Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification

Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification

I shall perhaps best promote the acceptance of the two main points on which I have been insisting for some years past, I mean, the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic development, by treating them as if they had something of that physical life with which they are so closely connected. Ideas are like plants and animals in this respect also, as in so many others, that they are more fully understood when their relations to other ideas of their time, and the history of their development are known and borne in mind. By development I do not merely mean their growth in the minds of those who first advanced them, but that larger development which consists in their subsequent good or evil fortunesin their reception, favourable or otherwise, by those to whom they were presented. This is to an idea what its surroundings are to an organism, and throws much the same light upon it that knowledge of the conditions under which an organism lives throws upon the organism itself. I shall, therefore, begin this new work with a few remarks about its predecessors. I am aware that what I may say on this head is likely to prove more interesting to future students of the literature of descent than to my immediate public, but any book that desires to see out a literary three-score years and ten must offer something to future generations as well as to its own. It is a condition of its survival that it shall do this, and herein lies one of the authors chief difficulties. If books only lived as long as men and women, we should know better how to grow them; as matters stand, however, the author lives for one or two generations, whom he comes in the end to understand fairly well, while the book, if reasonable pains have been taken with it, should live more or less usefully for a dozen. About the greater number of these generations the author is in the dark; but come what may, some of them are sure to have arrived at conclusions diametrically opposed to our own upon every subject connected with art, science, philosophy, and religion; it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased, it can only be at the cost of repelling some present readers. Unwilling as I am to do this, I still hold it the lesser of two evils; I will be as brief, however, as the interests of the opinions I am supporting will allow. In Life and Habit I contended that heredity was a mode of memory. I endeavoured to show that all hereditary traits, whether of mind or body, are inherited in virtue of, and as a manifestation of, the same power whereby we are able to remember intelligently what we did half an hour, yesterday, or a twelvemonth since, and this in no figurative but in a perfectly real sense. If life be compared to an equation of a hundred unknown quantities, I followed Professor Hering of Prague in reducing it to one of ninety-nine only, by showing two of the supposed unknown quantities to be so closely allied that they should count as one. I maintained that instinct was inherited memory, and this without admitting more exceptions and qualifying clauses than arise, as it were, by way of harmonics from every proposition, and must be neglected if thought and language are to be possible. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 4967
Author: Butler, Samuel
Release Date: Jan 1, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English