The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
what it now is. One fact involved in the difference might be that the
particular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the
sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particular
moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particular
serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing
the stone. But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any
one who {217} was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlook
the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an
agent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, the
westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky
way. If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
at the table, died because of that ominous feast. I know, in fact, one
such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident. "There are no
accidents," I might say, "for science. The whole history of the world
converged to produce that slip. If anything had been left out, the
slip would not have occurred just there and then. To say it would is
to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe. The
real cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions which
engendered the slip_,--and among them his having sat at a table, six
months previous, one among thirteen. _That_ is truly the reason why he
died within the year."
It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here.
I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination. But
unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
would be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. And
the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples. Our problem is, What are the
causes that make communities change from generation to
generation,--that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
that of thirty years ago?
I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
their decisions. The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control. They
are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks,
the Joneses and the Smiths.
Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely the same
fallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinner
with thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way. Like the
dog in the fable, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, they
drop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible human
point of view are available or attainable. Their fallacy is a
practical one. Let us see where it lies. Although I believe in
free-will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, and
assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions.
On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligence
investigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and
omnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a single
glance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way or
the fatal feast being {219} invoked among the sought-for causes. Such
a divine intelligence would see instantaneously all the infinite lines
of convergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover, see
impartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much a condition of
the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with the
stone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.
The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan.
It has no such power of universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it
to see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider
sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so
doing to drop all concrete truths. Thus, in the present case, if we as
men wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and
the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only by
falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract
proposition. We must say, All things in the world are fatally
predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system
of natural law. But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the
concrete links are the only things of importance. The human mind is
essentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by _picking out_
what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,--by narrowing its
point of view. Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed,
and it loses its way altogether. Man always wants his curiosity
gratified for a particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow,
the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the
cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to
{220} survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile
escape. And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves
in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice
the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow,
who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door,
and fall and break his head too.
It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our
view. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and
neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted
in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out all the
'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering. He treats them
(under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they
exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist
for the purposes of his calculation. Just so an astronomer, in dealing
with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves
made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and
night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so the
marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but
not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system. Just so
a business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes,
while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each
thousandth of a second.
There are, in short, _different cycles of operation_ in nature;
different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one
another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible
with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next. The
mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a {221} man-of-war vegetates
in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction
of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on
board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all
these larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any
chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learn
something of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who in
manoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary
to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely
lose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind.
The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected
with one another only _if we take the whole universe into account_.
For all lesser points of view it is lawful--nay, more, it is for human
wisdom necessary--to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one
another.
And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look at an
animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the
possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be
able to discriminate between the causes which originally _produced_ the
peculiarity in him and the causes that _maintain_ it after it is
produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born
with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant
cycles. It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, and
to act accordingly. Separating the causes of production under the
title of 'tendencies to spontaneous variation,' and relegating them to
a physiological cycle which he forthwith {222} agreed to ignore
altogether,[2] he confined his attention to the causes of preservation,
and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied
them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment.
Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine of
descent with modification; but they all committed the blunder of
clumping the two cycles of causation into one. What preserves an
animal with his peculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be the
nature of the environment to which the peculiarity was adjusted. The
giraffe with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there are
in his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest. But these
philosophers went further, and said that the presence of the trees not
only maintained an animal with a long neck to browse upon their
branches, but also produced him. They _made_ his neck long by the
constant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them. The
environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould the
animal by a kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses the
wax into harmony with itself. Numerous instances were given of the way
in which this goes on under our eyes. The exercise of the forge makes
the right arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountain
air distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and the chased
bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal combustion, and so
forth. Now these changes, of which many more examples might be
adduced, are {223} at present distinguished by the special name of
_adaptive_ changes. Their peculiarity is that that very feature in the
environment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself
produces the adjustment. The 'inner relation,' to use Mr. Spencer's
phrase, 'corresponds' with its own efficient cause.
Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance in
amount of these changes produced by direct adaptation, the immensely
greater mass of changes being produced by internal molecular accidents,
of which we know nothing. His next achievement was to define the true
problem with which we have to deal when we study the effects of the
visible environment on the animal. That problem is simply this; Is the
environment more likely to _preserve or to destroy him_, on account of
this or that peculiarity with which he may be born? In giving the name
of 'accidental variations' to those peculiarities with which an animal
is born, Darwin does not for a moment mean to suggest that they are not
the fixed outcome of natural law. If the total system of the universe