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 property is to a man’s mind or soul that his body is also, only more
so. The body is property carried to the bitter end, or property is the
body carried to the bitter end, whichever the reader chooses; the
expression “organic wealth” is not figurative; none other is so apt and
accurate; so universally, indeed, is this recognised that the fact has
found expression in our liturgy, which bids us pray for all those who are
any wise afflicted “in mind, body, or estate;” no inference, therefore,
can be more simple and legitimate than the one in accordance with which
the laws that govern the development of wealth generally are supposed
also to govern the particular form of health and wealth which comes most
closely home to us—I mean that of our bodily implements or organs. What
is the stomach but a living sack, or purse of untanned leather, wherein
we keep our means of subsistence? Food is money made easy; it is petty
cash in its handiest and most reduced form; it is our way of assimilating
our possessions and making them indeed our own. What is the purse but a
kind of abridged extra corporeal stomach wherein we keep the money which
we convert by purchase into food, as we presently convert the food by
digestion into flesh and blood? And what living form is there which is
without a purse or stomach, even though it have to job it by the meal as
the amœba does, and exchange it for some other article as soon as it has
done eating? How marvellously does the analogy hold between the purse
and the stomach alike as regards form and function; and I may say in
passing that, as usual, the organ which is the more remote from
protoplasm is at once more special, more an object of our consciousness,
and less an object of its own.
Talk of ego and non ego meeting, and of the hopelessness of avoiding
contradiction in terms—talk of this, and look, in passing, at the amœba.
It is itself _quâ_ maker of the stomach and being fed; it is not itself
_quâ_ stomach and _quâ_ its using itself as a mere tool or implement to
feed itself with. It is active and passive, object and subject, _ego_
and _non ego_—every kind of Irish bull, in fact, which a sound logician
abhors—and it is only because it has persevered, as I said in “Life and
Habit,” in thus defying logic and arguing most virtuously in a most
vicious circle, that it has come in the persons of some of its
descendants to reason with sufficient soundness. And what the amœba is
man is also; man is only a great many amœbas, most of them dreadfully
narrow-minded, going up and down the country with their goods and
chattels like gipsies in a caravan; he is only a great many amœbas that
have had much time and money spent on their education, and received large
bequests of organised intelligence from those that have gone before them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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