Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Butler, page 259
Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned method of procedure was not good enough for him. One-half the obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin’s work — I mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement. He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.
Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes’ definition of instinct: —
“Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of consciousness. The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained, but similarly performed under similar and frequently recurring circumstances by all the individuals of the same species.”
If Mr. Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor Hering’s foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly admitted, he might have said —
“Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations — the new generation remembering what happened to it before it parted company with the old.” Then he might have added as a rider —
“If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime, it is not an instinct. If having been acquired in one lifetime it is transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring though it was not an instinct in the parent. If the habit is transmitted partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly acquired.”
This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose, knowledge of purpose, &c.; it both introduces the feature of inheritance which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from so-called intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pass into the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition; finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said ) as “a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.
But then to have said this would have made it too plain that Mr. Romanes was following some one else. Mr. Romanes should remember that no one would mind how much he took if he would only take it well. But this is what those who take without due acknowledgment never do.
In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of time, money, and trouble that has been caused by his not having been content to appear as descending with modification like other people from those who went before him. It will take years to get the evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got Evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about “heredity being able to work up the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration,” or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” is little likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with advantage either to himself or any one else. Fortunately Mr. Romanes is not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s mantle, and got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’ shoulders hide a good deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin wore it.
REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES’ MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS — (concluded).
I gather that in the end the late Mr. Darwin himself admitted the soundness of the view which the reader will have found insisted upon in the extracts from my earlier books given in this volume. Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming “instinctive, i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another.”
Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of hereditary memory are as follows: —
1859. “It would be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.
1876. “It would be a serious error to suppose” &c., as before.
1881. “We should remember what a mass of inherited knowledge is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.”
1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes:— “It does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:” i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another.
And yet in 1839 or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped the conception from which until the last year or two of his life he so fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account of the voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, he wrote: “Nature by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country” ().
What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common-sense view of the matter which he took when he was a young man? I imagine simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter, — over-anxiety to appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck.
I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed. For in the preface to Hermann Müller’s Fertilisation of Flowers, which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin’s death, I find him saying:— “Design in nature has for a long time deeply interested many men, and though the subject must now be looked at from a somewhat different point of view from what was formerly the case, it is not on that account rendered less interesting.” This is mused forth as a general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing: the writer of the letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore’s Almanac could not be more guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.
I cannot of course be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design in organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr. Darwin’s. This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and moreover it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin think it worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It has no fitness in its connection with Hermann Müller’s book, for what little Hermann Müller says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why then should Mr. Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest attaching to design in organism? Neither has the passage any connection with the rest of the preface. There is not another word about design, and even here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which could be disputed.
The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr. Darwin wanted to hedge. He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a burglar’s jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again, and that though, as I insisted in Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory, it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it, as “was formerly the case,” it was not on that account any the less — design, as well as interesting.
I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly. Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner.
In passing I will give another example of Mr. Darwin’s manner when he did not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann’s Studies in the Theory of Descent, published in 1882.
“Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, “maintain with much confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability, and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility” — or towards, being able to be perfected.
I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor Weismann’s book. There was a little something here and there, but not much.
Mr Herbert Spencer has not in his more recent works said anything which enables me to appeal to his authority.
I imagine that if he had got hold of the idea that heredity was only a mode of memory before 1870, when he published the second edition of his Principles of Psychology, he would have gladly adopted it, for he seems continually groping after it, and aware of it as near him, though he is never able to grasp it. He probably failed to grasp it because Lamarck had failed. He could not adopt it in his edition of 1880, for this is evidently printed from stereos taken from the 1870 edition, and no considerable alteration was therefore possible.
The late Mr. G. H. Lewes did not get hold of the memory theory, probably because neither Mr. Spencer nor any of the well-known German philosophers had done so. Mr. Romanes, as I think I have shown, actually has adopted it, but he does not say where he got it from. I suppose from reading Canon Kingsley in Nature some years before Nature began to exist, or (for has not the mantle of Mr. Darwin fallen upon him?) he has thought it all out independently; but however Mr. Romanes may have reached his conclusion, he must have done so comparatively recently, for when he reviewed my book, Unconscious Memory, he scoffed at the very theory which he is now adopting.
Of the view that “there is thus a race memory, as there is an individual memory, and that the expression of the former constitutes the phenomena of heredity” — for it is thus Mr. Romanes with fair accuracy describes the theory I was supporting — he wrote:
“Now this view, in which Mr. Butler was anticipated by Prof. Hering, is interesting if advanced merely as an illustration; but to imagine that it maintains any truth of profound significance, or that it can possibly be fraught with any benefit to science, is simply absurd. The most cursory thought is enough to show,” &c. &c.
“We can understand,” he continued, “in some measure how an alteration in brain structure when once made should be permanent, . . . but we cannot understand how this alteration is transmitted to progeny through structures so unlike the brain as are the products of the generative glands. And we merely stultify ourselves if we suppose that the problem is brought any nearer to a solution by asserting that a future individual while still in the germ has already participated, say in the cerebral alterations of its parents,” &c. Mr. Romanes could find no measure of abuse strong enough for me, — as any reader may see who feels curious enough to turn to Mr. Romanes’ article in Nature already referred to.
As for Evolution, Old and New, he said I had written it “in the hope of gaining some notoriety by deserving and perhaps receiving a contemptuous refutation from” Mr. Darwin. In my reply to Mr. Romanes I said, “I will not characterise this accusation in the terms which it merits.” Mr. Romanes, in the following number of Nature, withdrew his accusation and immediately added, “I was induced to advance it because it seemed the only rational motive that could have led to the publication of such a book.” Again I will not characterise such a withdrawal in the terms it merits, but I may say in passing that if Mr. Romanes thinks the motive he assigned to me “a rational one,” his view of what is rational and mine differ. It does not commend itself as “rational” to me, that a man should spend a good deal of money and two or three years of work in the hope of deserving a contemptuous refutation from any one — not even from Mr. Darwin. But then Mr. Romanes has written such a lot about reason and intelligence.
The reply to Evolution, Old and New, which I actually did get from Mr. Darwin, was one which I do not see advertised among Mr. Darwin’s other works now, and which I venture to say never will be advertised among them again — not at least until it has been altered. I have seen no reason to leave off advertising Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory.
I have never that I know of seen Mr. Romanes, but am told that he is still young. I can find no publication of his indexed in the British Museum Catalogue earlier than 1874, and then it was only about Christian Prayer. Mr. Romanes was good enough to advise me to turn painter or homœopathist; as he has introduced the subject, and considering how many years I am his senior, I might be justified (if it could be any pleasure to me to do so) in suggesting to him too what I should imagine most likely to tend to his advancement in life; but there are examples so bad that even those who have no wish to be any better than their neighbours may yet decline to follow them, and I think Mr. Romanes’ is one of these. I will not therefore find him a profession.
But leaving this matter on one side, the point I wish to insist on is that Mr. Romanes is saying almost in my own words what less than three years ago he was very angry with me for saying. I do not think that under these circumstances much explanation is necessary as to the reasons which have led Mr. Romanes to fight so shy of any reference to Life and Habit, Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory — works in which, if I may venture to say so, the theory connecting the phenomena of heredity with memory has been not only “suggested,” but so far established that even Mr. Romanes has been led to think the matter over independently and to arrive at the same general conclusion as myself.
Curiously enough, Mr. Grant Allen too has come to much the same conclusions as myself, after having attacked me, though not so fiercely, as Mr. Romanes has done. In 1879 he said in the Examiner (May 17) that the teleological view put forward in Evolution, Old and New, was “just the sort of mystical nonsense from which” he “had hoped Mr. Darwin had for ever saved us.” And so in the Academy on the same day he said that no “one-sided argument” (referring to Evolution, Old and New) could ever deprive Mr. Darwin of the “place which he had eternally won in the history of human thought by his magnificent achievement.”
A few years, and Mr. Allen entertains a very different opinion of Mr. Darwin’s magnificent achievement.
“There are only two conceivable ways,” he writes, “in which any increment of brain power can ever have arisen in any individual. The one is the Darwinian way, by ‘spontaneous variation,’ that is to say by variation due to minute physical circumstances affecting the individual in the germ. The other is the Spencerian way, by functional increment, that is to say by the effect of increased use and constant exposure to varying circumstances during conscious life.”
Mr. Allen must know very well, or if he does not he has no excuse at any rate for not knowing, that the theory according to which increase of brain power or any other bodily or mental power is due to use, is no more Mr. Spencer’s than the theory of gravitation is, except in so far as that Mr. Spencer has adopted it. It is the theory which every one except Mr. Allen associates with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, but more especially (and on the whole I suppose justly) with Lamarck.
“I venture to think,” continues Mr. Allen, “that the first way [Mr. Darwin’s], if we look it clearly in the face, will be seen to be practically unthinkable; and that we have therefore no alternative but to accept the second.”
These writers go round so quickly and so completely that there is no keeping pace with them. “As to Materialism,” he writes presently, “surely it is more profoundly materialistic to suppose that mere physical causes operating on the germ can determine minute physical and material changes in the brain, which will in turn make the individuality what it is to be, than to suppose that all brains are what they are in virtue of antecedent function. The one creed makes the man depend mainly upon the accidents of molecular physics in a colliding germ cell and sperm cell; the other makes him depend mainly upon the doings and gains of his ancestors as modified and altered by himself.”
Here is a sentence taken almost at random from the body of the article: —
“We are always seeing something which adds to our total stock of memories; we are always learning and doing something new. The vast majority of these experiences are similar in kind to those already passed through by our ancestors: they add nothing to the inheritance of the race. . . . Though they leave physical traces on the individual, they do not so far affect the underlying organisation of the brain as to make the development of after-brains somewhat different from previous ones. But there are certain functional activities which do tend so to alter the development of after-brains; certain novel or sustained activities which apparently result in the production of new correlated brain elements or brain connections hereditarily transmissible as increased potentialities of similar activity in the offspring.”
Of Natural Selection Mr. Allen writes much, as Professor Mivart and others have been writing for many years past.
“It seems to me,” he says, “easy to understand how survival of the fittest may result in progress starting from such functionally produced gains, but impossible to understand how it could result in progress if it had to start in mere accidental structural increments due to spontaneous variation alone.”
