Part 9 (2/2)
”But no! It is certain _from revelation_ that all animals have alike been favoured with the grace of an act of direct creation, and that the first pair of every species issued full formed from the hands of the Creator.” {176}
This might be taken as _bona fide_, if it had been written by Bonnet, but it is impossible to accept it from Buffon. It is only those who judge him at second hand, or by isolated pa.s.sages, who can hold that he failed to see the consequences of his own premises. No one could have seen more clearly, nor have said more lucidly, what should suffice to show a sympathetic reader the conclusion he ought to come to. Even when ironical, his irony is not the ill-natured irony of one who is merely amusing himself at other people's expense, but the serious and legitimate irony of one who must either limit the circle of those to whom he appeals, or must know how to make the same language appeal differently to the different capacities of his readers, and who trusts to the good sense of the discerning to understand the difficulty of his position and make due allowance for it.
The compromise which he thought fit to put before the public was that ”Each species has a type of which the princ.i.p.al features are engraved in indelible and eternally permanent characters, while all accessory touches vary.” {177a} It would be satisfactory to know where an accessory touch is supposed to begin and end.
And again:--
”The essential characteristics of every animal have been conserved without alteration in their most important parts. . . . The individuals of each genus still represent the same forms as they did in the earliest ages, especially in the case of the larger animals”
(so that the generic forms even of the larger animals prove not to be the same, but only ”especially” the same as in the earliest ages).
{177b}
This transparently illogical position is maintained ostensibly from first to last, much in the same spirit as in the two foregoing pa.s.sages, written at intervals of thirteen years. But they are to be read by the light of the earlier one--placed as a lantern to the wary upon the threshold of his work in 1753--to the effect that a single, well-substantiated case of degeneration would make it conceivable that all living beings were descended from but one common ancestor. If after having led up to this by a remorseless logic, a man is found five-and- twenty years later still substantiating cases of degeneration, as he has been substantiating them unceasingly in thirty quartos during the whole interval, there should be little question how seriously we are to take him when he wishes us to stop short of the conclusions he has told us we ought to draw from the premises that he has made it the business of his life to establish--especially when we know that he has a Sorbonne to keep a sharp eye upon him.
I believe that if the reader will bear in mind the twofold, serious and ironical, character of Buffon's work he will understand it, and feel an admiration for it which will grow continually greater and greater the more he studies it, otherwise he will miss the whole point.
Buffon on one of the early pages of his first volume protested against the introduction of either ”_plaisanterie_” or ”_equivoque_” (p. 25) into a serious work. But I have observed that there is an unconscious irony in most disclaimers of this nature. When a writer begins by saying that he has ”an ineradicable tendency to make things clear,” we may infer that we are going to be puzzled; so when he shows that he is haunted by a sense of the impropriety of allowing humour to intrude into his work, we may hope to be amused as well as interested. As showing how far the objection to humour which he expressed upon his twenty-fifth page succeeded in carrying him safely over his twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, I will quote the following, which begins on page twenty- six:--
”Aldrovandus is the most learned and laborious of all naturalists; after sixty years of work he has left an immense number of volumes behind him, which have been printed at various times, the greater number of them after his death. It would be possible to reduce them to a tenth part if we could rid them of all useless and foreign matter, and of a prolixity which I find almost overwhelming; were this only done, his books should be regarded as among the best we have on the subject of natural history in its entirety. The plan of his work is good, his cla.s.sification distinguished for its good sense, his dividing lines well marked, his descriptions sufficiently accurate--monotonous it is true, but painstaking; the historical part of his work is less good; it is often confused and fabulous, and the author shows too manifestly the credulous tendencies of his mind.
”While going over his work, I have been struck with that defect, or rather excess, which we find in almost all the books of a hundred or a couple of hundred years ago, and which prevails still among the Germans--I mean with that quant.i.ty of useless erudition with which they intentionally swell out their works, and the result of which is that their subject is overlaid with a ma.s.s of extraneous matter on which they enlarge with great complacency, but with no consideration whatever for their readers. They seem, in fact, to have forgotten what they have to say in their endeavour to tell us what has been said by other people.
”I picture to myself a man like Aldrovandus, after he has once conceived the design of writing a complete natural history. I see him in his library reading, one after the other, ancients, moderns, philosophers, theologians, jurisconsults, historians, travellers, poets, and reading with no other end than with that of catching at all words and phrases which can be forced from far or near into some kind of relation with his subject. I see him copying all these pa.s.sages, or getting them copied for him, and arranging them in alphabetical order. He fills many portfolios with all manner of notes, often taken without either discrimination or research, and at last sets himself to write with a resolve that not one of all these notes shall remain unused. The result is that when he comes to his account of the cow or of the hen, he will tell us all that has ever yet been said about cows or hens; all that the ancients ever thought about them; all that has ever been imagined concerning their virtues, characters, and courage; every purpose to which they have ever yet been put; every story of every old woman that he can lay hold of; all the miracles which certain religions have ascribed to them; all the superst.i.tions they have given rise to; all the metaphors and allegories which poets have drawn from them; the attributes that have been a.s.signed to them; the representations that have been made of them in hieroglyphics and armorial bearings, in a word all the histories and all fables in which there was ever yet any mention either of a cow or hen. How much natural history is likely to be found in such a lumber-room? and how is one to lay one's hand upon the little that there may actually be?”
{180}
It is hoped that the reader will see Buffon, much as Buffon saw the learned Aldrovandus. He should see him going into his library, &c., and quietly chuckling to himself as he wrote such a pa.s.sage as the one in which we lately found him saying that the larger animals had ”especially”
the same generic forms as they had always had. And the reader should probably see Daubenton chuckling also.
EXTRACTS FROM UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY.
RECAPITULATION AND STATEMENT OF AN OBJECTION. (CHAPTER X. OF UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY.) {181a}
The true theory of unconscious action is that of Professor Hering, from whose lecture {181b} it is no strained conclusion to gather that he holds the action of all living beings, from the moment of conception to that of fullest development, to be founded in volition and design, though these have been so long lost sight of that the work is now carried on, as it were, departmentally and in due course according to an official routine which can hardly be departed from.
This involves the older ”Darwinism” and the theory of Lamarck, according to which the modification of living forms has been effected mainly through the needs of the living forms themselves, which vary with varying conditions--the survival of the fittest (which, as I see Mr. H. B.
Baildon has just said, ”sometimes comes to mean merely the survival of the survivors” {181c}) being taken as a matter of course. According to this view of evolution, there is a remarkable a.n.a.logy between the development of living organs, or tools, and that of those organs or tools external to the body which has been so rapid during the last few thousand years.
Animals and plants, according to Professor Hering, are guided throughout their development, and preserve the due order in each step they take, through memory of the course they took on past occasions when in the persons of their ancestors. I am afraid I have already too often said that if this memory remains for long periods together latent and without effect, it is because the vibrations of the molecular substance of the body which are its supposed explanation are during these periods too feeble to generate action, until they are augmented in force through an accession of similar vibrations issuing from exterior objects; or, in other words, until recollection is stimulated by a return of the a.s.sociated ideas. On this the internal agitation becomes so much enhanced, that equilibrium is visibly disturbed, and the action ensues which is proper to the vibrations of the particular substance under the particular conditions. This, at least, is what I suppose Professor Hering to intend.
Leaving the explanation of memory on one side, and confining ourselves to the fact of memory only, a caterpillar on being just hatched is supposed, according to this theory, to lose its memory of the time it was in the egg, and to be stimulated by an intense but unconscious recollection of the action taken by its ancestors when they were first hatched. It is guided in the course it takes by the experience it can thus command. Each step it takes recalls a new recollection, and thus it goes through a development as a performer performs a piece of music, each bar leading his recollection to the bar that should next follow.
In Life and Habit will be found examples of the manner in which this view solves a number of difficulties for the explanation of which the leading men of science express themselves at a loss. The following from Professor Huxley's recent work upon the crayfish may serve for an example. Professor Huxley writes:--
”It is a widely received notion that the energies of living matter have a tendency to decline and finally disappear, and that the death of the body as a whole is a necessary correlate of its life. That all living beings sooner or later perish needs no demonstration, but it would be difficult to find satisfactory grounds for the belief that they needs must do so. The a.n.a.logy of a machine, that sooner or later must be brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its parts, does not hold, inasmuch as the animal mechanism is continually renewed and repaired; and though it is true that individual components of the body are constantly dying, yet their places are taken by vigorous successors. A city remains notwithstanding the constant death-rate of its inhabitants; and such an organism as a crayfish is only a corporate unity, made up of innumerable partially independent individualities.”--_The Crayfish_, p. 127.
Surely the theory which I have indicated above makes the reason plain why no organism can permanently outlive its experience of past lives. The death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is the necessary end of all living beings, and who consider even the gentlest death from old age as violent and abnormal; so Professor Huxley seems to find a difficulty in seeing that though a city commonly outlives many generations of its citizens, yet cities and states are in the end no less mortal than individuals. ”The _city_,” he says, ”remains.” Yes, but not for ever. When Professor Huxley can find a city that will last for ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does not last for ever.
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