" {148}
After meeting this theory with answers which need not detain us, he
continues:--
"The senses of animals appear to me quite incapable of receiving the
explanation of their origin which this theory affords. Including under
the word 'sense' the organ and the perception, we have no account of
either. How will our philosopher get at vision or make an eye? Or,
suppose the eye formed, would the perception follow? The same of the
other senses. And this objection holds its force, ascribe what you will
to the hand of time, to the power of habit, to changes too slow to be
observed by man, or brought within any comparison which he is able to
make of past things with the present. Concede what you please to these
arbitrary and unattested superstitions, how will they help you? Here is
no inception. No laws, no course, no powers of nature which prevail at
present, nor any analogous to these would give commencement to a new
sense; and it is in vain to inquire how that might proceed which would
never _begin_."
In answer to this, let us suppose that some inhabitants of another world
were to see a modern philosopher so using a microscope that they should
believe it to be a part of the philosopher's own person, which he could
cut off from and join again to himself at pleasure, and suppose there
were a controversy as to how this microscope had originated, and that one
party maintained the man had made it little by little because he wanted
it, while the other declared this to be absurd and impossible; I ask,
would this latter party be justified in arguing that microscopes could
never have been perfected by degrees through the preservation of and
accumulation of small successive improvements inasmuch as men could not
have begun to want to use microscopes until they had had a microscope
which should show them that such an instrument would be useful to them,
and that hence there is nothing to account for the _beginning_ of
microscopes, which might indeed make some progress when once originated,
but which could never originate?
It might be pointed out to such a reasoner, firstly, that as regards any
acquired power the various stages in the acquisition of which he might be
supposed able to remember, he would find that logic notwithstanding, the
wish did originate the power, and yet was originated by it, both coming
up gradually out of something which was not recognisable as either power
or wish, and advancing through vain beating of the air, to a vague
effort, and from this to definite effort with failure, and from this to
definite effort with success, and from this to success with little
consciousness of effort, and from this to success with such complete
absence of effort that he now acts unconsciously and without power of
introspection, and that, do what he will, he can rarely or never draw a
sharp dividing line whereat anything shall be said to begin, though none
less certain that there has been a continuity in discontinuity, and a
discontinuity in continuity between it and certain other past things;
moreover, that his opponents postulated so much beginning of the
microscope as that there should be a dew-drop, even as our evolutionists
start with a sense of touch, of which sense all the others are
modifications, so that not one of them, but is resolvable into touch by
more or less easy stages; and secondly, that the question is one of fact
and of the more evident deductions therefrom, and should not be carried
back to those remote beginnings where the nature of the facts is so
purely a matter of conjecture and inference.
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