The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
be sure, never heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal
far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he
allowed it to drift alone.
I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the
environment in _mental_ evolution. After what I have already said, I
may be quite concise. Here, if anywhere, it would seem at first sight
as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic,
and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its
conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must
result from {246} a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already
defined of that word. We know what a vast part of our mental furniture
consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience. The entire
field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here. The
entire field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us with
the language into which we were born belongs here also. And, more than
this, there is reason to think that the order of 'outer relations'
experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which
the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted
by his mind.[14] The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which certain
parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other
parts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and our
attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental
experiences shall begin. It might, accordingly, seem as if there were
no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have
found so useful between 'spontaneous variation,' as the producer of
changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer,
did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the
parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be
quite right with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "The
cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency
with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has
been repeated in experience."[15]
{247}
But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in
holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here. I maintain that
the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata of the mind,
so to speak,--from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the
region of intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes.
And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental
departments which are highest, which are most characteristically human,
Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact
the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are
originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental
out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the
excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply
confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or
destroys,--selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and
social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.
It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a
simple order are very literal. They are slaves of habit, doing what
they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and
matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse
physical kind which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for
granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single
gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration. But
{248} even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring,
and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of
inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of
alternative choice. When we descend to the brutes, all these
peculiarities are intensified. No reader of Schopenhauer can forget
his frequent allusions to the _trockener ernst_ of dogs and horses, nor
to their _ehrlichkeit_. And every noticer of their ways must receive a
deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
and treadmill-like operations of their minds.
But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of
thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten
track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and
transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions
and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the
subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly
introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is
fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where
partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine
is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. According to the
idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one
character or another. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will
be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of
dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic
abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains
of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical
sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of
moral harmony. But, whatever their {249} differences may be, they will
all agree in this,--that their genesis is sudden and, as it were,
spontaneous. That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind
of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although,
when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may
thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom
it first occurred.
To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically
pointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the
number of these random notions and guesses which visit the
investigator's mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first
requisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience
contradicts them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tables
of instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one might as
well expect a chemist's note-book to write down the name of the body
analyzed, or a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of
probabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of
mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient
to make _any_ brain conceive their law. The conceiving of the law is a
spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term. It flashes
out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain
is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction.
But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad
flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an
exact equality in respect of their origin. Aristotle's absurd Physics
and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce
the one produce the other. {250} When walking along the street,
thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile
at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an
intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that
moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of the
same reservoir,--the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction of
images in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency has
long ceased to be the dominant law. But to the thought, when it is
once engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relations
may come. The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten. The
scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification.
I read, write, experiment, consult experts. Everything corroborates my
notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to
review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am
enshrined in the Pantheon of the great diviners of nature's ways. The
environment _preserves_ the conception which it was unable to _produce_
in any brain less idiosyncratic than my own.
Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at
particular moments into particular ideas and combinations are matched
by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards
determinate directions. The humorous bent is quite characteristic; the
sentimental one equally so. And the personal tone of each mind, which
makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, more
attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is
equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the
forces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the
{251} environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in a
certain way. Here again the selection goes on. The products of the
mind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease the
community. We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene. We
are fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of
woe. The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and alters
its tone. The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is
(_pace_ Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run the
gauntlet of the larger environment's selective power. Civilized
Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars, poets, princes, and
theologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in the
Albigensian crusade. France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs
and Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward relations.
Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its Humboldts and its Steins,
proved itself in the most signal way 'adjusted' to its environment in
1872.
Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,[17]
tries to show the necessary order in which the development of
conceptions in the human race occurs. No abstract conception can be
developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached
a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so
forth.
"Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in _law_, is a
belief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable....
Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the conception
of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations.... The
daily {252} impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very
imperfectly, and in but few cases. Of all the objects around,--trees,
stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,--most differ
widely, ... and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to make
discrimination difficult. Even between animals of the same species it
rarely happens that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in just
the same attitudes.... It is only along with a gradual development of
the arts ... that there come frequent experiences of perfectly straight
lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of
equality and inequality. Still more devoid is savage life of the
experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of
succession. The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day
seem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous trait
among them.... So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a
whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is
the notion which it tends to generate.... Only as fast as the practice
of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of