BACK TO METHUSELAH

A Metabiological Pentateuch

by

BERNARD SHAW

1921







Contents


The Infidel Half Century
  The Dawn of Darwinism
  The Advent of the Neo-Darwinians
  Political Inadequacy of the Human Animal
  Cowardice of the Irreligious
  Is there any Hope in Education?
  Homeopathic Education
  The Diabolical Efficiency of Technical Education
  Flimsiness of Civilization
  Creative Evolution
  Voluntary Longevity
  The Early Evolutionists
  The Advent of the Neo-Lamarckians
  How Acquirements are Inherited
  The Miracle of Condensed Recapitulation
  Heredity an Old Story
  Discovery Anticipated by Divination
  Corrected Dates for the Discovery of Evolution
  Defying the Lightning: a Frustrated Experiment
  In Quest of the First Cause
  Paley's Watch
  The Irresistible Cry of Order, Order!
  The Moment and the Man
  The Brink of the Bottomless Pit
  Why Darwin Converted the Crowd
  How we Rushed Down a Steep Place
  Darwinism not Finally Refutable
  Three Blind Mice
  The Greatest of These is Self-Control
  A Sample of Lamarcko-Shavian Invective
  The Humanitarians and the Problem of Evil
  How One Touch of Darwin makes the Whole World Kin
  Why Darwin Pleased the Socialists
  Darwin and Karl Marx
  Why Darwin pleased the Profiteers also
  The Poetry and Purity of Materialism
  The Viceroys of the King of Kings
  Political Opportunism in Excelsis
  The Betrayal of Western Civilization
  Circumstantial Selection in Finance
  The Homeopathic Reaction against Darwinism
  Religion and Romance
  The Danger of Reaction
  A Touchstone for Dogma
  What to do with the Legends
  A Lesson from Science to the Churches
  The Religious Art of the Twentieth Century
  The Artist-Prophets
  Evolution in the Theatre
  My Own Part in the Matter
In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden)
The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day
The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170
Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000
As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920




PREFACE

The Infidel Half Century


THE DAWN OF DARWINISM

One day early in the eighteen hundred and sixties, I, being then a
small boy, was with my nurse, buying something in the shop of a petty
newsagent, bookseller, and stationer in Camden Street, Dublin, when
there entered an elderly man, weighty and solemn, who advanced to the
counter, and said pompously, 'Have you the works of the celebrated
Buffoon?'

My own works were at that time unwritten, or it is possible that the
shop assistant might have misunderstood me so far as to produce a copy
of Man and Superman. As it was, she knew quite well what he wanted; for
this was before the Education Act of 1870 had produced shop assistants
who know how to read and know nothing else. The celebrated Buffoon was
not a humorist, but the famous naturalist Buffon. Every literate child
at that time knew Buffon's Natural History as well as Esop's Fables. And
no living child had heard the name that has since obliterated Buffon's
in the popular consciousness: the name of Darwin.

Ten years elapsed. The celebrated Buffoon was forgotten; I had doubled
my years and my length; and I had discarded the religion of my
forefathers. One day the richest and consequently most dogmatic of my
uncles came into a restaurant where I was dining, and found himself,
much against his will, in conversation with the most questionable of his
nephews. By way of making myself agreeable, I spoke of modern thought
and Darwin. He said, 'Oh, thats the fellow who wants to make out that we
all have tails like monkeys.' I tried to explain that what Darwin had
insisted on in this connection was that some monkeys have no tails.
But my uncle was as impervious to what Darwin really said as any
Neo-Darwinian nowadays. He died impenitent, and did not mention me in
his will.

Twenty years elapsed. If my uncle had been alive, he would have known
all about Darwin, and known it all wrong. In spite of the efforts of
Grant Allen to set him right, he would have accepted Darwin as the
discoverer of Evolution, of Heredity, and of modification of species by
Selection. For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark
Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard
scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo's
demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is
a moon of the sun, Newton's theory of gravitation, Sir Humphry Davy's
invention of the safety-lamp, the discovery of electricity, the
application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post. It was
just the same in other subjects. Thus Nietzsche, by the two or three who
had come across his writings, was supposed to have been the first man
to whom it occurred that mere morality and legality and urbanity lead
nowhere, as if Bunyan had never written Badman. Schopenhauer was
credited with inventing the distinction between the Covenant of Grace
and the Covenant of Works which troubled Cromwell on his deathbed.
People talked as if there had been no dramatic or descriptive music
before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to
myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring
innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long
rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of MoliГЁre; and to
lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.


THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-DARWINIANS

This particular sort of ignorance does not always or often matter. But
in Darwin's case it did matter. If Darwin had really led the world at
one bound from the book of Genesis to Heredity, to Modification of
Species by Selection, and to Evolution, he would have been a philosopher
and a prophet as well as an eminent professional naturalist, with
geology as a hobby. The delusion that he had actually achieved this
feat did no harm at first, because if people's views are sound, about
evolution or anything else, it does not make two straws difference
whether they call the revealer of their views Tom or Dick. But later on
such apparently negligible errors have awkward consequences. Darwin was
given an imposing reputation as not only an Evolutionist, but as _the_
Evolutionist, with the immense majority who never read his books.
The few who never read any others were led by them to concentrate
exclusively on Circumstantial Selection as the explanation of all the
transformations and adaptations which were the evidence for Evolution.
And they presently found themselves so cut off by this specialization
from the majority who knew Darwin only by his spurious reputation, that
they were obliged to distinguish themselves, not as Darwinians, but as
Neo-Darwinians.

Before ten more years had elapsed, the Neo-Darwinians were practically
running current Science. It was 1906; I was fifty; I published my own
view of evolution in a play called Man and Superman; and I found that
most people were unable to understand how I could be an Evolutionist
and not a Neo-Darwinian, or why I habitually derided Neo-Darwinism as
a ghastly idiocy, and would fall on its professors slaughterously in
public discussions. It was in the hope of making me clear the matter up
that the Fabian Society, which was then organizing a series of lectures
on Prophets of the Nineteenth Century, asked me to deliver a lecture
on the prophet Darwin. I did so; and scraps of that lecture, which was
never published, variegate these pages.


POLITICAL INADEQUACY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL

Ten more years elapsed. Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a
European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so
unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from
certain whether our civilization will survive it. The circumstances
of this catastrophe, the boyish cinema-fed romanticism which made it
possible to impose it on the people as a crusade, and especially the
ignorance and errors of the victors of Western Europe when its violent
phase had passed and the time for reconstruction arrived, confirmed a
doubt which had grown steadily in my mind during my forty years public
work as a Socialist: namely, whether the human animal, as he exists at
present, is capable of solving the social problems raised by his own
aggregation, or, as he calls it, his civilization.


COWARDICE OF THE IRRELIGIOUS

Another observation I had made was that goodnatured unambitious men are
cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and exploited not
only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will
do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the more childish and
selfish uses of money, but by able and sound administrators who can do
nothing else with them than dominate and exploit them. Government and
exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world
is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards.
Those who refuse to stand in with them are persecuted and occasionally
executed when they give any trouble to the exploiters. They fall into
poverty when they lack lucrative specific talents. At the present moment
one half of Europe, having knocked the other half down, is trying to
kick it to death, and may succeed: a procedure which is, logically,
sound Neo-Darwinism. And the goodnatured majority are looking on
in helpless horror, or allowing themselves to be persuaded by the
newspapers of their exploiters that the kicking is not only a sound
commercial investment, but an act of divine justice of which they are
the ardent instruments.

But if Man is really incapable of organizing a big civilization, and
cannot organize even a village or a tribe any too well, what is the use
of giving him a religion? A religion may make him hunger and thirst for
righteousness; but will it endow him with the practical capacity to
satisfy that appetite? Good intentions do not carry with them a grain of
political science, which is a very complicated one. The most devoted and
indefatigable, the most able and disinterested students of this science
in England, as far as I know, are my friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
It has taken them forty years of preliminary work, in the course of
which they have published several treatises comparable to Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations, to formulate a political constitution adequate to
existing needs. If this is the measure of what can be done in a
lifetime by extraordinary ability, keen natural aptitude, exceptional
opportunities, and freedom from the preoccupations of bread-winning,
what are we to expect from the parliament man to whom political science
is as remote and distasteful as the differential calculus, and to whom
such an elementary but vital point as the law of economic rent is a
_pons asinorum_ never to be approached, much less crossed? Or from the
common voter who is mostly so hard at work all day earning a living that
he cannot keep awake for five minutes over a book?


IS THERE ANY HOPE IN EDUCATION?

The usual answer is that we must educate our masters: that is,
ourselves. We must teach citizenship and political science at school.
But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must
_not_ teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster
who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets
without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded
indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the
morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the
military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of
the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see
through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals
whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new
generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the
fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending
the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them
the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance
than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the
educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion,
children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act
as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that
save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of
drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out
through the schoolmaster.


HOMEOPATHIC EDUCATION

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any
other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is
said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or
may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he
will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable
to cure himself the next time it attacks him. Therefore, if you want
to see a cat clean, you throw a bucket of mud over it, when it will
immediately take extraordinary pains to lick the mud off, and finally be
cleaner than it was before. In the same way doctors who are up-to-date
(BURGE-LUBIN per cent of all the registered practitioners, and 20 per
cent of the unregistered ones), when they want to rid you of a disease
or a symptom, inoculate you with that disease or give you a drug that
produces that symptom, in order to provoke you to resist it as the mud
provokes the cat to wash itself.

Now an acute person will ask me why, if this be so, our false education
does not provoke our scholars to find out the truth. My answer is that
it sometimes does. Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits; Samuel Butler
was the pupil of a hopelessly conventional and erroneous country parson.
But then Voltaire was Voltaire, and Butler was Butler: that is, their
minds were so abnormally strong that they could throw off the doses of
poison that paralyse ordinary minds. When the doctors inoculate you and
the homeopathists dose you, they give you an infinitesimally attenuated
dose. If they gave you the virus at full strength it would overcome your
resistance and produce its direct effect. The doses of false doctrine
given at public schools and universities are so big that they overwhelm
the resistance that a tiny dose would provoke. The normal student is
corrupted beyond redemption, and will drive the genius who resists out
of the country if he can. Byron and Shelley had to fly to Italy, whilst
Castlereagh and Eldon ruled the roost at home. Rousseau was hunted from
frontier to frontier; Karl Marx starved in exile in a Soho lodging;
Ruskin's articles were refused by the magazines (he was too rich to be
otherwise persecuted); whilst mindless forgotten nonentities governed
the land; sent men to the prison or the gallows for blasphemy and
sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State); and sedulously
stored up the social disease and corruption which explode from time to
time in gigantic boils that have to be lanced by a million bayonets.
This is the result of allopathic education. Homeopathic education has
not yet been officially tried, and would obviously be a delicate
matter if it were. A body of schoolmasters inciting their pupils to
infinitesimal peccadilloes with the object of provoking them to exclaim,
'Get thee behind me, Satan,' or telling them white lies about history
for the sake of being contradicted, insulted, and refuted, would
certainly do less harm than our present educational allopaths do; but
then nobody will advocate homeopathic education. Allopathy has produced
the poisonous illusion that it enlightens instead of darkening. The
suggestion may, however, explain why, whilst most people's minds succumb
to inculcation and environment, a few react vigorously: honest and
decent people coming from thievish slums, and sceptics and realists from
country parsonages.


THE DIABOLICAL EFFICIENCY OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

But meanwhile--and here comes the horror of it--our technical
instruction is honest and efficient. The public schoolboy who is
carefully blinded, duped, and corrupted as to the nature of a society
based on profiteering, and is taught to honor parasitic idleness and
luxury, learns to shoot and ride and keep fit with all the assistance
and guidance that can be procured for him by the most anxiously sincere
desire that he may do these things well, and if possible superlatively
well. In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns
to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is
rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons,
battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied
destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business,
and really mean the learners to succeed. The result is that powers
of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to
infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of
romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by
education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a
religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless
under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic
terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools,
commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own
industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the
money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely
because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple
purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of
public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting
ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune
because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford
to pay the piper. Neither the rulers nor the ruled understand high
politics. They do not even know that there is such a branch of knowledge
as political science; but between them they can coerce and enslave
with the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization,
because their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly
carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is
nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible
powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and
compel the rest to submit, because they have been taught to do so as
an article of religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural
enlightenment has reacted against artificial education submit because
they are compelled; but they would resist, and finally resist
effectively, if they were not cowards. And they are cowards because they
have neither an officially accredited and established religion nor a
generally recognized point of honor, and are all at sixes and sevens
with their various private speculations, sending their children perforce
to the schools where they will be corrupted for want of any other
schools. The rulers are equally intimidated by the immense extension
and cheapening of the means of slaughter and destruction. The British
Government is more afraid of Ireland now that submarines, bombs, and
poison gas are cheap and easily made than it was of the German Empire
before the war; consequently the old British custom which maintained a
balance of power through command of the sea is intensified into a terror
that sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the
entire globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible
in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians.


FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION

This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result
of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the
secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying
'Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,' and the poor, 'How long, O
Lord, how long?' But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those
who help themselves. This does not mean that if Man cannot find the
remedy no remedy will be found. The power that produced Man when the
monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if
Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man is to be
saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he
should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present
best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in
polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain
is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must
stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try
another experiment.

What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the
Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement
can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the
statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other
equally senseless accident.


CREATIVE EVOLUTION

But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the
impulse that produces evolution is creative. They have observed the
simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain
pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and
organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no
means played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus
of an athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable
to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put
up a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution
shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: providing
the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at
all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the
sea; enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the
fowl to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of
any sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our
resources.


VOLUNTARY LONGEVITY

Among other matters apparently changeable at will is the duration of
individual life. Weismann, a very clever and suggestive biologist who
was unhappily reduced to idiocy by Neo-Darwinism, pointed out that death
is not an eternal condition of life, but an expedient introduced to
provide for continual renewal without overcrowding. Now Circumstantial
Selection does not account for natural death: it accounts only for the
survival of species in which the individuals have sense enough to decay
and die on purpose. But the individuals do not seem to have calculated
very reasonably: nobody can explain why a parrot should live ten times
as long as a dog, and a turtle be almost immortal. In the case of man,
the operation has overshot its mark: men do not live long enough: they
are, for all the purposes of high civilization, mere children when they
die; and our Prime Ministers, though rated as mature, divide their
time between the golf course and the Treasury Bench in parliament.
Presumably, however, the same power that made this mistake can remedy
it. If on opportunist grounds Man now fixes the term of his life at
three score and ten years, he can equally fix it at three hundred, or
three thousand, or even at the genuine Circumstantial Selection limit,
which would be until a sooner-or-later-inevitable fatal accident makes
an end of the individual. All that is necessary to make him extend his
present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the late war shall
convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his taste for
golf and cigars if the race is to be saved. This is not fantastic
speculation: it is deductive biology, if there is such a science as
biology. Here, then, is a stone that we have left unturned, and that may
be worth turning. To make the suggestion more entertaining than it would
be to most people in the form of a biological treatise, I have written
Back to Methuselah as a contribution to the modern Bible.

Many people, however, can read treatises and cannot read Bibles. Darwin
could not read Shakespear. Some who can read both, like to learn the
history of their ideas. Some are so entangled in the current confusion
of Creative Evolution with Circumstantial Selection by their historical
ignorance that they are puzzled by any distinction between the two.
For all their sakes I must give here a little history of the conflict
between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians (though not
altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selection, and that
which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the
genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now anxiously
looking.


THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS

The idea of Evolution, or Transformation as it is now sometimes called,
was not first conceived by Charles Darwin, nor by Alfred Russel Wallace,
who observed the operation of Circumstantial Selection simultaneously
with Charles. The celebrated Buffoon was a better Evolutionist than
either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon was born, the Greek
philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of life are transformations
of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, effected by the two
innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love and hate. As lately
as 1860 I myself was taught as a child that everything was made out of
these four elements. Both the Empedocleans and the Evolutionists were
opposed to those who believed in the separate creation of all forms
of life as described in the book of Genesis. This 'conflict between
religion and science', as the phrase went then, did not perplex my
infant mind in the least: I knew perfectly well, without knowing that I
knew it, that the validity of a story is not the same as the occurrence
of a fact. But as I grew up I found that I had to choose between
Evolution and Genesis. If you believed that dogs and cats and snakes
and birds and beetles and oysters and whales and men and women were all
separately designed and made and named in Eden garden at the beginning
of things, and have since survived simply by reproducing their kind,
then you were not an Evolutionist. If you believed, on the contrary,
that all the different species are modifications, variations, and
elaborations of one primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then
you were an Evolutionist. But you were not necessarily a Darwinian; for
you might have been a modern Evolutionist twenty years before Charles
Darwin was born, and a whole lifetime before he published his Origin of
Species. For that matter, when Aristotle grouped animals with backbones
as blood relations, he began the sort of classification which, when
extended by Darwin to monkeys and men, so shocked my uncle.

Genesis had held the field until the time (1707-1778) of Linnaeus the
famous botanist. In the meantime the microscope had been invented. It
revealed a new world of hitherto invisible creatures called Infusorians,
as common water was found to be an infusion of them. In the eighteenth
century naturalists were very keen on the Infusorian Amoebas, and were
much struck by the way in which the members of this old family behaved
and developed. But it was still possible for Linnaeus to begin a
treatise by saying 'There are just so many species as there were forms
created in the beginning,' though there were hundreds of commonplace
Scotch gardeners, pigeon fanciers, and stock breeders then living who
knew better. Linnaeus himself knew better before he died. In the
last edition of his System of Nature, he began to wonder whether the
transmutation of species by variation might not be possible. Then came
the great poet who jumped over the facts to the conclusion. Goethe said
that all the shapes of creation were cousins; that there must be some
common stock from which all the species had sprung; that it was the
environment of air that had produced the eagle, of water the seal, and
of earth the mole. He could not say how this happened; but he divined
that it did happen. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, carried
the environment theory much further, pointing out instance after
instance of modifications made in species apparently to adapt it to
circumstances and environment: for instance, that the brilliant colors
of the leopard, which make it so conspicuous in Regent's Park, conceal
it in a tropical jungle. Finally he wrote, as his declaration of faith,
'The world has been evolved, not created: it has arisen little by little
from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the
elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than come
into being at an almighty word. What a sublime idea of the infinite
might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all
fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would
surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to
produce the effects themselves.' In this, published in the year 1794,
you have nineteenth-century Evolution precisely defined. And Erasmus
Darwin was by no means its only apostle. It was in the air then. A
German biologist named Treviranus, whose book was published in 1802,
wrote, 'In every living being there exists a capacity for endless
diversity of form. Each possesses the power of adapting its organization
to the variations of the external world; and it is this power, called
into activity by cosmic changes, which has enabled the simple zoophytes
of the primitive world to climb to higher and higher stages of
organization, and has brought endless variety into nature.' There you
have your evolution of Man from the amoeba all complete whilst Nelson
was still alive on the seas. And in 1809, before the battle of Waterloo,
a French soldier named Lamarck, who had beaten his musket into a
microscope and turned zoologist, declared that species were an illusion
produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they were
constantly changing and melting into one another and into new forms as
surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it moves so
slowly that it looks stationary to us. We have since come to think that
its industry is less continuous: that the clock stops for a long time,
and then is suddenly 'put on' by a mysterious finger. But never mind
that just at present.


THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-LAMARCKIANS

I call your special attention to Lamarck, because later on there were
Neo-Lamarckians as well as Neo-Darwinians. I was a Neo-Lamarckian.
Lamarck passed on from the conception of Evolution as a general law to
Charles Darwin's department of it, which was the method of Evolution.
Lamarck, whilst making many ingenious suggestions as to the reaction
of external causes on life and habit, such as changes of climate,
food supply, geological upheavals and so forth, really held as his
fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they
wanted to. As he stated it, the great factor in Evolution is use and
disuse. If you have no eyes, and want to see, and keep trying to see,
you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you
have eyes and dont want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like
eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your
energies on the stretching of your neck, you will finally get a long
neck, like the giraffe. This seems absurd to inconsiderate people at the
first blush; but it is within the personal experience of all of us that
it is just by this process that a child tumbling about the floor becomes
a boy walking erect; and that a man sprawling on the road with a bruised
chin, or supine on the ice with a bashed occiput, becomes a bicyclist
and a skater. The process is not continuous, as it would be if mere
practice had anything to do with it; for though you may improve at each
bicycling lesson _during_ the lesson, when you begin your next lesson
you do not begin at the point at which you left off: you relapse
apparently to the beginning. Finally, you succeed quite suddenly, and do
not relapse again. More miraculous still, you at once exercise the new
power unconsciously. Although you are adapting your front wheel to your
balance so elaborately and actively that the accidental locking of your
handle bars for a second will throw you off; though five minutes before
you could not do it at all, yet now you do it as unconsciously as you
grow your finger nails. You have a new faculty, and must have created
some new bodily tissue as its organ. And you have done it solely by
willing. For here there can be no question of Circumstantial Selection,
or the survival of the fittest. The man who is learning how to ride
a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in the struggle for
existence: quite the contrary. He has acquired a new habit, an automatic
unconscious habit, solely because he wanted to, and kept trying until it
was added unto him.


HOW ACQUIREMENTS ARE INHERITED

But when your son tries to skate or bicycle in his turn, he does not
pick up the accomplishment where you left it, any more than he is born
six feet high with a beard and a tall hat. The set-back that occurred
between your lessons occurs again. The race learns exactly as the
individual learns. Your son relapses, not to the very beginning, but to
a point which no mortal method of measurement can distinguish from the
beginning. Now this is odd; for certain other habits of yours, equally
acquired (to the Evolutionist, of course, all habits are acquired),
equally unconscious, equally automatic, are transmitted without any
perceptible relapse. For instance, the very first act of your son
when he enters the world as a separate individual is to yell with
indignation: that yell which Shakespear thought the most tragic and
piteous of all sounds. In the act of yelling he begins to breathe:
another habit, and not even a necessary one, as the object of breathing
can be achieved in other ways, as by deep sea fishes. He circulates his
blood by pumping it with his heart. He demands a meal, and proceeds at
once to perform the most elaborate chemical operations on the food he
swallows. He manufactures teeth; discards them; and replaces them with
fresh ones. Compared to these habitual feats, walking, standing upright,
and bicycling are the merest trifles; yet it is only by going through
the wanting, trying process that he can stand, walk, or cycle, whereas
in the other and far more difficult and complex habits he not only does
not consciously want nor consciously try, but actually consciously
objects very strongly. Take that early habit of cutting the teeth: would
he do that if he could help it? Take that later habit of decaying and
eliminating himself by death--equally an acquired habit, remember--how
he abhors it! Yet the habit has become so rooted, so automatic, that he
must do it in spite of himself, even to his own destruction.

We have here a routine which, given time enough for it to operate, will
finally produce the most elaborate forms of organized life on Lamarckian
lines without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection at all. If
you can turn a pedestrian into a cyclist, and a cyclist into a pianist
or violinist, without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection, you
can turn an amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All
of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if
you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but
inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration.

Let us fix the Lamarckian evolutionary process well in our minds. You
are alive; and you want to be more alive. You want an extension of
consciousness and of power. You want, consequently, additional organs,
or additional uses of your existing organs: that is, additional habits.
You get them because you want them badly enough to keep trying for them
until they come. Nobody knows how: nobody knows why: all we know is that
the thing actually takes place. We relapse miserably from effort to
effort until the old organ is modified or the new one created, when
suddenly the impossible becomes possible and the habit is formed. The
moment we form it we want to get rid of the consciousness of it so as
to economize our consciousness for fresh conquests of life; as all
consciousness means preoccupation and obstruction. If we had to think
about breathing or digesting or circulating our blood we should have
no attention to spare for anything else, as we find to our cost when
anything goes wrong with these operations. We want to be unconscious of
them just as we wanted to acquire them; and we finally win what we want.
But we win unconsciousness of our habits at the cost of losing our
control of them; and we also build one habit and its corresponding
functional modification of our organs on another, and so become
dependent on our old habits. Consequently we have to persist in them
even when they hurt us. We cannot stop breathing to avoid an attack of
asthma, or to escape drowning. We can lose a habit and discard an organ
when we no longer need them, just as we acquired them; but this process
is slow and broken by relapses; and relics of the organ and the habit
long survive its utility. And if other and still indispensable habits
and modifications have been built on the ones we wish to discard, we
must provide a new foundation for them before we demolish the old one.
This is also a slow process and a very curious one.


THE MIRACLE OF CONDENSED RECAPITULATION

The relapses between the efforts to acquire a habit are important
because, as we have seen, they recur not only from effort to effort in
the case of the individual, but from generation to generation in the
case of the race. This relapsing from generation to generation is an
invariable characteristic of the evolutionary process. For instance,
Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of
painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever
handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest,
and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown
adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully
grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to
struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was
indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a
backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time
doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress untold
centuries of development into nine months before he was human enough
to break loose as an independent being. And even then he was still so
incomplete that his parents might well have exclaimed 'Good Heavens!
have you learnt nothing from our experience that you come into the world
in this ridiculously elementary state? Why cant you talk and walk and
paint and behave decently?' To that question Baby Raphael had no answer.
All he could have said was that this is how evolution or transformation
happens. The time may come when the same force that compressed the
development of millions of years into nine months may pack many more
millions into even a shorter space; so that Raphaels may be born
painters as they are now born breathers and blood circulators. But they
will still begin as specks of protoplasm, and acquire the faculty of
painting in their mother's womb at quite a late stage of their embryonic
life. They must recapitulate the history of mankind in their own
persons, however briefly they may condense it.

Nothing was so astonishing and significant in the discoveries of the
embryologists, nor anything so absurdly little appreciated, as this
recapitulation, as it is now called: this power of hurrying up into
months a process which was once so long and tedious that the mere
contemplation of it is unendurable by men whose span of life is
three-score-and-ten. It widened human possibilities to the extent of
enabling us to hope that the most prolonged and difficult operation of
our minds may yet become instantaneous, or, as we call it, instinctive.
It also directed our attention to examples of this packing up of
centuries into seconds which were staring us in the face in all
directions. As I write these lines the newspapers are occupied by the
exploits of a child of eight, who has just defeated twenty adult chess
players in twenty games played simultaneously, and has been able
afterwards to reconstruct all the twenty games without any apparent
effort of memory. Most people, including myself, play chess (when they
play it at all) from hand to mouth, and can hardly recall the last move
but one, or foresee the next but two. Also, when I have to make an
arithmetical calculation, I have to do it step by step with pencil and
paper, slowly, reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result
that I dare not act on it without 'proving' the sum by a further
calculation involving more ciphering. But there are men who can neither
read, write, nor cipher, to whom the answer to such sums as I can do
is instantly obvious without any conscious calculation at all; and the
result is infallible. Yet some of these natural arithmeticians have but
a small vocabulary; are at a loss when they have to find words for any
but the simplest everyday occasions; and cannot for the life of them
describe mechanical operations which they perform daily in the course of
their trade; whereas to me the whole vocabulary of English literature,
from Shakespear to the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
is so completely and instantaneously at my call that I have never had
to consult even a thesaurus except once or twice when for some reason I
wanted a third or fourth synonym. Again, though I have tried and failed
to draw recognizable portraits of persons I have seen every day for
years, Mr Bernard Partridge, having seen a man once, will, without more
strain than is involved in eating a sandwich, draw him to the life. The
keyboard of a piano is a device I have never been able to master; yet Mr
Cyril Scott uses it exactly as I use my own fingers; and to Sir Edward
Elgar an orchestral score is as instantaneously intelligible at sight as
a page of Shakespear is to me. One man cannot, after trying for years,
finger the flute fluently. Another will take up a flute with a newly
invented arrangement of keys on it, and play it at once with hardly a
mistake. We find people to whom writing is so difficult that they prefer
to sign their name with a mark, and beside them men who master systems
of shorthand and improvise new systems of their own as easily as they
learnt the alphabet. These contrasts are to be seen on all hands, and
have nothing to do with variations in general intelligence, nor even
in the specialized intelligence proper to the faculty in question: for
example, no composer or dramatic poet has ever pretended to be able to
perform all the parts he writes for the singers, actors, and players who
are his executants. One might as well expect Napoleon to be a fencer, or
the Astronomer Royal to know how many beans make five any better than
his bookkeeper. Even exceptional command of language does not imply the
possession of ideas to express; Mezzofanti, the master of fifty-eight
languages, had less to say in them than Shakespear with his little Latin
and less Greek; and public life is the paradise of voluble windbags.

All these examples, which might be multiplied by millions, are cases in
which a long, laborious, conscious, detailed process of acquirement has
been condensed into an instinctive and unconscious inborn one. Factors
which formerly had to be considered one by one in succession are
integrated into what seems a single simple factor. Chains of hardly
soluble problems have coalesced in one problem which solves itself
the moment it is raised. What is more, they have been pushed back (or
forward, if you like) from post-natal to pre-natal ones. The child
in the womb may take some time over them; but it is a miraculously
shortened time.

The time phenomena involved are curious, and suggest that we are either
wrong about our history or else that we enormously exaggerate the
periods required for the pre-natal acquirement of habits. In the
nineteenth century we talked very glibly about geological periods, and
flung millions of eons about in the most lordly manner in our reaction
against Archbishop Ussher's chronology. We had a craze for big figures,
and positively liked to believe that the progress made by the child in
the womb in a month was represented in prehistoric time by ages and
ages. We insisted that Evolution advanced more slowly than any snail
ever crawled, and that Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds. This
was all very well as long as we were dealing with such acquired habits
as breathing or digestion. It was possible to believe that dozens of
epochs had gone to the slow building up of these habits. But when we
have to consider the case of a man born not only as an accomplished
metabolist, but with such an aptitude for shorthand and keyboard
manipulation that he is a stenographer or pianist at least five sixths
ready-made as soon as he can control his hands intelligently, we
are forced to suspect either that keyboards and shorthand are older
inventions than we suppose, or else that acquirements can be assimilated
and stored as congenital qualifications in a shorter time than we think;
so that, as between Lyell and Archbishop Ussher, the laugh may not be
with Lyell quite so uproariously as it seemed fifty years ago.


HEREDITY AN OLD STORY

It is evident that the evolutionary process is a hereditary one, or,
to put it less drily, that human life is continuous and immortal. The
Evolutionists took heredity for granted. So did everybody. The human
mind has been soaked in heredity as long back as we can trace its
thought. Hereditary peers, hereditary monarchs, hereditary castes and
trades and classes were the best known of social institutions, and in
some cases of public nuisances. Pedigree men counted pedigree dogs and
pedigree horses among their most cherished possessions. Far from being
unconscious of heredity, or sceptical, men were insanely credulous about
it: they not only believed in the transmission of qualities and habits
from generation to generation, but expected the son to begin mentally
where the father left off.

This belief in heredity led naturally to the practice of Intentional
Selection. Good blood and breeding were eagerly sought after in human
marriage. In dealing with plants and animals, selection with a view to
the production of new varieties and the improvement and modification of
species had been practised ever since men began to cultivate them. My
pre-Darwinian uncle knew as well as Darwin that the race-horse and the
dray-horse are not separate creations from the Garden of Eden, but
adaptations by deliberate human selection of the medieval war-horse to
modern racing and industrial haulage. He knew that there are nearly
two hundred different sorts of dogs, all capable of breeding with one
another and of producing cross varieties unknown to Adam. He knew that
the same thing is true of pigeons. He knew that gardeners had spent
their lives trying to breed black tulips and green carnations and
unheard-of orchids, and had actually produced flowers just as strange
to Eve. His quarrel with the Evolutionists was not a quarrel with the
evidence for Evolution: he had accepted enough of it to prove Evolution
ten times over before he ever heard of it. What he repudiated was
cousinship with the ape, and the implied suspicion of a rudimentary
tail, because it was offensive to his sense of his own dignity, and
because he thought that apes were ridiculous, and tails diabolical when
associated with the erect posture. Also he believed that Evolution was
a heresy which involved the destruction of Christianity, of which, as
a member of the Irish Church (the pseudo-Protestant one), he conceived
himself a pillar. But this was only his ignorance; for man may deny his
descent from an ape and be eligible as a churchwarden without being any
the less a convinced Evolutionist.


DISCOVERY ANTICIPATED BY DIVINATION

What is more, the religious folk can claim to be among the pioneers of
Evolutionism. Weismann, Neo-Darwinist though he was, devoted a long
passage in his History of Evolution to the Nature Philosophy of Lorenz
Oken, published in 1809. Oken defined natural science as 'the science
of the everlasting transmutations of the Holy Ghost in the world.' His
religion had started him on the right track, and not only led him to
think out a whole scheme of Evolution in abstract terms, but guided his
aim in a significantly good scientific shot which brought him within the
scope of Weismann. He not only defined the original substance from which
all forms of life have developed as protoplasm, or, as he called it,
primitive slime (_Urschleim_), but actually declared that this slime
took the form of vesicles out of which the universe was built. Here was
the modern cell morphology guessed by a religious thinker long before
the microscope and the scalpel forced it on the vision of mere
laboratory workers who could not think and had no religion. They worked
hard to discover the vital secrets of the glands by opening up dogs
and cutting out the glands, or tying up their ducts, or severing their
nerves, thereby learning, negatively, that the governors of our vital
forces do not hold their incessant conversations through the nerves,
and, positively, how miserably a horribly injured dog can die, leaving
us to infer that we shall probably perish likewise if we grudge our
guineas to Harley Street. Lorenz Oken _thought_ very hard to find out
what was happening to the Holy Ghost, and thereby made a contribution of
extraordinary importance to our understanding of uninjured creatures.
The man who was scientific enough to see that the Holy Ghost is a
scientific fact got easily in front of the blockheads who could only
sin against it. Hence my uncle was turning his back on very respectable
company when he derided Evolution, and would probably have recanted and
apologized at once had anybody pointed out to him what a solecism he was
committing.