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
True, in his “Principles of Psychology” (vol. ii. p. 195) Mr. Spencer
says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all intelligence is
acquired through experience “so as to make it include with the experience
of each individual the experiences of all ancestral individuals,” &c.
This is all very good, but it is much the same as saying, “We have only
got to stand on our heads and we shall be able to do so and so.” We did
not see our way to standing on our heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help
us; we had been accustomed, as I am afraid I must have said _usque ad
nauseam_ already, to lose sight of the physical connection existing
between parents and offspring; we understood from the marriage service
that husband and wife were in a sense one flesh, but not that parents and
children were so also; and without this conception of the matter, which
in its way is just as true as the more commonly received one, we could
not extend the experience of parents to offspring. It was not in the
bond or _nexus_ of our ideas to consider experience as appertaining to
more than a single individual in the common acceptance of the term; these
two ideas were so closely bound together that wherever the one went the
other went perforce. Here, indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer’s
just referred to, the race is throughout regarded as “a series of
individuals”—without an attempt to call attention to that other view, in
virtue of which we are able to extend to many an idea we had been
accustomed to confine to one.
In his chapter on Memory, Mr. Spencer certainly approaches the Heringian
view. He says, “On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of
organised memory; on the other, Memory may be regarded as a kind of
incipient instinct” (“Principles of Psychology,” ed. 2, vol. i. p. 445).
Here the ball has fallen into his hands, but if he had got firm hold of
it he could not have written, “Instinct _may be_ regarded as _a kind of_,
&c.;” to us there is neither “may be regarded as” nor “kind of” about it;
we require, “Instinct is inherited memory,” with an explanation making it
intelligible how memory can come to be inherited at all. I do not like,
again, calling memory “a kind of incipient instinct;” as Mr. Spencer puts
them the words have a pleasant antithesis, but “instinct is inherited
memory” covers all the ground, and to say that memory is inherited
instinct is surplusage.
Nor does he stick to it long when he says that “instinct is a kind of
organised memory,” for two pages later he says that memory, to be memory
at all, must be tolerably conscious or deliberate; he, therefore (vol. i.
p. 447), denies that there can be such a thing as unconscious memory; but
without this it is impossible for us to see instinct as the “kind of
organised memory” which he has just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct
is notably undeliberate and unreflecting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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