By revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the scientific principle of Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative life. It has shown us that we are never less free to act than when we try to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of the Fates, and the most terrible. It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.

OSCAR WILDE (1891) 

The problem of how human characteristics are transmitted from one generation to the next has always been given an answer of one sort or another; but as a scientific problem it was not faced squarely before the perfecting of microscopic techniques and the rise of embryological studies with the work of K.F. Wolff about 1760. Only then did it become clear that, however the information of inheritance is packed, the spermatozoon is observably not just a minute version of the adult. For the most popular theory of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been that the total number of individuals who were ever going to be born from the Creation to Armageddon were packed into the primordial egg like a series of Chinese dolls. 'Dans cette hypothese,' one summarist of this strange theory tells us, 'il n'y a plus creation, ni formation, mais Evolution de germes preexistants ou toutes les parties de l'etre futur sont indiquees par avance et n'ont qu'a grandir et a se developper'.² The proponents of emboitement were not of course troubled by any considerations of limits on the divisibility of matter; and this makes Delage's prints of early drawings (allegedly taken from life) of spermatozoa which illustrate this layered arrangement of mannikins specially quaint, as well as incidentally supplying good examples of preconceptions controlling observation.

Pari passu, the same strictures apply to the theories of inheritance current at the end of the nineteenth century. Not only were these numerous and short-lived - Delage lists no less than thirty different systems current in 1896, few of which survived far into the next century - but also their advocates changed allegiances with bewildering rapidity. A biologist philosopher like Hans Driesch (1867-1941), for example, began as a pupil of Ernst Haeckel, a fierce evolutionary materialist who had an explanation for heredity based on the mechanical vibration of the muscles; later he worked with August Weismann, the founder of the neo-Darwinian school, in 1886; yet he lived to become an aggressive vitalist, to whom Darwinism was 'a discarded theory . . . an insult to the reader'.3 As was the case with several other of the theoreticians in this field, Driesch's early training among the Darwinians made him a formidable opponent and his criticism very highly pointed. He handled Darwin with particular roughness over his treatment of the problem of variation. It was a keystone in the original natural selection hypothesis, of course, that no saltatory factors like mutations were of any significance, and Darwin was thus forced back to rely on the exclusive action of individual differences. Darwin could not satisfactorily explain why these occurred, either; but he also knew as an empiricist that the only real scientifically persuasive knowledge is that of cause and effect. Convinced that the enormous effects of variation aided by population pressure could account for all evolution, Darwin at first simply assigned the cause of variation to chance. In most contexts this is a disagreeably ambiguous term, and even after Darwin had tried to refine it two meanings can still be distinguished in his writings. Sometimes Darwin obviously wished it to be translated as 'ignorance', and therefore not to be taken as a vera causa. This is how T.H. Huxley always took it: 'because no law has yet been made out, Darwin is obliged to speak of variation as if it were spontaneous'?4 But at other times Darwin and especially some of his followers went farther to speak of variation as a truly random process, conforming to no discernible law at all. They spoke of it as unwilled, unplanned, as not being 'called out' by any specific circumstances, as not moving forward to any observable end. For this second assertion the Darwinians had no proof. As the negative phrasing in their definition suggests, the only value of the assertion of randomness was simply in its lying at the most distant possible remove from teleological explanation. Placing on one side the actual truth in this matter, the ambiguity in the Darwinian view of heredity is still of great interest because while it existed it deflected many theorists into unverifiable speculation against which no observable facts might be set.

Darwin himself, having laid down the cause of variation to chance or to unknown factors, then did his best to fill the gap by presenting a theory, pangenesis, which essentially is no more than the reworking of an ancient Greek idea. Pangenesis represents Darwin's final movement into a position where he accepted the workings of 'soft' factors in heredity, though it came surprisingly early in his career - it may even pre-date the Origin. His first public account of it forms the twenty-seventh chapter of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868).5 According to this hypothesis, all parts of the body - or the cells which constitute it manufacture and then throw off particles (the so-called 'pangenes' which obviously owe something to Spencer's 'physiological units') which move through the bloodstream and conglomerate in the reproductive organs. Here they become the components of heredity in egg and sperm. Darwin did not imagine his pangenes to be themselves cells, but only to be capable of constructing or turning into cells. He further imagined that the actual quantity of pangenes produced by each organ of the body was controlled by the activity of that organ or by its development, or by the intensity of the environmental pressures upon it. To explain the transport of pangenes to the reproductive organs, Darwin spoke of a mysterious 'mutual affinity' between them; possibly he supposed that the ova and spermatozoa are themselves just aggregated packets of pangenes, for he certainly shared in the common mistake of his time about the physiology of reproduction in believing that the whole mass of sperm is the fertilising agent and that the sex of the embryo and the resemblance to its father will depend on the amount of sperm released. One immediate difficulty with pangenesis, which Darwin was very much alive to and tried to deal with at once, is that it would in action be too grossly Lamarckian to square with common observation. It is not only Lamarckian, for Darwin supposed that the rearrangement and redistribution of pangenes could explain the blending of characteristics, along the lines of modern genetic theory; but certainly, if the theory were true, one could expect that the inherited acquired skills and other modifications passed from parent to child would swamp all others. To resolve this difficulty, Darwin's further supposition was that most pangenes remain dormant and exercise no influence on inheritance, the ones that do being only those from the most mature parent ceils. This, though ingenious, does not disguise the fact that natural selection and pangenesis do tend in opposite directions conceptually; nor that Darwin's theory, like Samuel Butler's, was an armchair theory without any physiological backing. The merit of pangenesis derived solely from the reputation of its originator and in itself had no firmer empirical basis than any of the dozens of other theories popular at the time. The only experimental test done for pangenetic effects - by Francis Gaiton, who tried transfusing blood (ex hypothesi containing pangenes) from one variety of rabbit to another - naturally yielded negative results.

Francis Gaiton, whose whole career as a eugenist was shadowed by his inability to resolve the issue of particulate versus blended heredity in favour of the former, well conveys the general imbroglio in this part of biology in the 1880s when, looking back in his autobiography from 1908, he recalls how

the subject of human heredity had never been squarely faced, and opinions were lax and contradictory. It seems hardly credible now that even the word heredity was then considered fanciful and unusual. I was chaffed by a cultured friend for adopting it from the French.6

And if that were already true by 1908 how much more difficult it is now to reconstruct the clashings of those ignorant armies! There is, after all, nothing quite so dead as dead science; nor anything quite so unappealing as quarrels over what were, as it turned out, inadequately substantiated facts. And yet to understand some of the literary activity which was set in motion by ideas of inheritance we must think ourselves into that group state of mind which appears even to the most capable scientific historian of the period to be one of 'documented qualification and nagging doubt'.7

To try to capture something of that atmosphere we cannot do better than refer to the retrospective account of one who lived through those days in active engagement but who never occupied a position of extreme partisanship. The career of William Bateson (1861-1926) fully spans the relevant period, and in the later 1880s and the 1890s he was a prime mover in establishing the exact limits of the variation problem even though he made no real contribution to its solution. Bateson began as a Lamarckian; but not (unusually) as a Lamarckian content to argue his case without extensive fieldwork. He abandoned it with some reluctance only after he had convinced himself that there was no evidence for it in the wild. Later on he was instantly receptive to the rediscovery of Mendelism - there is an anecdote of him completely rewriting a lecture in Mendelian terms while in a train en route to deliver it, after he read of that rediscovery in a journal - and in his spirited defence of Mendelism (1902) he refers to the occasion as 'a moment of rejoicing'. Though much the larger part of this defence turns on highly technical questions and the need for it has long since passed by, the preface, where Bateson looks back on the frustrating pre-Mendelian days, is particularly evocative. Bateson's usually spare prose takes a metaphorical turn as he describes how progress in theoretical biology had ceased and how 'the more prudent' researchers left for fields 'where the harvest is less precarious or the yield more immediate'. We get a strong impression of the intellectual sterility surrounding the active young biologist in the 1880s, and the impression is reinforced as Bateson goes on (probably with one of his own arduous and disappointing field expeditions in mind) to speak of those admirable souls who remained to push through 'the jungle of phenomena' in contrast to those who were, he concludes bitterly, 'content supinely to rest on the great clearing Darwin had made long since'~8 - an image combining imputations of laziness, arrogance and a slack readiness to confuse partial formulations with definite solutions. Nor did the passage of several more years exhaust Bateson's lode of scorn. In an article commemorating Darwin's birth he returned to the attack, now abandoning figurative expression for the round assertion that one of the 'melancholy sequela' of Darwinism was 'the process of attrition' in the stock of evidence about variation and heredity. Should you be interested in the prehistory of genetics, warns Bateson, you will have to do more than thumb through the back copies of Nature: there is 'little to reward [your] quest in the leading scientific Journals of the Darwinian epoch'?~9 Now, the charge is a good deal more serious than of idleness among Darwin's apprentices. It is the one which we have already several times mentioned: that Darwinism with its appeals to some nebulous 'chance' provoked a great deal of woolly theory but little experimental work. It is no wonder that Mendelism, once it had become common currency after 1900, produced a great sense of intellectual release in those like Bateson who were trained in the biometric school of Gaiton, Pearson and Weldon. Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer, reflecting on his early life at the turn of the century, has spoken of the 'leap from the sombre Gaiton-Pearson period into the bright day of Mendelism'.~10 The oddity is that the 'leap' had in reality been made thirty-five years before.

Gregor Mendel's experiments showing particulate inheritance in peas (begun 1856; first published 1865) effectively superannuated all previous speculation about the mechanism of inheritance, by dispensing with what Garrett Hardin has called the 'paint-pot' or blending theory~11 which Darwin and the eugenists had taken for granted, and thereby placing natural selection on a firm statistical basis. Mendelism and Darwinism, the two prime axioms of modern biology which perfectly interlock with each counteracting the deficiencies and limitations of the other, came to fruition in the same decade. The baffling problem of why Mendel's important paper 'Versuche uber Pflanzenhybriden' should have been neglected for so long, and the equally baffling fact of three independent researchers duplicating his results in the single year 1900, continue to haunt the historian of ideas and to intrigue those desiring to integrate scientific discovery into one prevailing cultural Zeitgeist. Fancifully, one might almost suppose that the pressure to make some sense out of the confusion in biology grew so intense that the enigma suddenly capitulated on three fronts simultaneously. Many more prosaic solutions have been proposed, ranging from the obscurity of the original paper in the Transactions of the Brunn Natural Science Society to the blunt accusation that Mendel or an assistant faked certain critical ratios to accord with a predicted distribution of characteristics, which made strict repeatability impossible.~12 None of these really satisfies. After a most careful review of the whole problem, Elizabeth Gasking arrives back at a simple generalisation with which we, holding in mind the literary trends of this period, can wholeheartedly concur: 'one is forced to conclude that Mendel was ignored because his whole way of looking at the phenomena of inheritance was foreign to the scientific thought of his time ... [while in 1900 ] his problems were the problems of the time'. ~13 The first half of this statement can in fact be sustained purely in terms of biological history. First, one of the few contacts Mendel had in the larger scientific world, Karl Nageli of Munich, let him down badly by condescendingly laying aside his statistical treatment not as false but as simply trivial; and in fact Nageli's massive synthetic volume of 1884, devoted entirely to problems of inheritance, does not mention Mendel's name once.~14 Second, all the evidence suggests that even had Darwin had Mendel's laws before him as he prepared the fourth edition of the Origin he would not have altered his conclusions one jot and certainly would not have retreated from that part of his explanation for evolution based on the use and disuse of organic function. This is not unsupported speculation.~15 Some experiments on plant hybridisation other than Mendel's were carried out in the early 1860s by Charles Naudin (1815-99) and, though he obtained no results consistent enough to be dignified as 'laws' he discovered enough to publish a testable hypothesis of particulate inheritance. Darwin rejected it in a letter of 13 September 1864.~16

We do not have to search for the reason. Darwin was firmly caught in a cleft stick. One the one hand, any theory of blending inheritance was, after Fleeming Jenkin's critique, fatally damaging to natural selection (Mendel was no evolutionist, but he did note that his laws solved the Darwinians' 'paint-pot' problem); on the other, Darwin had already committed himself irretrievably with pangenesis to a highly fluid view of variation as a phenomenon modifiable in many ways - and Naudin's findings hinted at indivisible units, 'atomic' in the original sense. Darwin, then, was in the extraordinary position of being unable even to consider the explanation which removed a major criticism because it flew in the face of another, supplementary, hypothesis. The Darwinian school took its cue from him, and the stage was set for a whole generation of hotchpotch conjecture.

The reasons why Mendel was unacceptable in the 1860s therefore accord well enough generally with our knowledge of the selective blindnesses of that time. The second half of Gasking's resume, the 'rightness' of the fin de siecle as the incubator of more empirical studies of heredity, offers a lot more resistance to being pinned down by a few extracts from scientific history. Even to attempt a gloss would mean pushing well on into the present century to a time when Mendelism had undergone a mathematical transformation and its relevance to evolutionary theory had been fully delineated. Here we must content ourselves with the observation that, quite apart from Mendel's work, the end of the nineteenth century marks another transformation in ways of thinking about heredity. In 1903, Theodor Boveri and Walter Sutton, working on the recently discovered chromosomes, proved that these do indeed carry information in some inconceivably condensed form between parent and child. They went on to show, in a whole series of exceedingly delicate operations on sea-urchin eggs, that the movement of chromosomes during fertilisati~n actually accords with the statistical abstractions of Mendel; and in the same year Sutton postulated a series of sub-microscopic 'genes' strung out along each chromosome. At first glance, there may seem to be only trifling differences between Sutton's new gene and the earlier pangene, id or plastidule. Was this not just another ghostly concept? It was not, because attitudes had changed. Sutton, just like his Victorian colleagues, knew that to get as far as the facts one has to step beyond the facts. But, unlike them, he extrapolated only one step at a time and waited for observation to catch up. He was not interested in armchair experiments, and in that of course he represents the modern mood. The opposing theories of inheritance of Samuel Butler and August Weismann, to which we now tum, represent the former tradition of reaching for the truth - a manner Platonic rather than Aristotelian. Just as Socrates, in his famous demonstration, dipped into the mind of an illiterate slave and drew forth the fundamental manipulations of geometry and arithmetic, so Butler and Weismann (to be fair, the first much more than the second) believed that they could reach within themselves for a priori explanations and expect nature to conform with them.

Butler on Heredity

[ The Origin is] a book for which I can never be sufficiently grateful, though I am well aware how utterly uncapable I am of forming any opinion on a scientific subject which is worth a moment's consideration. ~17

Samuel Butler wrote this sentence in 1872: today it must strike us as one of the most unconsciously ironic that that master of irony ever penned. Perhaps in 1872 he did believe its sentiments to be true, for in that year he was known not as a scientist but as the writer of occasional essays, of a book on being a colonist in New Zealand, and of a popular and clever satirical romance, Erewhon. Certainly there was on this past form every reason for his correspondent, who was the ageing Darwin himself, to take the above statement at face value. Yet within two years of making it Butler had become fascinated by the most profound puzzle of his age; within six years, obsessed; within eight, had set his face against every competent biologist alive, had abused the revered Darwin personally, and had accused him wildly of the most wretched chicanery, plagiarism and fumbled attempts at fraud. By the year 1890 he had conceived and presented the original ideas of his first treatise, Life and Habit (1877), had gone on to write three further works on related topics, and had finally published a connected group of essays under the title of 'The deadlock in Darwinism'.~18 The man of letters incapable, according to his own words, 'of forming any opinion ... worth a moment's consideration' had transformed himself into a self-taught scientific controversialist for whom speculative biology was the dominant interest of life throughout his most energetic years. We notice, however, that it was never the sole interest and was not one that lasted till death. Butler's 'evolution' writings (that term is much too limiting, but serves as shorthand) fill only four and part of a fifth of the twenty volumes of his Collected Works. In his last decade Butler turned his attention and his well-oiled argumentative powers to quite different problems which obliterated any residual interest he may have retained in biology. There may even be a touch of pettishness in a remark to Marcus Hertog in November 1891 that he felt himself to be 'too busy on other matters to meddle with biology just now'. ~19 The dates just quoted are critical ones. They at once limit what we can expect of Butler's theories; that is to say, his 'evolution' work fits in its entirety into Peter Vorzimmer's long period of 'nagging doubt'. Butler, by withdrawing his interest at just the time he did, isolated himself by accident or design from Bateson, from Weismann, from the reappraisal of Mendel. While these men were publishing and drifting towards the bright centre of disputation Butler was off hunting that Snark of his later years, the Authoress of the Odyssey.

When considered as what in fact they are, a single extended essay in controversy, the evolution books have no even texture. The best-written is undoubtedly the first, Life and Habit, where the thought is freshest, Butler's odd wit thoroughly meshed with his material, and the entertaining illustrations are carried over from his earlier exploitation oftopsy-turveydom for its own sake. Most of his exegetes quote heavily from it and ignore that most mature and deliberate piece of argument Luck, or Cunning? (1886), which is at least as good. The two intermediate books were written hastily and are little more than rag-bags stuffed with replies, denunciations, oddments of translation from sympathetic German biologists (Butler had a much better press there than in England), and even fragments of autobiography. They supply nothing that is not available in livelier form elsewhere. But to open any single essay or volume by Butler with the expectation of being able to extract therefrom a considered and stable point of view is to be disappointed. We are ushered instead into a wildly untidy storeroom full of fragmentary notions which have a treacherous solidity but which disintegrate as soon as they are grasped. The reader's perceptiveness is not at fault. Rather, it is Butler conducting his own education in public by a curious pedagogical technique which might be described thus: he does not, as he adds to his stock of knowledge, gradually extend outwards an area of what is for him certainty. Instead, having selected a topic intuitively, he rotates it steadily before his mind contemplating each facet in turn - even incompatible facets - as though it alone expressed the truth. Then, over the years, we find him stripping away the unacceptable and the inconsistent until his truth emerges bare and clean. And it does so emerge, given time: 'I was not sure that my Life and Habit theory was more than ingenious paradox,' wrote Butler years later, recollecting his first days incubating that book, 'but by February 14th [ 1876] I had gripped my meaning and knew it to be sound.'~20 Often moving from paradox to assurance took a lot longer than that; and only when we range over his whole career, recognising the excrescences for what they are, does a simple and consistent pattern emerge.

It has not been observed before that Butler's so-called 'theory of evolution' is in fact made up of two strands of ideas. One of these had imaginative potential for Butler himself; the other not, although effectively made use of by others. The strands are, first, the theory of human inheritance proper which we will take up in a moment; the second a speculation about future human evolution, which must be dealt with summarily here. The two strands were never woven into any intellectually satisfying union, though both persist (rather bewilderingly) into Butler's last novel.

Nothing tells more about Butler's method of first twisting about all the possibilities latent in a notion (to the confusion of his public) and then pursuing only the useful ones than his prognosis ofhumanity's future. Yet the sequence is really easy enough to trace, and permits us to see in detail the gradual solidification of Butler's real, serious, view. His two articles in the Christchurch Press (1863-5) comprise the first stage. In the first, which is disguised as a letter to the editor and replete with bogus concern, the pseudonymous correspondent proposes machines as the natural inheritors of the planet: just as vegetable life developed from minerals, so is the mechanical kingdom beginning to lord it over the organic. Humans, by placing more power in machines and relying more upon them, are conniving at their own obsolescence: 'in the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race'.21~ Here Butler has certainly not escaped from the spell of the Origin (he may have read it only the year before) and, rather than trying to establish whether he is 'serious' or not, it suffices to recognise that the logic of the piece is exclusively Darwinian. Beleaguered man is offered only two choices: capitulation to the machine or war to the death. There is nothing obviously parodic about the essay at all, any more than there is about the following piece written in London but also published in the Press, or the third and final piece, 'The mechanical creation', which supplements it. The second Press contribution, couched as a reply to the previously distraught correspondent, puts forward machinery not as the natural enemy of humanity but as humanity's symbiotic partner. Instances of the coming 'machinate' phase of evolution are already about us: a man's watch is more use to him than most of his hair; a notebook in the pocket substitutes for an infallible memory. We are already witnessing in the gulf that is opening between rich and poor a division into two distinct sub-species of man. The rich man 'can tack a portion of one of the P. and O. boats on to his identity' and make the poor regard him with the 'affectionate reverence' a dog feels for man.~22 Butler claims to be passing no moral judgement ('we do not say that the thousand-horse man is better than a one-horse man, we only say that he is more highly organized and should be recognized as being so': p. 220) but this is disingenuous, for in reality he is already having as much trouble as the Darwinians in keeping evolution and ethics apart. Later on, when, paradoxically, he had thrown over Darwinism, he succumbed entirely and spoke freely of the rich as the chosen medium of expression of the evolutionary Purpose. For, if his vision of man's prosthetic future was ever a joke at all, it very rapidly ceased to be one. The final vision is specially elaborated in a perfectly serious chapter of Luck, or Gunning? entitled 'Property, common sense and protoplasm'. Among many similar examples he suggests that we see our stomachs as purses for storing nutriment and, by the same token, our purse as 'a kind of abridged extra-corporeal stomach wherein we keep the money which we convert by purchase into food'.~23 The inversions are reminiscent of similar ones in Erewhon, but the tone is more like that of a textbook. Butler has found his truth, has 'gripped his meaning'.

Butler's theory of inheritance pursues quite a different line and ramifies outwards far more thoughtfully than the unsophisticated, mildly comic sequence of ideas which we have just traced. There, Butler has tried to give us a series of snapshots illustrating some ways in which the destiny of man might be involved with the machine. It is accomplished journalism, but no more than that. But the inheritance theory analyses in quite exact detail a troublesome problem in theoretical biology. It takes rational notice of rational objection and is offered, as we shall see, as a real contribution to group scientific enterprise. To be sure, both speculative sequences of ideas have their origins among Butler's first literary work. There are quirky ideas about heredity even in Erewhon, in the chapters 'Birth formulae' and 'The world of the unborn'. Earlier than that, indeed; for Butler tells us in his preface to the revised edition (1901) of Erewhon that these two chapters were written, and may have been obscurely published, as early as 1865.~24 But the theory that is expressed in Life and Habit already has a firmness of outline, an attention to detail and to potential criticism which together bespeak hard thought and constant rewriting. Common sense tells us that such a theory did not spring from Butler's forehead fully armed, but the only indisputably accurate description of its writing - by Butler himself in a long letter to Francis Darwin (Darwin's third son, who was for a short time an acquaintance of Butler's) on the eve of the publication of Life and Habit - is not only vague about sources but also poses some problems about the exact nature of Butler's disagreement with Darwin. As this letter is germane to the present line of argument, and as its significance has not been generally noticed, a few essentials will be extracted from it.~25 At the time it was written Butler's main concern was the offence which Darwin might find in the newly completed Life and Habit. He begins by asking Francis Darwin to evaluate it before passing on a copy. He then continues:

it has resolved itself into a downright attack upon your father's view of evolution, and a defence of what I conceive to be Lamarck's. I neither intended nor wished this, but was simply driven into it. (Memoir, 1:257)

He goes on to tell how the impelling force came about two months earlier (from internal evidence, this must have been on 23 or 24 September) when Life and Habit was already 'three parts done'. On looking into the latest edition of the Origin - this was the sixth, published five years before to check what Darwin had to say on the causes of variation, Butler was confronted with Darwin's maintaining it to be a 'serious error' to believe that very many habits are directly transmitted (he does not, of course, say that no habits are transmissible). Butler describes his feeling of shock and how he was inclined to burn the manuscript of his book at once. Very soon, though, he saw his way afresh. He would have to break with Darwinism altogether. Therefore he simply 'cut out all support of natural selection and made it square with a teleological view' (1:258). All of these readjustments must have occupied less than two months.

What do these remarks teach us about the successive stages in the construction and application of Butler's theory? First and most obviously, they modify the usual impression of Butler as the fierce and highly original anti-Darwinian theorist who positively enjoyed setting about the biological establishment. On the evidence of this letter Butler first conceived his theory of inheritance as a supplement to the theory of natural selection. In offering such a supplement, in trying to find a true cause of variations, Butler was doing no more than tackling the same problem which was fully occupying Romanes, Spencer and of course Darwin himself. In this sense, then, he is in the main line of theoretical development and in no sense a renegade thinker. Second, Butler, despite his early lucid precis of the Origin's argument, had not kept up with the gradual drift of the Origin back to useinheritance and related spurious explanations for variation. Third, practically all the really substantial objections to Darwinism were taken with a single grab from Mivart's Genesis of Species (published six years before), which Butler had rapidly decided was on certain points unanswerable. Fourth and most relevantly, the date of the letter offers the intriguing possibility that Butler, in the light of the new neo-Lamarckian principles to which he had exposed himself, changed his plans for his new novel which was to become The Way of All Flesh.

Butler finds it convenient in Life and Habit to direct the reader first to the three levels of human attention and to make him see these as habits (that is, as 'learned' involuntary behaviour patterns) which have been relegated with greater or lesser success to the unconscious. At the deepest level below the threshold of consciousness proceed such autonomous habits as the cellular defence mechanisms or blood circulation which cannot be brought under voluntary control even if we wish. A little higher in the level of attainment exist such subconscious habits as seeing, hearing, walking, piano-playing and so on - skills which at some early stage had to be deliberately acquired and practised before they could be 'forgotten'. Finally, on the surface for most people, are such deliberate activities as doing mathematics, social routines and decision-making which demand a continuous input of conscious mental energy. That these levels exist and are not clearly demarcated Butler thought conclusively proven by the capacities of child prodigies and calculating wizards: such people can draw on, as low-level habits, skills which for the majority have to be painfully deliberate.

Butler quickly noticed that these psychological facts about habits (which he did not of course discover) were comparable with other facts about heredity; and he quickly went on to suppose that the relationship was not in fact a mere analogy at all, but a true affinity or even identity. These points of resemblance which especially struck Butler may be conveniently summarised in a table which tries to synthesise statements from the four evolution books stripped of supportive examples:
 

Memory   1 The most recent impressions are recalled most readily.

Heredity   Offspring resemble most closely their immediate forebears.

2 Memory works by associating items of information which, once fixed, may only be recalled in complete trains (e.g. whistling a tune).   3 Deeply engrained habits (not low-level habits like breathing, but fixed patterns of activity) need the occasional shock of a new experience to prevent their becoming obsessive.  4 But a wholly unfamiliar situation, for which no habits are appropriate, can be disruptive or even fatal.

In embryo, offspring recapitulate the entire history of organic development.

Most species (but not humans?) benefit from hybridisation.

Inter-species sterility.

A perfected habit is totally unconscious and not subject to rational appraisal.

Some animal instincts are inappropriate to new conditions, or even lethal (e.g. migration of Lemmus lemmus).

6 Some disorders of memory like fixations Atavism.
and obsessions and phobias are
characterised by the upheaval of old,
forgotten and obsolete memories.

7 Creativity is the recombination of Variation.
memories in new patterns until a
satisfactory or effective one emerges.

These parallels, weak though some of them are, would be entirely meaningless if Butler had not made two further assertions, one of which he defended vigorously (the issue threatens, in fact, to become the sole issue), the other of which he never questioned the truth. In order to offer heredity persuasively as inherited habit, Butler's theory required him to see all life as continuous; as being chopped into arbitrary units called individuals to suit our immediate convenience alone. It must at once be stressed that this insistence on the essential identity of all life (he traces the sequence back from octogenarian adult to newborn child, to embryo, to gamete and so to that primordial ceil 'which has differentiated itself into the life of the world, all living things whatever being one with it, and members one of another'~26) is in no sense a mystical or pantheistic insistence. The linkage he has in mind has nothing to do with reincarnation: it is purely physiological. All bodies, he is saying, are of one flesh; for how else could memory persist? Given this, each life-cycle is but a repetition of a habit built up by this same 'individual' over every preceding cycle; and heredity is but what he can recall, or have others point out to him, of his experience in his earlier manifestations. Should new and unforeseen circumstances arise in which memory cannot be trusted, the organism must turn to its own resources, must act with whatever consciousness it can muster, and must either adapt or be obliterated. Butler gives us an amusing but highly fanciful example of the second contingency: that of a corn kernel picked up by a hen. At first the kernel thinks it has been sown and tries to germinate. Then it becomes aware of the grossly unfamiliar conditions, 'gets frightened, loses its head, is carried into the gizzard, and comminuted among the gizzard stones'.~27 The hen's habits have mastered its own vegetable habits, so it is digested, forgets its own nature and partakes of the hen's past instead. From now on it will attack its brother kernels with ferocity. This is excellent fun if we allow for the not very helpful anthropomorphism, but behind the humour is the implicit assertion that experience is transmissible directly through the generations, whether or not these are 'really' one creature. Butler never saw the slightest reason for doubt here: and with the voluminous work of Darwin, Spencer and Romanes plus their massy reputations behind him why should he have doubted? As late as 1886 he was still referring to his system as being an easy corollary on Lamarck's - not, we notice, a substantiation of Lamarck for which he obviously saw no need, but just a humble adjunct. To his mind, he could supply himself with no better credentials.

Butlerism and Mainstream Biology

Whether we look at it from the standpoint of a well-informed biologist of, say, 1903 or as modern historians of science tracing the mainstream of advance in theories of heredity, the whole corpus of Butler's 'evolutionary' writings are,. as serious contributions to the sum total of knowledge, absolutely spurious. This is a harsh judgement and not a popular one; it is one that almost all of Butler's admirers have tried to evade. Even in his own century when his personal abuse of Darwin made him an Ishmael among nearly the whole of the scientific fraternity, there were still a few independent souls willing to praise his possession of"'scientific imagination" and logical consistency very rarely found among scientific men';~28 and in the euphoric, immediately post-Mendelian days there was sober talk of a Butler revival: his theoretical work was hopefully seen to be 'emerging from oblivion',~29 and he himself was hailed as a depolariser of the extreme opinions of his own era. Butler's more recent critics have had a purely literary orientation and this has certainly made it easier for grossly inflated claims for his significance beyond that of satirist and novelist to get a footing. Clara Stillman, writing at a time when Lamarckism still retained a precarious respectability, proudly aiT~xed Butler's name to the roll of early twentieth-century neo-Lamarckians - a tribute which now reads flatly since all their reputations have sunk to zero.~30 The collapse of the neo-Lamarckian school has meant that two further roles have been invented for Butler: the clear-eyed demolisher of Darwinian cant, or else the visionary who forestailed discoveries in other sciences altogether. So we have the Butler who gave 'a salutary check to the uncritical acceptance of Darwinism'; the one who wrote 'pioneer works in psychology' having 'much in common with Jung's theory of the racial unconscious'; and yet another who allegedly anticipated William James, August Weismann, Freud, and the entire science of genetics.31~

The truth is that Butler's greatest selective blindness was his profound lack of comprehension of Darwin and the experimental technique, and his gross insensitivity to the kinds of question science can hope to bring into its purlieu. Not an incomprehension of Darwinism itself - he came to understand natural selection better than most - but of the hypotheticodeductive system which is the core of science itself: the amassing of facts, the disinterested testing of potentially disprovable hypotheses, and the expunging of personal beliefs. No piece of hard evidence cited anywhere in Butler's work is first-hand, and his examples of the genetic transmission of habits are dubious indeed. Even in the summarising 'Deadlock in Darwinism' essays we are offered nothing more convincing than a child masking his eyes with one hand and later passing on the same habit to his children, or the kids of a goat which had been kept chained acquiring the same struggling motions from their parent. It is quite true and should always be kept in mind that such cases were the common currency of the biological speculation of the day, with even the most eminent accepting these standards of evidence; it is also true that laboratory experiments in biology were in this period a lot rarer than the armchair variety. But Butler's thought is demonstrably eclectic to an extent to which, as a self-styled renegade philosopher, he was not willing to admit. Time and again he takes facts from Darwin even while abusing Darwin for failing adequately to acknowledge his sources. Elsewhere he blends together with scant respect such mutual adversaries as Erasmus Darwin, Weismann and Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel's 'molecular' theory of inheritance, which Butler spoke of enthusiastically, helps to place Butler's speculations within the context of the general crudity of thought at the time. Haeckel taught that as, for example, a bird's wing is strengthened by use the protoplasm of the wing muscle is altered in that its constituent molecules take up a different frequency of vibration. He supposed that these were transmitted through the bird mechanically and caused the reproductive ceils somehow to resonate in harmony!~32

But even by the undemanding standards of the day suggested by this example Butler's argumentative strategy is slack. Often he relies on metaphor and even in places on the pun. We are told solemnly that a baby 'knows' hydrodynamics as it pumps blood in its body; that a sodium atom

'knows' how to combine with chlorine to form salt; that a pianist 'knows' a work by heart. Butler makes no distinction (seems indeed unaware that there is any to be made) between these different senses of know. His standard retort to charges of inconsistency in reasoning is that nature is inconsistent, too. Typically he treats scientific evidence as a lawyer treats the evidence of his client. He measures his success in reasoning not by directing a question at nature and cajoling from her a wholly unambiguous reply, but rather by his ability to persuade enough men off the street that what he has to say expresses the whole truth. 'What nonsense!' Butler is reported as having briskly remarked when told ofT. H. Huxley's blistering opinion of Life and Habit. 'The matter is one which any barrister or business man can judge of just as well as Huxley himself.'~33 For Butler the story of the facts of heredity was a philosophical problem and one where all the facts are in. He saw scientific controversy simply in terms of getting up the best possible defence - in which logical tricks like ad hominem appeals are just part of the routine - and then waiting for a verdict from a jury oflaymen. This legal habit of mind also expresses itself as an implicit contempt for inconvenient fact, as a belief that a hired advocate has no moral responsibility to present a fully rounded case. Allied with this is another form of contempt, directed at the narrow specialist who is incapable of drawing back his gaze long enough to capture the total implication of his labours. The specialist may be used to build up a case, certainly; but he must not be allowed to fill in a pristine theory with a mass of superfluous and pettifogging detail. Butler saw no shame in professing an ignorance of science: 'I know nothing about science... I neither know, nor want to know, more detail than is necessary.' Rather, this was a boast, as was the extraordinary admission that 'I have left my scientific inaccuracies uncorrected even when aware of them'.~34 This is partly romantic defiance of professional scientism; the pawky cheek of the amateur who has burnbled his way to great discovery. It is a potent myth in English scientific history. Even Francis Darwin, publishing his reminiscences of his father in 1887, dwelt lovingly on the slovenliness of Darwin's practical work - the inaccurate micrometer, the use of the household's ruler, the unreadable gradations on the dirty measuring-glass - and rightly assumed that these details could only enhance his portrait of the greatest biologist of the day. In Butler's case, though, there is also something rather less pleasant detectable. There is arrogance coupled with a wish to hedge, to keep open an escape route back to the relativistic land of Erewhon. Simultaneously he wants 'simply to entertain and interest' without having anyone pin him down on particulars; yet he does not, presumably, want to be called a liar when avowing 'I am in very serious earnest. . .from the first page of my book to the last'.~35 Even Butler's virtually unchallenged status as 'the most dogged, perceptive, and forceful opponent of Darwinism in the nineteenth century'~36 will not withstand a moment's investigation. Compare his performance with any of the teleologically minded capable biologists of the 1880s and 1890s,

compare him even with Herbert Spencer, who like him relied on others to do the experimental spadework, and Butler at once stands revealed as the lightweight theoretician he is. His wholly undeserved reputation in this regard is the fabrication of his too reverent interpreters.

What value, then, does remain in Butlerism? Is there anything to be said for it? To the scientific historian it does retain the negative virtue of indicating unmistakably the essential vacuity of all the hereditarian ideas current in the closing decades of the century, even as it loses the positive virtue of being a set of notions that might have filled that void, could Butler only have been granted a hearing. He himself of course inclined towards a conspiracy explanation which sometimes approaches a condition of mild paranoia: 'why have so many of our leaders shown such a strong hankering after the theory, if there is nothing in it?'~37 he asks plaintively as almost his final utterance, apparently oblivious of the strong Lamarckian currents swirling all about him. But, in truth, Butler cared little for the outcome of the battle between the two main biological factions; cared little, even, that as he was writing Weismannism was deliquescing before his eyes. What he wanted in his embittered middle-age was far simpler: public recognition that equating memory and habit had been his contribution alone. But in fairness we must add that these considerations were not yet in the foreground in 1877, when it is Butler's remarkable prescience expressed in Life and Habit that 'heredity of any kind is little more than a term for something which one does not understand' that commands our admiration. His polemic, though it eventually relapsed into mere diatribe, has at its best moments a certain crude vigour. Even if the matter was lifted from Mivart, the expression is his own; and as a destructive critique of Darwin's evasions in the successive editions of the Origin his work is a mine still not quite exhausted. His misfortune lay in his trying to mould at that early date a few wretched straws of fact into a solid conceptual brick. In the end he paid the penalty of the innovator, as did the originators of all those other too hasty coinages: 'gemmules' and 'plastidules', 'ids' and 'physiological units'. Such another was Weismann's concept of 'the germ plasm', whose fame in its heyday far transcended these others.

Weismann and the Germ Plasm

August Friedrich Leopold Weismann was born in 1834 and, as he did not die until 1914, had a professional life which more than covers our entire period. In the first part of his career he did important work in zoology, but his theory of heredity which alone concerns us here was worked out in the 1880s after bad eyesight had brought his laboratory work to a halt. The essence of Weismannism in its pure, early form is to be found in his treatise of 1885, Die Continuita't des Keimplasma's als Grundlage einer Theone der Vererbung, although because this was not translated into English until 1893 by Parker and Ronnfeldt and probably also because of its limited

appeal, Weismann did not achieve widespread recognition until 1889 when his Essays upon Heredity were collected and translated.

Weismann begins, in the earlier Continuity of the Germ Plasm, with the prosaic observation that at the unicellular level life is continuous and immortal because the mode of reproduction - simple division - makes death impossible except for accidents. He goes on to assume that this continuity and immortality is essentially no less true for multicellular organisms, including those as complex as man himself. For each organism may be traced back to a sperm and an egg ceil which were in turn part of an organism; and so the line may be traced back to the (speculative) genesis of life from organic matter. In this conception of heredity the individual organism is only of secondary importance, and ought to be viewed as a kind of 'housing' generated by the parasitic germ plasm within as a form of protection. The ribbon of inheritance is continuous and unbreakable, and the genetic endowment alone is transmitted down the ages, absolutely unaffected by anything happening to its transient carriers short of death before the reproductive age. At first glance the persistence of the plasm may not seem to be wholly distinct from Butler's idea of persisting habits; and indeed at a later date Bernard Shaw was content to draw upon both without noticing that there are in reality absolute dissimilarities. We may express these simply in this way. Butler's argument at core is that a psychological phenomenon, habit, may be forced to bear the weight of a biological phenomenon, heredity. We have noticed that he argues as though in a courtroom and that the few facts he musters are wholly derivative. Further, the validity of his whole case may be fined down to the simple Lamarckian postulate. Demonstrate that no habits are inheritable (or, better, put the onus of proof on Butler) and his case falls to dust. Weismann believed that he could make that demonstration, and on his belief erected his concept of the inviolability of the germ plasm. Unlike Butler he had the resources of the laboratory at his back. When he declared war on the neo-Lamarckians, he did so on the basis of a heroic series of experiments in which he amputated the tails of no less than 1,592 mice of twenty-two consecutive generations. When he found that even the very last mouse in that long line continued to bear young with full length tails, Weismann concluded that acquired characters are not transmissible.

The later history ofWeismannism - and by extension of the whole neoDarwinjan movement of which Weismann was the chief figure - repeated uncannily though more speedily the history of Darwinism itself thirty years earlier. The parallelism with the initial fortunes of Darwinism is explicable enough in so far as the most serious deficiency of Darwin's natural selection - its failure to explain variation - is repeated, in another form, in Weismann's continuity theory. One curious feature of that theory is its similarity to the old semi-metaphysical one ofemboftement. To suppose that the germ plasm is continuous and deathless is to imply that cached within it are all the possibilities, all the metamorphoses of structure through which life will pass into the indefinite future. Besides being deterministic at both the personal and racial level to an absurd degree, this implication seems to deny adaptive evolution its raw material of a constant supply of wideranging variation, however caused. Weismann did not of course deny the existence of variations, but he asserted that they are due to amphimixis alone: that is to say, arising from the blending of the characteristics of a bisexual parentage; these characters being divided differently, perhaps at random, in each separate fertilisation. Weismann here came very close to the idea of the Mendelian lottery, with the serious reservations that he had no sense of discrete particles of inheritance, no supportive experimental work, and nothing more definite than the logic of his position to make him adhere to it. Within his lifetime, Hugo de Vries proved that radical mutations do occur in nature; and after his death Hermann Muller Co. 1890) gave some reasons why: the ribbon of inheritance, far from being immutable inside its body-case, can be disrupted fairly easily by crude environmental changes in heat and radiation levels. By 1895 at the latest Weismannism had effectively surrendered all its uniqueness by adding on something called 'germinal selection', which supposedly worked in a Darwinian way on changes induced by the environment.~38 Even Weismann, arch-opponent of vitalism in all its many forms, could not avoid making this final truce with his enemies.

The best contemporary account of the rise and collapse of Weismann's reputation is to be found in G.J. Romanes' three critical analyses of 1890, 1893 and 1894-5,~39 which taken together illustrate in extenso the defects of Weismannism already noted. They are particularly interesting in that Romanes, a subtle but occasionally devious and often too vehement critic, saw more clearly than any other of Darwin's first followers the massive problems posed by variation. His interest in Weismann's solution was first sparked by the publication in English of Weismann's influential Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems (1889-92). The eight essays it contains, all closely connected in theme, were written in German over a period of seven years but not collected until, the importance of his work having come to be recognised in England, three admirers collaborated in producing an edition in translation together with a preface by the author. On publication the Essays were reviewed with almost lavish praise and soon attracted more attention outside the narrow confines of their speciality than any strictly biological text since the Descent. The young H.G. Wells made some play with Weismannian panmixia in an early version of The Time Machine, and the consequences of Hardy's reading the Essays will be taken up in the next chapter. But Romanes in his review early the following year was notably more cautious in his praise than certain other Darwinians who saw Weismann as the bearer of the master's words purified of all dross. Romanes saw that on some cruces Weismann and Darwin were at loggerheads. It would be impossible, he thought, to find any common ground between the germ plasm theory and Darwin's pangenesis, which he accurately described as the former's 'logical antipodes'. In his youth Romanes had been one of Darwin's most fervent and uncritical admirers, and he was forever afterwards eager to turn his bellicose pen to the defence even of his teacher's inconsistencies and delusions.~40 Romanes came to value cases of allegedly Lamarckian transmission because they supplied him with a stout stick with which to belabour Weismannism. We find him, after giving some second-hand facts about tailless cats producing tailless kittens, concluding triumphantly, 'it would be a grand thing to knock down Weismann's whole edifice with a cat's tail'.~41 This is Romanes in an offduty mood, but it is suggestive that Romanes really thought Weismann could be upset that easily. A year later his feelings, now shared more generally by the professional world, have hardened considerably. He accuses Weismann of asking for evidence of the germ plasm's manipulation by outside factors, and then ignoring what Romanes took to be the quite conclusive work of Charles Brown-Sequard on inheritable mutations. Further - this is a petty touch - Weismann no longer deserves the honourable title of 'neo-Darwinist'; let him be relabelled an 'ultraDarwinist'.~42 So the wheel of fortune inexorably bore Weismann down. As Romanes' final attitude shows, his offence had been to be more royalist than the king. In the end he acquired the scientifically dangerous reputation of extremism, of being a man of one idea at a time when biology was necessarily eclectic and fond of invoking multiple causes when no testable hypothesis offered itself. Not natural selection or use-inheritance, not saltation or smooth variation, but both together; and often other factors thrown in for good measure. In the last analysis neither Weismann nor Butler did justice to the facts, particularly when one bears in mind that the experimental foundations of the germ plasm theory were hardly less shaky than those of Butlerism. Weismannism never really squared up to the objection that in most organisms, once one gets above the level of quite primitive plants, the reproductive cells form directly out of the somatic cells and hence preserve no simple continuity at all. The plasm tends to become something invisible and undetectable, and Weismann's best reason for promoting it a feeling that it ought to exist, like phlogiston before Lavoisier or the ether before the Michelson-Morley experiment. Why, then, was Weismannism so popular? Certainly it was later partly vindicated by the discovery of DNA, which does have some of the plasm's characteristics. But we still have to account for the adulation of the time; still have to explain, as Herbert Cannon incisively puts it, 'how any serious-minded person would come to believe in Weismann's fantasies'.~43

As Cannon is obliged to concede, such persons did believe for a while, and in large numbers. The evidence for why they did so is still there, buried in those ruminative essays by biologists with the popular touch. For Alfred Russel Wallace, for Ray Lankester (who completely reorganised his own book on inheritance of 1876 after reading the Essays in 1889-90), as well as for others lacking formal biological training like Hardy, Weismannism excited attention because rather than qualifying the Darwinian struggle for survival it intensified and confirmed it, thereby awakening all those demons who had been lulled to sleep by the gradual thirty-year softening of that bleak scenario of the past. Even the harshest Darwinians had not been opposed, or not uniformly opposed, to theories of social progress set upon humaner principles than killing or being killed. Now, a decade after Darwin's death, the human condition looked as gloomy as it had done for a brief spell in the early 1860s. Wallace, in his essay 'Human progress' to which we have already referred for its contribution to the eugenic debate, makes much more of the main social difficulties posed by Weismannism. Since the germ plasm cannot be touched, the line of human inheritance cannot be improved by any education to which the somatotype is exposed. Social selection, imitating natural selection, can be the only method of improvement; and yet this kind of control, Wallace argues, can only be to our moral detriment. But Wallace, we recall, was in a difficult intellectual position. Despite his antipathy to the depressing quality of Weismannism, Wallace was at the same time eager to defend a theoretician who was, after all, the first important voice for some decades to support Wallace's lonely insistence on the efficacy of hard Darwinism. He does his best therefore to load the other side of the scales as heavily as possible: we are told comfortingly that at least Weismannian heredity, if true, cannot transmit the bad effects of either education or environment. The mistakes and vices of the past cannot directly infect the present. There is no biological original sin: 'street arabs of our great cities, when brought up under healthy and elevating conditions in the colonies, usually improve both [sic ] physically, intellectually and morally, so as to be fully equal to the average of their fellow-countrymen'.~44 Thus every generation starts afresh with an unsullied inheritance and the opportunities for social improvement rest squarely in the hands of the reformers. Wallace's attempts to lighten the picture in this fashion could not really be successful, however, because of the undeniable stress placed by Weismann on the necessity of not tampering with the selection mechanism. He was sure that retrogression and a host of other organic evils would follow rapidly upon any attempt to mitigate the operations of nature. Weismann pointed frequently to the same potent example often chosen by the degenerationists. In the dark and placid waters of certain subterranean lakes in Kentucky live fish who have no eyes. Sight for these creatures after they had become trapped in permanent darkness no longer had any selective advantages over blindness, so that the hereditary factors producing blindness, and those mutations born without any eyes altogether, were not suppressed but spread inexorably through the population. There could be no cheating nature in Weismann's account: the species which is not evolving through natural selection is devolving instead. Others, like Benjamin Kidd in his Social Evolution (1894), were not slow in making the extrapolations to human society. In doing so they undercut the rationale of those static Utopias of the previous two decades which had relied on circumventing nature by opting for zero growth not merely of their economies but of human potentiality generally. Earlier we examined the shift in emphasis from the static Utopia to the everblossoming, ever-dynamic Utopia which dare not slacken its rush into the future. It is the shift implicit in Wells's dystopian stories and made explicit in his polemics of the late 1890s. Here we need further remark only that this transition, along with the hyper-Darwinian sociology of Kidd, originated obscurely in that biological school of which Weismann was the most active and learned proponent.

In conclusion, then, one might say that Weismannism lost ground just as rapidly as it gained it. But while his star was in the ascendant Weismann's influence was felt more strongly outside the narrow scientific orbit than that of any other biologist apart from the two survivors of Darwin's own group, Huxley and Wallace. And that influence was as a biologist, not as a popular social philosopher. It cannot be said, however, that Weismann permanently advanced the neo-Darwinian cause. Quite the reverse: by overreaching itself, by pushing Darwinism to its logical conclusion and then in the end displaying a rather shamefaced willingness to toy with useinheritance after all, Weismann furnished the vitalists with powerful ammunition. Even his simplistic experimental work was ruthlessly pilloried by the creative evolutionists: his amputated mouse-tails were thrown in his face. What possible effect, demanded Bernard Shaw splenetically, could one expect from 'injuries or accidents coming from external sources against the will of the victim'?~45 These are not habits! So up to the century's end, and for twenty years or so past it, the neo-Lamarckians pinned their hopes on the inheritance of automatic, involuntary habits which in the past some individuals had found it to their benefit consciously and painfully to acquire. For a while public opinion held that the Butlerians had triumphed over the Weismannians. In the long view, no doubt, the whole controversy shrinks to the proportions of that between the Big-Endians and the LittleEndians. Yet, like Swift's masterpiece, the finest creative works may be generated in an atmosphere of sterile and obsolete debate; and the final chapter will examine two cases proving this to be so.