceur de l'ame.”
Is it possible not to think of the following?--
”But whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away . . . and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” {163}
BUFFON'S METHOD--THE IRONICAL CHARACTER OF HIS WORK. (CHAPTER IX. OF EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)
Buffon's idea of a method amounts almost to the denial of the possibility of method at all. ”The true method,” he writes, ”is the complete description and exact history of each particular object,” {164a} and later on he asks, ”is it not more simple, more natural and more true to call an a.s.s an a.s.s, and a cat a cat, than to say, without knowing why, that an a.s.s is a horse, and a cat a lynx?” {164b}
He admits such divisions as between animals and vegetables, or between vegetables and minerals, but that done, he rejects all others that can be founded on the nature of things themselves. He concludes that one who could see living forms as a whole and without preconceived opinions, would cla.s.sify animals according to the relations in which he found himself standing towards them:--
”Those which he finds most necessary and useful to him will occupy the first rank; thus he will give the precedence among the lower animals to the dog and the horse; he will next concern himself with those which without being domesticated, nevertheless occupy the same country and climate as himself, as for example stags, hares, and all wild animals; nor will it be till after he has familiarised himself with all these that curiosity will lead him to inquire what inhabitants there may be in foreign climates, such as elephants, dromedaries, &c.
The same will hold good for fishes, birds, insects, sh.e.l.ls, and for all nature's other productions; he will study them in proportion to the profit which he can draw from them; he will consider them in that order in which they enter into his daily life; he will arrange them in his head according to this order, which is in fact that in which he has become acquainted with them, and in which it concerns him to think about them, This order--the most natural of all--is the one which I have thought it well to follow in this volume. My cla.s.sification has no more mystery in it than the reader has just seen . . . it is preferable to the most profound and ingenious that can be conceived, for there is none of all the cla.s.sifications which ever have been made or ever can be, which has not more of an arbitrary character than this has. Take it for all in all,” he concludes, ”it is more easy, more agreeable, and more useful, to consider things in their relation to ourselves than from any other standpoint.” {165}
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