Part 9 (2/2)
”Whereas intelligence is developed slowly by acc.u.mulated experience, instinct is perfect from the first” (”Heredity,” p. 14).
Obviously the memory of a habit or experience will not commonly be transmitted to offspring in that perfection which is called ”instinct,” till the habit or experience has been repeated in several generations with more or less uniformity; for otherwise the impression made will not be strong enough to endure through the busy and difficult task of reproduction. This of course involves that the habit shall have attained, as it were equilibrium with the creature's sense of its own needs, so that it shall have long seemed the best course possible, leaving upon the whole and under ordinary circ.u.mstances little further to be desired, and hence that it should have been little varied during many generations. We should expect that it would be transmitted in a more or less partial, varying, imperfect, and intelligent condition before equilibrium had been attained; it would, however, continually tend towards equilibrium, for reasons which will appear more fully later on.
When this stage has been reached, as regards any habit, the creature will cease trying to improve; on which the repet.i.tion of the habit will become stable, and hence become capable of more unerring transmission--but at the same time improvement will cease; the habit will become fixed, and be perhaps transmitted at an earlier and earlier age, till it has reached that date of manifestation which shall be found most agreeable to the other habits of the creature.
It will also be manifested, as a matter of course, without further consciousness or reflection, for people cannot be always opening up settled questions; if they thought a matter over yesterday they cannot think it all over again to-day, but will adopt for better or worse the conclusion then reached; and this, too, even in spite sometimes of considerable misgiving, that if they were to think still further they could find a still better course. It is not, therefore, to be expected that ”instinct” should show signs of that hesitating and tentative action which results from knowledge that is still so imperfect as to be actively self-conscious; nor yet that it should grow or vary, unless under such changed conditions as shall baffle memory, and present the alternative of either invention--that is to say, variation--or death. But every instinct must have poised through the laboriously intelligent stages through which human civilisations AND MECHANICAL INVENTIONS are now pa.s.sing; and he who would study the origin of an instinct with its development, partial transmission, further growth, further transmission, approach to more unreflecting stability, and finally, its perfection as an unerring and unerringly transmitted instinct, must look to laws, customs, AND MACHINERY as his best instructors. Customs and machines are instincts AND ORGANS now in process of development; they will a.s.suredly one day reach the unconscious state of equilibrium which we observe in the structures and instincts of bees and ants, and an approach to which may be found among some savage nations. We may reflect, however, not without pleasure, that this condition--the true millennium--is still distant. Nevertheless the ants and bees seem happy; perhaps more happy than when so many social questions were in as hot discussion among them, as other, and not dissimilar ones, will one day be amongst ourselves.
And this, as will be apparent, opens up the whole question of the stability of species, which we cannot follow further here, than to say, that according to the balance of testimony, many plants and animals do appear to have reached a phase of being from which they are hard to move--that is to say, they will die sooner than be at the pains of altering their habits--true martyrs to their convictions.
Such races refuse to see changes in their surroundings as long as they can, but when compelled to recognise them, they throw up the game because they cannot and will not, or will not and cannot, invent. And this is perfectly intelligible, for a race is nothing but a long-lived individual, and like any individual, or tribe of men whom we have yet observed, will have its special capacities and its special limitations, though, as in the case of the individual, so also with the race, it is exceedingly hard to say what those limitations are, and why, having been able to go so far, it should go no further. Every man and every race is capable of education up to a certain point, but not to the extent of being made from a sow's ear into a silk purse. The proximate cause of the limitation seems to lie in the absence of the wish to go further; the presence or absence of the wish will depend upon the nature and surroundings of the individual, which is simply a way of saying that one can get no further, but that as the song (with a slight alteration) says:-
”Some breeds do, and some breeds don't, Some breeds will, but this breed won't, I tried very often to see if it would, But it said it really couldn't, and I don't think it could.”
It may perhaps be maintained, that with time and patience, one might train a rather stupid plough-boy to understand the differential calculus. This might be done with the help of an inward desire on the part of the boy to learn, but never otherwise. If the boy wants to learn or to improve generally, he will do so in spite of every hindrance, till in time he becomes a very different being from what he was originally. If he does not want to learn, he will not do so for any wish of another person. If he feels that he has the power he will wish; or if he wishes, he will begin to think he has the power, and try to fulfil his wishes; one cannot say which comes first, for the power and the desire go always hand in hand, or nearly so, and the whole business is nothing but a most vicious circle from first to last. But it is plain that there is more to be said on behalf of such circles than we have been in the habit of thinking. Do what we will, we must each one of us argue in a circle of our own, from which, so long as we live at all, we can by no possibility escape. I am not sure whether the frank acceptation and recognition of this fact is not the best corrective for dogmatism that we are likely to find.
We can understand that a pigeon might in the course of ages grow to be a peac.o.c.k if there was a persistent desire on the part of the pigeon through all these ages to do so. We know very well that this has not probably occurred in nature, inasmuch as no pigeon is at all likely to wish to be very different from what it is now. The idea of being anything very different from what it now is, would be too wide a cross with the pigeon's other ideas for it to entertain it seriously. If the pigeon had never seen a peac.o.c.k, it would not be able to conceive the idea, so as to be able to make towards it; if, on the other hand, it had seen one, it would not probably either want to become one, or think that it would be any use wanting seriously, even though it were to feel a pa.s.sing fancy to be so gorgeously arrayed; it would therefore lack that faith without which no action, and with which, every action, is possible.
That creatures have conceived the idea of making themselves like other creatures or objects which it was to their advantage or pleasure to resemble, will be believed by any one who turns to Mr.
Mivart's ”Genesis of Species,” where he will find (chapter ii.) an account of some very showy South American b.u.t.terflies, which give out such a strong odour that nothing will eat them, and which are hence mimicked both in appearance and flight by a very different kind of b.u.t.terfly; and, again, we see that certain birds, without any particular desire of gain, no sooner hear any sound than they begin to mimick it, merely for the pleasure of mimicking; so we all enjoy to mimick, or to hear good mimicry, so also monkeys imitate the actions which they observe, from pure force of sympathy. To mimick, or to wish to mimick, is doubtless often one of the first steps towards varying in any given direction. Not less, in all probability, than a full twenty per cent. of all the courage and good nature now existing in the world, derives its origin, at no very distant date, from a desire to appear courageous and good-natured.
And this suggests a work whose t.i.tle should be ”On the Fine Arts as bearing on the Reproductive System,” of which the t.i.tle must suffice here.
Against faith, then, and desire, all the ”natural selection” in the world will not stop an amoeba from becoming an elephant, if a reasonable time be granted; without the faith and the desire, neither ”natural selection” nor artificial breeding will be able to do much in the way of modifying any structure. When we have once thoroughly grasped the conception that we are all one creature, and that each one of us is many millions of years old, so that all the pigeons in the one line of an infinite number of generations are still one pigeon only--then we can understand that a bird, as different from a peac.o.c.k as a pigeon is now, could yet have wandered on and on, first this way and then that, doing what it liked, and thought that it could do, till it found itself at length a peac.o.c.k; but we cannot believe either that a bird like a pigeon should be able to apprehend any ideal so different from itself as a peac.o.c.k, and make towards it, or that man, having wished to breed a bird anything like a peac.o.c.k from a bird anything like a pigeon, would be able to succeed in acc.u.mulating accidental peac.o.c.k-like variations till he had made the bird he was in search of, no matter in what number of generations; much less can we believe that the acc.u.mulation of small fortuitous variations by ”natural selection” could succeed better. We can no more believe the above, than we can believe that a wish outside a plough-boy could turn him into a senior wrangler. The boy would prove to be too many for his teacher, and so would the pigeon for its breeder.
I do not forget that artificial breeding has modified the original type of the horse and the dog, till it has at length produced the dray-horse and the greyhound; but in each case man has had to get use and disuse--that is to say, the desires of the animal itself--to help him.
We are led, then, to the conclusion that all races have what for practical purposes may be considered as their limits, though there is no saying what those limits are, nor indeed why, in theory, there should be any limits at all, but only that there are limits in practice. Races which vary considerably must be considered as clever, but it may be speculative, people who commonly have a genius in some special direction, as perhaps for mimicry, perhaps for beauty, perhaps for music, perhaps for the higher mathematics, but seldom in more than one or two directions; while ”inflexible organisations,” like that of the goose, may be considered as belonging to people with one idea, and the greater tendency of plants and animals to vary under domestication may be reasonably compared with the effects of culture and education: that is to say, may be referred to increased range and variety of experience or perceptions, which will either cause sterility, if they be too unfamiliar, so as to be incapable of fusion with preceding ideas, and hence to bring memory to a sudden fault, or will open the door for all manner of further variation--the new ideas having suggested new trains of thought, which a clever example of a clever race will be only too eager to pursue.
Let us now return to M. Ribot. He writes (p. 14):- ”The duckling hatched by the hen makes straight for water.” In what conceivable way can we account for this, except on the supposition that the duckling knows perfectly well what it can, and what it cannot do with water, owing to its recollection of what it did when it was still one individuality with its parents, and hence, when it was a duckling before?
”The squirrel, before it knows anything of winter, lays up a store of nuts. A bird when hatched in a cage will, when given its freedom, build for itself a nest like that of its parents, out of the same materials, and of the same shape.”
If this is not due to memory, even an imperfect explanation of what else it can be due to, ”would be satisfactory.”
”Intelligence gropes about, tries this way and that, misses its object, commits mistakes, and corrects them.”
Yes. Because intelligence is of consciousness, and consciousness is of attention, and attention is of uncertainty, and uncertainty is of ignorance or want of consciousness. Intelligence is not yet thoroughly up to its business.
”Instinct advances with a mechanical certainty.”
Why mechanical? Should not ”with apparent certainty” suffice?
”Hence comes its unconscious character.”
But for the word ”mechanical” this is true, and is what we have been all along insisting on.
”It knows nothing either of ends, or of the means of attaining them; it implies no comparison, judgment, or choice.”
This is a.s.sumption. What is certain is that instinct does not betray signs of self-consciousness as to its own knowledge. It has dismissed reference to first principles, and is no longer under the law, but under the grace of a settled conviction.
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