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
Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as
functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and
substance, are—for the condition of every substance may be considered as
the expression and outcome of its mind. Where there is consciousness
there is change; where there is no change there is no consciousness; may
we not suspect that there is no change without a _pro tanto_
consciousness however simple and unspecialised? Change and motion are
one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or motion), as the
ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, and
all feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited, to be the
interaction of those states which for want of better terms we call mind
and matter. Action may be regarded as a kind of middle term between mind
and matter; it is the throe of thought and thing, the quivering clash and
union of body and soul; commonplace enough in practice; miraculous, as
violating every canon on which thought and reason are founded, if we
theorise about it, put it under the microscope, and vivisect it. It is
here, if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction
in terms of combining with that which is without material substance and
cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with matter,
till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.
All body is more or less ensouled. As it gets farther and farther from
ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say to
ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about it—as
though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power of being
understood rather than of understanding. We are intelligent, and no
intelligence, so different from our own as to baffle our powers of
comprehension deserves to be called intelligence at all. The more a
thing resembles ourselves, the more it thinks as we do—and thus by
implication tells us that we are right, the more intelligent we think it;
and the less it thinks as we do, the greater fool it must be; if a
substance does not succeed in making it clear that it understands our
business, we conclude that it cannot have any business of its own, much
less understand it, or indeed understand anything at all. But letting
this pass, so far as we are concerned, χρημάτων πάντων μέτρον άνθρωπος;
we are body ensouled, and soul embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible
for us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist
either of soul without body, or body without soul. Unmattered condition,
therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned matter; and we must
hold that all body with which we can be conceivably concerned is more or
less ensouled, and all soul, in like manner, more or less embodied.
Strike either body or soul—that is to say, effect either a physical or a
mental change, and the harmonics of the other sound. So long as body is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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