Part 10 (1/2)
General deduction that we never do anything in this unconscious or semi-conscious manner unless we know how to do it exceedingly well and have had long practice.
Also that consciousness is a vanis.h.i.+ng quant.i.ty and that as soon as we know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of it-- consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty--and hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it when we do not know of our knowledge.
2. Whatever we do in this way is all one and the same in kind--the difference being only in degree. Playing [almost?] unconsciously-- writing, more unconsciously (as to each letter)--reading, very unconsciously--talking, still more unconsciously (it is almost impossible for us to notice the action of our tongue in every letter)--walking, much the same--breathing, still to a certain extent within our own control--heart's beating, perceivable but beyond our control--digestion, unperceivable and beyond our control, digestion being the oldest of the . . . habits.
3. A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and has only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of considerations, in the same way as a man who goes into the City to buy Great Northern A Shares . . . It is only unconscious of these operations because it has done them a very large number of times already. A man may do a thing by a fluke once, but to say that a foetus can perform so difficult an operation as the growth of a pair of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how to do it, and without ever having done it before, is to contradict all human experience. Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before. Its unconsciousness (or speedy loss of memory) is simply the result of over-knowledge, not of under-knowledge. It knows so well and has done it so often that its power of self-a.n.a.lysis is gone. If it knew what it was doing, or was conscious of its own act in oxidising its blood after birth, I should suspect that it had not done it so often before; as it is I am confident that it must have done it more often- -much more often--than any act which we perform consciously during our whole lives.
4. When, then, did it do it? Clearly when last it was an impregnate ovum or some still lower form of life which resulted in that impregnate ovum.
5. How is it, then, that it has not gained perceptible experience?
Simply because a single repet.i.tion makes little or no difference; but go back 20,000 repet.i.tions and you will find that it has gained in experience and modified its performance very materially.
6. But how about the ident.i.ty? What is ident.i.ty? Ident.i.ty of matter? Surely no. There is no ident.i.ty of matter between me as I now am, and me as an impregnate ovum. Continuity of existence? Then there is ident.i.ty between me as an impregnate ovum and my father and mother as impregnate ova. Drop out my father's and mother's lives between the dates of their being impregnate ova and the moment when I became an impregnate ovum. See the ova only and consider the second ovum as the first two ova's means not of reproducing themselves but of continuing themselves--repeating themselves--the intermediate lives being nothing but, as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye to the place where it will grow its next tuber.
7. Given a single creature capable of reproducing itself and it must go on reproducing itself for ever, for it would not reproduce itself, unless it reproduced a creature that was going to reproduce itself, and so on ad infinitum.
Then comes Descent with Modification. Similarity tempered with dissimilarity, and dissimilarity tempered with similarity--a contradiction in terms, like almost everything else that is true or useful or indeed intelligible at all. In each case of what we call descent, it is still the first reproducing creature identically the same--doing what it has done before--only with such modifications as the struggle for existence and natural selection have induced. No matter how highly it has been developed, it can never be other than the primordial cell and must always begin as the primordial cell and repeat its last performance most nearly, but also, more or less, all its previous performances.
A begets A' which is A with the additional experience of a dash. A'
begets A'' which is A with the additional experiences of A' and A''; and so on to A(n) but you can never eliminate the A.
8. Let A(n) stand for a man. He begins as the primordial cell-- being verily nothing but the primordial cell which goes on splitting itself up for ever, but gaining continually in experience. Put him in the same position as he was in before and he will do as he did before. First he will do his tadpoles by rote, so to speak, on his head, from long practice; then he does his fish trick; then he grows arms and legs, all unconsciously from the inveteracy of the habit, till he comes to doing his man, and this lesson he has not yet learnt so thoroughly. Some part of it, as the breathing and oxidisation business, he is well up to, inasmuch as they form part of previous roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, the power of speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble--for he is very stupid--a regular dunce in fact. Then comes his newer and more complex environment, and this puzzles him--arrests his attention--whereon consciousness springs into existence, as a spark from a horse's hoof.
To be continued--I see it will have to be more than 30 pp. It is still foggy in parts, but I must clear it a little. It will go on to show that we are all one animal and that death (which was at first voluntary, and has only come to be disliked because those who did not dislike it committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only phases of the ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies daily.
Always very truly yours, S. BUTLER.
IV--MEMORY AND DESIGN
Clergymen and Chickens
[Extract from a lecture On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of Heredity delivered by Butler at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, on Sat.u.r.day, 2nd December, 1882.]
Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg which egg can become a chicken in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a twelvemonth, while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs but give birth to a baby which will take three-and-twenty years before it can become another clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient, it is not cheap, it is not free from danger, it is not only not perfect but is so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes, or as the cuckoo perhaps observes it.
The explanation usually given is that it is a law of nature that children should be born as they are, but this is like the parched pea which St. Anthony set before the devil when he came to supper with him and of which the devil said that it was good as far as it went.
We want more; we want to know with what familiar set of facts we are to connect the one in question which, though in our midst, at present dwells apart as a mysterious stranger of whose belongings, reason for coming amongst us, antecedents, and so forth, we believe ourselves to be ignorant, though we know him by sight and name and have a fair idea what sort of man he is to deal with.
We say it is a phenomenon of heredity that chickens should be laid as eggs in the first instance and clergymen born as babies, but, beyond the fact that we know heredity extremely well to look at and to do business with, we say that we know nothing about it. I have for some years maintained this to be a mistake and have urged, in company with Professor Hering, of Prague, and others, that the connection between memory and heredity is so close that there is no reason for regarding the two as generically different, though for convenience sake it may be well to specify them by different names. If I can persuade you that this is so, I believe I shall be able to make you understand why it is that chickens are hatched as eggs and clergymen born as babies.