Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic ModificationButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification
Butler, Samuel
Evolution; Natural selection
What else, however, can we do? We can only escape the Scylla of calling
everything by one name, and recognising no individual existences of any
kind, by falling into the Charybdis of having a name for everything, or
by some piece of intellectual sharp practice like that of the shrewd but
unprincipled Ulysses. If we were consistent honourable gentlemen, into
Charybdis or on to Scylla we should go like lambs; every subterfuge by
the help of which we escape our difficulty is but an arbitrary
high-handed act of classification that turns a deaf ear to everything not
robust enough to hold its own; nevertheless even the most scrupulous of
philosophers pockets his consistency at a pinch, and refuses to let the
native hue of resolution be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
nor yet fobbed by the rusty curb of logic. He is right, for assuredly
the poor intellectual abuses of the time want countenancing now as much
as ever, but so far as he countenances them, he should bear in mind that
he is returning to the ground of common sense, and should not therefore
hold himself too stiffly in the matter of logic.
As with life and death so with design and absence of design or luck. So
also with union and disunion. There is never either absolute design
rigorously pervading every detail, nor yet absolute absence of design
pervading any detail rigorously, so, as between substances, there is
neither absolute union and homogeneity, not absolute disunion and
heterogeneity; there is always a little place left for repentance; that
is to say, in theory we should admit that both design and chance, however
well defined, each have an aroma, as it were, of the other. Who can
think of a case in which his own design—about which he should know more
than any other, and from which, indeed, all his ideas of design are
derived—was so complete that there was no chance in any part of it? Who,
again, can bring forward a case even of the purest chance or good luck
into which no element of design had entered directly or indirectly at any
juncture? This, nevertheless, does not involve our being unable ever to
ascribe a result baldly either to luck or cunning. In some cases a
decided preponderance of the action, whether seen as a whole or looked at
in detail, is recognised at once as due to design, purpose, forethought,
skill, and effort, and then we properly disregard the undesigned element;
in others the details cannot without violence be connected with design,
however much the position which rendered the main action possible may
involve design—as, for example, there is no design in the way in which
individual pieces of coal may hit one another when shot out of a sack,
but there may be design in the sack’s being brought to the particular
place where it is emptied; in others design may be so hard to find that
we rightly deny its existence, nevertheless in each case there will be an
element of the opposite, and the residuary element would, if seen through
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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