not try for things which we believe to be beyond our reach, hence one
would expect that the fortunes, as it were, of animals should have been
built up gradually. Our own riches grow with our desires and the pains
we take in pursuit of them, and our desires vary and increase with our
means of gratifying them; but unless with men of exceptional business
aptitude, wealth grows gradually by the adding field to field and farm to
farm; so with the limbs and instincts of animals; these are but the
things they have made or bought with their money, or with money that has
been left them by their forefathers, which, though it is neither silver
nor gold, but faith and protoplasm only, is good money and capital
notwithstanding.
I have already admitted that instinct may be modified by food or drugs,
which may affect a structure or habit as powerfully as we see certain
poisons affect the structure of plants by producing, as Mr. Darwin tells
us, very complex galls upon their leaves. I do not, therefore, for a
moment insist on habit as the sole cause of instinct. Every habit must
have had its originating cause, and the causes which have started one
habit will from time to time start or modify others; nor can I explain
why some individuals of a race should be cleverer than others, any more
than I can explain why they should exist at all; nevertheless, I observe
it to be a fact that differences in intelligence and power of growth are
universal in the individuals of all those races which we can best watch.
I also most readily admit that the common course of nature would both
cause many variations to arise independently of any desire on the part of
the animal (much as we have lately seen that the moons of Mars were on
the point of being discovered three hundred years ago, merely through
Galileo sending to Kepler a Latin anagram which Kepler could not
understand, and arranged into the line—“_Salve umbistineum geminatum
Martia prolem_,” and interpreted to mean that Mars had two moons, whereas
Galileo had meant to say “_Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi_,”
meaning that he had seen Saturn’s ring), and would also preserve and
accumulate such variations when they had arisen; but I can no more
believe that the wonderful adaptation of structures to needs, which we
see around us in such an infinite number of plants and animals, can have
arisen without a perception of those needs on the part of the creature in
whom the structure appears, than I can believe that the form of the
dray-horse or greyhound—so well adapted both to the needs of the animal
in his daily service to man, and to the desires of man, that the creature
should do him this daily service—can have arisen without any desire on
man’s part to produce this particular structure, or without the inherited
habit of performing the corresponding actions for man, on the part of the
greyhound and dray-horse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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