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
Claude Bernard says, _Rien ne nait_, _rien ne se crée_, _tout se
continue_. _La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune création_,
_elle est d’une éternelle continuation_; {35a} but surely he is insisting
upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another which is just
as real, and just as important; he might have said, _Rien ne se
continue_, _tout nait_, _tout se crée_. _La nature ne nous offre le
spectacle d’aucune continuation_. _Elle est d’une éternelle création_;
for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and, indeed, the two
stand or fall together. True, discontinuity, where development is
normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the difference between
looking at distances on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have
even the smallest change without a small partial corresponding
discontinuity; on a small scale—too small, indeed, for us to
cognise—these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our
understanding goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the
phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall
normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out. Creations, then,
there must be, but they must be so small that practically they are no
creations. We must have a continuity in discontinuity, and a
discontinuity in continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the
help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It
comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and
harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no
conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by flying in
the face of every rule that professors of the art of thinking have drawn
up for our instruction. These rules may be good enough as servants, but
we have let them become the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy
is made for man, not man for philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower
of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into
the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—nor has
confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul
said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what
faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as
species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its own way
both living and saving.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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