Part 5 (2/2)
The only remark which suggests itself upon this, is that we have no right to say that the part of the animal which moves does not also perceive its own act of motion, as much as it has perceived the impression which has caused it to move. It is plain ”the animal”
cannot do so, for the animal cannot be said to be any longer in existence. Half a frog is not a frog; nevertheless, if the hind legs are capable, as M. Ribot appears to admit, of ”perceiving the impression” which produces their action, and if in that action there is (and there would certainly appear to be so) ”all that const.i.tutes an intelligent act, . . . a determinate adaptation to a determinate end,” one fails to see on what ground they should be supposed to be incapable of perceiving their own action, in which case the action of the hind legs becomes distinctly psychological.
Secondly, M. Ribot appears to forget that it is the tendency of all psychological action to become unconscious on being frequently repeated, and that no line can be drawn between psychological acts and those reflex acts which he calls physiological. All we can say is, that there are acts which we do without knowing that we do them; but the a.n.a.logy of many habits which we have been able to watch in their pa.s.sage from laborious consciousness to perfect unconsciousness, would suggest that all action is really psychological, only that the soul's action becomes invisible to ourselves after it has been repeated sufficiently often--that there is, in fact, a law as simple as in the case of optics or gravitation, whereby conscious perception of any action shall vary inversely as the square, say, of its being repeated.
It is easy to understand the advantage to the individual of this power of doing things rightly without thinking about them; for were there no such power, the attention would be incapable of following the mult.i.tude of matters which would be continually arresting it; those animals which had developed a power of working automatically, and without a recurrence to first principles when they had once mastered any particular process, would, in the common course of events, stand a better chance of continuing their species, and thus of transmitting their new power to their descendants.
M. Ribot declines to pursue the subject further, and has only cursorily alluded to it. He writes, however, that, on the ”obscure problem” of the difference between reflex and psychological actions, some say, ”when there can be no consciousness, because the brain is wanting, there is, in spite of appearances, only mechanism,” whilst others maintain, that ”when there is selection, reflection, psychical action, there must also be consciousness in spite of appearances.” A little later (p. 223), he says, ”It is quite possible that if a headless animal could live a sufficient length of time” (that is to say, if THE HIND LEGS OF AN ANIMAL could live a sufficient length of time without the brain), ”there would be found in it” (THEM) ”a consciousness like that of the lower species, which would consist merely in the faculty of apprehending the external world.” (Why merely? It is more than apprehending the outside world to be able to try to do a thing with one's left foot, when one finds that one cannot do it with one's right.) ”It would not be correct to say that the amphioxus, the only one among fishes and vertebrata which has a spinal cord without a brain, has no consciousness because it has no brain; and if it be admitted that the little ganglia of the invertebrata can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for the spinal cord.”
We conclude, therefore, that it is within the common scope and meaning of the words ”personal ident.i.ty,” not only that one creature can become many as the moth becomes manifold in her eggs, but that each individual may be manifold in the sense of being compounded of a vast number of subordinate individualities which have their separate lives within him, with their hopes, and fears, and intrigues, being born and dying within us, many generations, of them during our single lifetime.
”An organic being,” writes Mr. Darwin, ”is a microcosm, a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute, and numerous as the stars in heaven.”
As these myriads of smaller organisms are parts and processes of us, so are we but parts and processes of life at large.
CHAPTER VIII--APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS--THE a.s.sIMILATION OF OUTSIDE MATTER
Let us now return to the position which we left at the end of the fourth chapter. We had then concluded that the self-development of each new life in succeeding generations--the various stages through which it pa.s.ses (as it would appear, at first sight, without rhyme or reason)--the manner in which it prepares structures of the most surpa.s.sing intricacy and delicacy, for which it has no use at the time when it prepares them--and the many elaborate instincts which it exhibits immediately on, and indeed before, birth--all point in the direction of habit and memory, as the only causes which could produce them.
Why should the embryo of any animal go through so many stages-- embryological allusions to forefathers of a widely different type?
And why, again, should the germs of the same kind of creature always go through the same stages? If the germ of any animal now living is, in its simplest state, but part of the personal ident.i.ty of one of the original germs of all life whatsoever, and hence, if any now living organism must be considered without quibble as being itself millions of years old, and as imbued with an intense though unconscious memory of all that it has done sufficiently often to have made a permanent impression; if this be so, we can answer the above questions perfectly well. The creature goes through so many intermediate stages between its earliest state as life at all, and its latest development, for the simplest of all reasons, namely, because this is the road by which it has always. .h.i.therto travelled to its present differentiation; this is the road it knows, and into every turn and up or down of which, it has been guided by the force of circ.u.mstances and the balance of considerations. These, acting in such a manner for such and such a time, caused it to travel in such and such fas.h.i.+on, which fas.h.i.+on having been once sufficiently established, becomes a matter of trick or routine to which the creature is still a slave, and in which it confirms itself by repet.i.tion in each succeeding generation.
Thus I suppose, as almost every one else, so far as I can gather, supposes, that we are descended from ancestors of widely different characters to our own. If we could see some of our forefathers a million years back, we should find them unlike anything we could call man; if we were to go back fifty million years, we should find them, it may be, fishes pure and simple, breathing through gills, and unable to exist for many minutes in air.
It is admitted on all hands that there is more or less a.n.a.logy between the embryological development of the individual, and the various phases or conditions of life through which his forefathers have pa.s.sed. I suppose, then, that the fish of fifty million years back and the man of to-day are one single living being, in the same sense, or very nearly so, as the octogenarian is one single living being with the infant from which he has grown; and that the fish has lived himself into manhood, not as we live out our little life, living, and living, and living till we die, but living by pulsations, so to speak; living so far, and after a certain time going into a new body, and throwing off the old; making his body much as we make anything that we want, and have often made already, that is to say, as nearly as may be in the same way as he made it last time; also that he is as unable as we ourselves are, to make what he wants without going through the usual processes with which he is familiar, even though there may be other better ways of doing the same thing, which might not be far to seek, if the creature thought them better, and had not got so accustomed to such and such a method, that he would only be baffled and put out by any attempt to teach him otherwise.
And this oneness of personality between ourselves and our supposed fishlike ancestors of many millions of years ago, must hold also between each individual one of us and the single pair of fishes from which we are each (on the present momentary hypothesis) descended; and it must also hold between such pair of fishes and all their descendants besides man, it may be some of them birds, and others fishes; all these descendants, whether human or otherwise, being but the way in which the creature (which was a pair of fishes when we first took it in hand though it was a hundred thousand other things as well, and had been all manner of other things before any part of it became fishlike) continues to exist--its manner, in fact, of growing. As the manner in which the human body grows is by the continued birth and death, in our single lifetime, of many generations of cells which we know nothing about, but say that we have had only one hand or foot all our lives, when we have really had many, one after another; so this huge compound creature, LIFE, probably thinks itself but one single animal whose component cells, as it may imagine, grow, and it may be waste and repair, but do not die.
It may be that the cells of which we are built up, and which we have already seen must be considered as separate persons, each one of them with a life and memory of its own--it may be that these cells reckon time in a manner inconceivable by us, so that no word can convey any idea of it whatever. What may to them appear a long and painful process may to us be so instantaneous as to escape us altogether, we wanting some microscope to show us the details of time. If, in like manner, we were to allow our imagination to conceive the existence of a being as much in need of a microscope for our time and affairs as we for those of our own component cells, the years would be to such a being but as the winkings or the twinklings of an eye. Would he think, then, that all the ants and flies of one wink were different from those of the next? or would he not rather believe that they were always the same flies, and, again, always the same men and women, if he could see them at all, and if the whole human race did not appear to him as a sort of spreading and lichen-like growth over the earth, not differentiated at all into individuals? With the help of a microscope and the intelligent exercise of his reason, he would in time conceive the truth. He would put Covent Garden Market on the field of his microscope, and would perhaps write a great deal of nonsense about the unerring ”instinct” which taught each costermonger to recognise his own basket or his own donkey-cart; and this, mutatis mutandis, is what we are getting to do as regards our own bodies.
What I wish is, to make the same sort of step in an upward direction which has already been taken in a downward one, and to show reason for thinking that we are only component atoms of a single compound creature, LIFE, which has probably a distinct conception of its own personality though none whatever of ours, more than we of our own units. I wish also to show reason for thinking that this creature, LIFE, has only come to be what it is, by the same sort of process as that by which any human art or manufacture is developed, i.e., through constantly doing the same thing over and over again, beginning from something which is barely recognisable as faith, or as the desire to know, or do, or live at all, and as to the origin of which we are in utter darkness,--and growing till it is first conscious of effort, then conscious of power, then powerful with but little consciousness, and finally, so powerful and so charged with memory as to be absolutely without all self-consciousness whatever, except as regards its latest phases in each of its many differentiations, or when placed in such new circ.u.mstances as compel it to choose between death and a reconsideration of its position.
No conjecture can be hazarded as to how the smallest particle of matter became so imbued with faith that it must be considered as the beginning of LIFE, or as to what such faith is, except that it is the very essence of all things, and that it has no foundation.
In this way, then, I conceive we can fairly transfer the experience of the race to the individual, without any other meaning to our words than what they would naturally suggest; that is to say, that there is in every impregnate ovum a bona fide memory, which carries it back not only to the time when it was last an impregnate ovum, but to that earlier date when it was the very beginning of life at all, which same creature it still is, whether as man or ovum, and hence imbued, so far as time and circ.u.mstance allow, with all its memories. Surely this is no strained hypothesis; for the mere fact that the germ, from the earliest moment that we are able to detect it, appears to be so perfectly familiar with its business, acts with so little hesitation and so little introspection or reference to principles, this alone should incline us to suspect that it must be armed with that which, so far as we observe in daily life, can alone ensure such a result-- to wit, long practice, and the memory of many similar performances.
The difficulty is, that we are conscious of no such memory in our own persons, and beyond the one great proof of memory given by the actual repet.i.tion of the performance--and of some of the latest deviations from the ordinary performance (and this proof ought in itself, one would have thought, to outweigh any save the directest evidence to the contrary) we can detect no symptom of any such mental operation as recollection on the part of the embryo. On the other hand, we have seen that we know most intensely those things that we are least conscious of knowing; we will most intensely what we are least conscious of willing; we feel continually without knowing that we feel, and our attention is hourly arrested without our attention being arrested by the arresting of our attention. Memory is no less capable of unconscious exercise, and on becoming intense through frequent repet.i.tion, vanishes no less completely as a conscious action of the mind than knowledge and volition. We must all be aware of instances in which it is plain we must have remembered, without being in the smallest degree conscious of remembering. Is it then absurd to suppose that our past existences have been repeated on such a vast number of occasions that the germ, linked on to all preceding germs, and, by once having become part of their ident.i.ty, imbued with all their memories, remembers too intensely to be conscious of remembering, and works on with the same kind of unconsciousness with which we play, or walk, or read, until something unfamiliar happens to us? and is it not singularly in accordance with this view that consciousness should begin with that part of the creature's performance with which it is least familiar, as having repeated it least often--that is to say, in our own case, with the commencement of our human life--at birth, or thereabouts?
It is certainly noteworthy that the embryo is never at a loss, unless something happens to it which has not usually happened to its forefathers, and which in the nature of things it cannot remember.
When events are happening to it which have ordinarily happened to its forefathers, and which it would therefore remember, if it was possessed of the kind of memory which we are here attributing to it, IT ACTS PRECISELY AS IT WOULD ACT IF IT WERE POSSESSED OF SUCH MEMORY.
When, on the other hand, events are happening to it which, if it has the kind of memory we are attributing to it, would baffle that memory, or which have rarely or never been included in the category of its recollections, IT ACTS PRECISELY AS A CREATURE ACTS WHEN ITS RECOLLECTION IS DISTURBED, OR WHEN IT IS REQUIRED TO DO SOMETHING WHICH IT HAS NEVER DONE BEFORE.
We cannot remember having been in the embryonic stage, but we do not on that account deny that we ever were in such a stage at all. On a little reflection it will appear no more reasonable to maintain that, when we were in the embryonic stage, we did not remember our past existences, than to say that we never were embryos at all. We cannot remember what we did or did not recollect in that state; we cannot now remember having grown the eyes which we undoubtedly did grow, much less can we remember whether or not we then remembered having grown them before; but it is probable that our memory was then, in respect of our previous existences as embryos, as much more intense than it is now in respect of our childhood, as our power of acquiring a new language was greater when we were one or two years old, than when we were twenty. And why should this power of acquiring languages be greater at two years than at twenty, but that for many generations we have learnt to speak at about this age, and hence look to learn to do so again on reaching it, just as we looked to making eyes, when the time came at which we were accustomed to make them.
If we once had the memory of having been infants (which we had from day to day during infancy), and have lost it, we may well have had other and more intense memories which we have lost no less completely. Indeed, there is nothing more extraordinary in the supposition that the impregnate ovum has an intense sense of its continuity with, and therefore of its ident.i.ty with, the two impregnate ova from which it has sprung, than in the fact that we have no sense of our continuity with ourselves as infants. If then, there is no a priori objection to this view, and if the impregnate ovum acts in such a manner as to carry the strongest conviction that it must have already on many occasions done what it is doing now, and that it has a vivid though unconscious recollection of what all, and more especially its nearer, ancestral ova did under similar circ.u.mstances, there would seem to be little doubt what conclusion we ought to come to.
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