Complete works of samuel.., p.277
Complete Works of Samuel Butler, page 277
Common sense can only carry weight in respect of matters with which every one is familiar, as forming part of the daily and hourly conduct of affairs; if we would keep our comfortable hard and fast lines, our rough and ready unspecialised ways of dealing with difficult questions, our impatience of what St. Paul calls “doubtful disputations,” we must refuse to quit the ground on which the judgments of mankind have been so long and often given that they are not likely to be questioned. Common sense is not yet formulated in manners of science or philosophy, for only few consider them; few decisions, therefore, have been arrived at which all hold final. Science is, like love, “too young to know what conscience,” or common sense, is. As soon as the world began to busy itself with evolution it said good-bye to common sense, and must get on with uncommon sense as best it can. The first lesson that uncommon sense will teach it is that contradiction in terms is the foundation of all sound reasoning — and, as an obvious consequence, compromise, the foundation of all sound practice. This, it follows easily, involves the corollary that as faith, to be of any value, must be based on reason, so reason, to be of any value, must be based on faith, and that neither can stand alone or dispense with the other, any more than culture or vulgarity can stand unalloyed with one another without much danger of mischance.
It may not perhaps be immediately apparent why the admission that a piece of healthy living brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail, is so dangerous to common sense ways of looking at life and death; I had better, therefore, be more explicit. By this admission degrees of livingness are admitted within the body; this involves approaches to non-livingness. On this the question arises, “Which are the most living parts?” The answer to this was given a few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists shouted with one voice, “Great is protoplasm. There is no life but protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet.” Read Huxley’s “Physical Basis of Mind.” Read Professor Mivart’s article, “What are Living Beings?” in the Contemporary Review, July, 1879. Read Dr. Andrew Wilson’s article in the Gentleman’s Magazine, October, 1879. Remember Professor Allman’s address to the British Association, 1879; ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved scientific attitude as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic parts of the body, and he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion arrived at by all of them is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone truly living, and that the non-protoplasmic are non-living.
It may suffice if I confine myself to Professor Allman’s address to the British Association in 1879, as a representative utterance. Professor Allman said: —
“Protoplasm lies at the base of every vital phenomenon. It is, as Huxley has well expressed it, ‘the physical basis of life;’ wherever there is life from its lowest to its highest manifestation there is protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm there is life.”
To say wherever there is life there is protoplasm, is to say that there can be no life without protoplasm, and this is saying that where there is no protoplasm there is no life. But large parts of the body are non-protoplasmic; a bone is, indeed, permeated by protoplasm, but it is not protoplasm; it follows, therefore, that according to Professor Allman bone is not in any proper sense of words a living substance. From this it should follow, and doubtless does follow in Professor Allman’s mind, that large tracts of the human body, if not the greater part by weight (as bones, skin, muscular tissues, &c.), are no more alive than a coat or pair of boots in wear is alive, except in so far as the bones, &c., are more closely and nakedly permeated by protoplasm than the coat or boots, and are thus brought into closer, directer, and more permanent communication with that which, if not life itself, still has more of the ear of life, and comes nearer to its royal person than anything else does. Indeed that this is Professor Allman’s opinion appears from the passage on page 26 of the report, in which he says that in “protoplasm we find the only form of matter in which life can manifest itself.”
According to this view the skin and other tissues are supposed to be made from dead protoplasm which living protoplasm turns to account as the British Museum authorities are believed to stuff their new specimens with the skins of old ones; the matter used by the living protoplasm for this purpose is held to be entirely foreign to protoplasm itself, and no more capable of acting in concert with it than bricks can understand and act in concert with the bricklayer. As the bricklayer is held to be living and the bricks non-living, so the bones and skin which protoplasm is supposed to construct are held non-living and the protoplasm alone living. Protoplasm, it is said, goes about masked behind the clothes or habits which it has fashioned. It has habited itself as animals and plants, and we have mistaken the garment for the wearer — as our dogs and cats doubtless think with Giordano Bruno that our boots live when we are wearing them, and that we keep spare paws in our bedrooms which lie by the wall and go to sleep when we have not got them on.
If, in answer to the assertion that the osseous parts of bone are non-living, it is said that they must be living, for they heal if broken, which no dead matter can do, it is answered that the broken pieces of bone do not grow together; they are mended by the protoplasm which permeates the Haversian canals; the bones themselves are no more living merely because they are tenanted by something which really does live, than a house lives because men and women inhabit it; and if a bone is repaired, it no more repairs itself than a house can be said to have repaired itself because its owner has sent for the bricklayer and seen that what was wanted was done.
We do not know, it is said, by what means the structureless viscid substance which we call protoplasm can build for itself a solid bone; we do not understand how an amœba makes its test; no one understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably does not know how he has done it. Set a man who has never painted, to watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six, and he will no more understand how Rembrandt can have done it, than we can understand how the amœba makes its test, or the protoplasm cements two broken ends of a piece of bone. Ces choses se font mais ne s’expliquent pas. So some denizen of another planet looking at our earth through a telescope which showed him much, but still not quite enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb on end so that he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would think the trains there a kind of caterpillar which went through the mountain by a pure effort of the will — that enabled them in some mysterious way to disregard material obstacles and dispense with material means. We know, of course, that it is not so, and that exemption from the toil attendant on material obstacles has been compounded for, in the ordinary way, by the single payment of a tunnel; and so with the cementing of a bone, our biologists say that the protoplasm, which is alone living, cements it much as a man might mend a piece of broken china, but that it works by methods and processes which elude us, even as the holes of the St. Gothard tunnel may be supposed to elude a denizen of another world.
The reader will already have seen that the toils are beginning to close round those who, while professing to be guided by common sense, still parley with even the most superficial probers beneath the surface; this, however, will appear more clearly in the following chapter. It will also appear how far-reaching were the consequences of the denial of design that was involved in Mr. Darwin’s theory that luck is the main element in survival, and how largely this theory is responsible for the fatuous developments in connection alike with protoplasm and automatism which a few years ago seemed about to carry everything before them.
Chapter IX. Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm (continued)
The position, then, stands thus. Common sense gave the inch of admitting some parts of the body to be less living than others, and philosophy took the ell of declaring the body to be almost all of it stone dead. This is serious; still if it were all, for a quiet life, we might put up with it. Unfortunately we know only too well that it will not be all. Our bodies, which seemed so living and now prove so dead, have served us such a trick that we can have no confidence in anything connected with them. As with skin and bones to-day, so with protoplasm to-morrow. Protoplasm is mainly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out, we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic components. Science has not, I believe, settled all the components of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there; she has settled what it is in great part, and there is no trusting her not to settle the rest at any moment, even if she has not already done so. As soon as this has been done we shall be told that nine-tenths of the protoplasm of which we are composed must go the way of our non-protoplasmic parts, and that the only really living part of us is the something with a new name that runs the protoplasm that runs the flesh and bones that run the organs —
Why stop here? Why not add “which run the tools and properties which are as essential to our life and health as much that is actually incorporate with us?” The same breach which has let the non-living effect a lodgment within the body must, in all equity, let the organic character — bodiliness, so to speak — pass out beyond its limits and effect a lodgment in our temporary and extra-corporeal limbs. What, on the protoplasmic theory, the skin and bones are, that the hammer and spade are also; they differ in the degree of closeness and permanence with which they are associated with protoplasm, but both bones and hammers are alike non-living things which protoplasm uses for its own purposes and keeps closer or less close at hand as custom and convenience may determine.
According to this view, the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are tools of the first degree; they are not living, but they are in such close and constant contact with that which really lives, that an aroma of life attaches to them. Some of these, however, such as horns, hooves, and tusks, are so little permeated by protoplasm that they cannot rank much higher than the tools of the second degree, which come next to them in order.
These tools of the second degree are either picked up ready-made, or are manufactured directly by the body, as being torn or bitten into shape, or as stones picked up to throw at prey or at an enemy.
Tools of the third degree are made by the instrumentality of tools of the second and first degrees; as, for example, chipped flint, arrow-heads, &c.
Tools of the fourth degree are made by those of the third, second, and first. They consist of the simpler compound instruments that yet require to be worked by hand, as hammers, spades, and even hand flour-mills.
Tools of the fifth degree are made by the help of those of the fourth, third, second, and first. They are compounded of many tools, worked, it may be, by steam or water and requiring no constant contact with the body.
But each one of these tools of the fifth degree was made in the first instance by the sole instrumentality of the four preceding kinds of tool. They must all be linked on to protoplasm, which is the one original tool-maker, but which can only make the tools that are more remote from itself by the help of those that are nearer, that is to say, it can only work when it has suitable tools to work with, and when it is allowed to use them in its own way. There can be no direct communication between protoplasm and a steam-engine; there may be and often is direct communication between machines of even the fifth order and those of the first, as when an engine-man turns a cock, or repairs something with his own hands if he has nothing better to work with. But put a hammer, for example, to a piece of protoplasm, and the protoplasm will no more know what to do with it than we should be able to saw a piece of wood in two without a saw. Even protoplasm from the hand of a carpenter who has been handling hammers all his life would be hopelessly put off its stroke if not allowed to work in its usual way but put bare up against a hammer; it would make a slimy mess and then dry up; still there can be no doubt (so at least those who uphold protoplasm as the one living substance would say) that the closer a machine can be got to protoplasm and the more permanent the connection, the more living it appears to be, or at any rate the more does it appear to be endowed with spontaneous and reasoning energy, so long, of course, as the closeness is of a kind which protoplasm understands and is familiar with. This, they say, is why we do not like using any implement or tool with gloves on, for these impose a barrier between the tool and its true connection with protoplasm by means of the nervous system. For the same reason we put gloves on when we box so as to bar the connection.
That which we handle most unglovedly is our food, which we handle with our stomachs rather than with our hands. Our hands are so thickly encased with skin that protoplasm can hold but small conversation with what they contain, unless it be held for a long time in the closed fist, and even so the converse is impeded as in a strange language; the inside of our mouths is more naked, and our stomachs are more naked still; it is here that protoplasm brings its fullest powers of suasion to bear on those whom it would proselytise and receive as it were into its own communion — whom it would convert and bring into a condition of mind in which they shall see things as it sees them itself, and, as we commonly say, “agree with” it, instead of standing out stiffly for their own opinion. We call this digesting our food; more properly we should call it being digested by our food, which reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests us, till it comes to understand us and encourage us by assuring us that we were perfectly right all the time, no matter what any one might have said, or say, to the contrary. Having thus recanted all its own past heresies, it sets to work to convert everything that comes near it and seems in the least likely to be converted. Eating is a mode of love; it is an effort after a closer union; so we say we love roast beef. A French lady told me once that she adored veal; and a nurse tells her child that she would like to eat it. Even he who caresses a dog or horse pro tanto both weds and eats it. Strange how close the analogy between love and hunger; in each case the effort is after closer union and possession; in each case the outcome is reproduction (for nutrition is the most complete of reproductions), and in each case there are residua. But to return.
I have shown above that one consequence of the attempt so vigorously made a few years ago to establish protoplasm as the one living substance, is the making it clear that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body and the simpler extra-corporeal tools or organs must run on all fours in the matter of livingness and non-livingness. If the protoplasmic parts of the body are held living in virtue of their being used by something that really lives, then so, though in a less degree, must tools and machines. If, on the other hand, tools and machines are held non-living inasmuch as they only owe what little appearance of life they may present when in actual use to something else that lives, and have no life of their own — so, though in a less degree, must the non-protoplasmic parts of the body. Allow an overflowing aroma of life to vivify the horny skin under the heel, and from this there will be a spilling which will vivify the boot in wear. Deny an aroma of life to the boot in wear, and it must ere long be denied to ninety-nine per cent. of the body; and if the body is not alive while it can walk and talk, what in the name of all that is unreasonable can be held to be so?
That the essential identity of bodily organs and tools is no ingenious paradoxical way of putting things is evident from the fact that we speak of bodily organs at all. Organ means tool. There is nothing which reveals our most genuine opinions to us so unerringly as our habitual and unguarded expressions, and in the case under consideration so completely do we instinctively recognise the underlying identity of tools and limbs, that scientific men use the word “organ” for any part of the body that discharges a function, practically to the exclusion of any other term. Of course, however, the above contention as to the essential identity of tools and organs does not involve a denial of their obvious superficial differences — differences so many and so great as to justify our classing them in distinct categories so long as we have regard to the daily purposes of life without looking at remoter ones.
If the above be admitted, we can reply to those who in an earlier chapter objected to our saying that if Mr. Darwin denied design in the eye he should deny it in the burglar’s jemmy also. For if bodily and non-bodily organs are essentially one in kind, being each of them both living and non-living, and each of them only a higher development of principles already admitted and largely acted on in the other, then the method of procedure observable in the evolution of the organs whose history is within our ken should throw light upon the evolution of that whose history goes back into so dim a past that we can only know it by way of inference. In the absence of any show of reason to the contrary we should argue from the known to the unknown, and presume that even as our non-bodily organs originated and were developed through gradual accumulation of design, effort, and contrivance guided by experience, so also must our bodily organs have been, in spite of the fact that the contrivance has been, as it were, denuded of external evidences in the course of long time. This at least is the most obvious inference to draw; the burden of proof should rest not with those who uphold function as the most important means of organic modification, but with those who impugn it; it is hardly necessary, however, to say that Mr. Darwin never attempted to impugn by way of argument the conclusions either of his grandfather or of Lamarck. He waved them both aside in one or two short semi-contemptuous sentences, and said no more about them — not, at least, until late in life he wrote his “Erasmus Darwin,” and even then his remarks were purely biographical; he did not say one syllable by way of refutation, or even of explanation.
I am free to confess that, overwhelming as is the evidence brought forward by Mr. Spencer in the articles already referred to, as showing that accidental variations, unguided by the helm of any main general principle which should as it were keep their heads straight, could never accumulate with the results supposed by Mr. Darwin; and overwhelming, again, as is the consideration that Mr. Spencer’s most crushing argument was allowed by Mr. Darwin to go without reply, still the considerations arising from the discoveries of the last forty years or so in connection with protoplasm, seem to me almost more overwhelming still. This evidence proceeds on different lines from that adduced by Mr. Spencer, but it points to the same conclusion, namely, that though luck will avail much if backed by cunning and experience, it is unavailing for any permanent result without them. There is an irony which seems almost always to attend on those who maintain that protoplasm is the only living substance which ere long points their conclusions the opposite way to that which they desire — in the very last direction, indeed, in which they of all people in the world would willingly see them pointed.
