Selections from Previous Works: With Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals, and a Psalm of MontrealButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Selections from Previous Works: With Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals, and a Psalm of Montreal
Butler, Samuel
English literature -- 19th century -- Miscellanea; Romanes, George John, 1848-1894. Mental evolution in animals
The purposiveness, which even Dr. Darwin (and Lamarck still less) seems
never to have quite recognised in spite of their having insisted so much
on what amounts to the same thing, now comes into full view. It is seen
that the organs external to the body, and those internal to it, are the
second as much as the first, things which we have made for our own
convenience, and with a prevision that we shall have need of them; the
main difference between the manufacture of these two classes of organs
being, that we have made the one kind so often that we can no longer
follow the processes whereby we make them, while the others are new
things which we must make introspectively or not at all, and which are
not yet so incorporate with our vitality as that we should think they
grow instead of being manufactured. The manufacture of the tool, and the
manufacture of the living organ prove therefore to be but two species of
the same genus, which, though widely differentiated, have descended as it
were from one common filament of desire and inventive faculty. The
greater or less complexity of the organs goes for very little. It is
only a question of the amount of intelligence and voluntary
self-adaptation which we must admit, and this must be settled rather by
an appeal to what we find in organism, and observe concerning it, than by
what we may have imagined _a priori_.
Given a small speck of jelly with some power of slightly varying its
actions in accordance with slightly varying circumstances and
desires--given such a jelly-speck with a power of assimilating other
matter, and thus of reproducing itself, given also that it should be
possessed of a memory and a reproductive system, and we can show how the
whole animal world can have descended it may be from an _amoeba_ without
interference from without, and how every organ in every creature is
designed at first roughly and tentatively but finally fashioned with the
most consummate perfection, by the creature which has had need of that
organ, which best knew what it wanted, and was never satisfied till it
had got that which was the best suited to its varying circumstances in
their entirety. We can even show how, if it becomes worth the
Ethiopian's while to try and change his skin, or the leopard's to change
his spots, they can assuredly change them within a not unreasonable time
and adapt their covering to their own will and convenience, and to that
of none other; thus what is commonly conceived of as direct creation by
God is moved back to a time and space inconceivable in their remoteness,
while the aim and design so obvious in nature are shown to be still at
work around us, growing ever busier and busier, and advancing from day to
day both in knowledge and power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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