Erewhon
CHAPTER XXVII
THE VIEWS OF AN EREWHONIAN PHILOSOPHER
CONCERNING THE RIGHTS OF VEGETABLES
Let me leave this unhappy story, and return to the course of
events among the Erewhonians at large. No matter how many laws they
passed increasing the severity of the punishments inflicted on
those who ate meat in secret, the people found means of setting
them aside as fast as they were made. At times, indeed, they would
become almost obsolete, but when they were on the point of being
repealed, some national disaster or the preaching of some fanatic
would reawaken the conscience of the nation, and people were
imprisoned by the thousand for illicitly selling and buying animal
food.
About six or seven hundred years, however, after the death of
the old prophet, a philosopher appeared, who, though he did not
claim to have any communication with an unseen power, laid down the
law with as much confidence as if such a power had inspired him.
Many think that this philosopher did not believe his own teaching,
and, being in secret a great meat-eater, had no other end in view
than reducing the prohibition against eating animal food to an
absurdity, greater even than an Erewhonian Puritan would be able to
stand.
Those who take this view hold that he knew how impossible it
would be to get the nation to accept legislation that it held to be
sinful; he knew also how hopeless it would be to convince people
that it was not wicked to kill a sheep and eat it, unless he could
show them that they must either sin to a certain extent, or die.
He, therefore, it is believed, made the monstrous proposals of
which I will now speak.
He began by paying a tribute of profound respect to the old
prophet, whose advocacy of the rights of animals, he admitted, had
done much to soften the national character, and enlarge its views
about the sanctity of life in general. But he urged that times had
now changed; the lesson of which the country had stood in need had
been sufficiently learnt, while as regards vegetables much had
become known that was not even suspected formerly, and which, if
the nation was to persevere in that strict adherence to the highest
moral principles which had been the secret of its prosperity
hitherto, must necessitate a radical change in its attitude towards
them.
It was indeed true that much was now known that had not been
suspected formerly, for the people had had no foreign enemies, and,
being both quick-witted and inquisitive into the mysteries of
nature, had made extraordinary progress in all the many branches of
art and science. In the chief Erewhonian museum I was shown a
microscope of considerable power, that was ascribed by the
authorities to a date much about that of the philosopher of whom I
am now speaking, and was even supposed by some to have been the
instrument with which he had actually worked.
This philosopher was Professor of botany in the chief seat of
learning then in Erewhon, and whether with the help of the
microscope still preserved, or with another, had arrived at a
conclusion now universally accepted among ourselves—I mean,
that all, both animals and plants, have had a common ancestry, and
that hence the second should be deemed as much alive as the first.
He contended, therefore, that animals and plants were cousins, and
would have been seen to be so, all along, if people had not made an
arbitrary and unreasonable division between what they chose to call
the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
He declared, and demonstrated to the satisfaction of all those
who were able to form an opinion upon the subject, that there is no
difference appreciable either by the eye, or by any other test,
between a germ that will develop into an oak, a vine, a rose, and
one that (given its accustomed surroundings) will become a mouse,
an elephant, or a man.
He contended that the course of any germ’s development was
dictated by the habits of the germs from which it was descended and
of whose identity it had once formed part. If a germ found itself
placed as the germs in the line of its ancestry were placed, it
would do as its ancestors had done, and grow up into the same kind
of organism as theirs. If it found the circumstances only a little
different, it would make shift (successfully or unsuccessfully) to
modify its development accordingly; if the circumstances were
widely different, it would die, probably without an effort at self-
adaptation. This, he argued, applied equally to the germs of plants
and of animals.
He therefore connected all, both animal and vegetable
development, with intelligence, either spent and now unconscious,
or still unspent and conscious; and in support of his view as
regards vegetable life, he pointed to the way in which all plants
have adapted themselves to their habitual environment. Granting
that vegetable intelligence at first sight appears to differ
materially from animal, yet, he urged, it is like it in the one
essential fact that though it has evidently busied itself about
matters that are vital to the well-being of the organism that
possesses it, it has never shown the slightest tendency to occupy
itself with anything else. This, he insisted, is as great a proof
of intelligence as any living being can give.
“Plants,” said he, “show no sign of
interesting themselves in human affairs. We shall never get a rose
to understand that five times seven are thirty-five, and there is
no use in talking to an oak about fluctuations in the price of
stocks. Hence we say that the oak and the rose are unintelligent,
and on finding that they do not understand our business conclude
that they do not understand their own. But what can a creature who
talks in this way know about intelligence? Which shows greater
signs of intelligence? He, or the rose and oak?
“And when we call plants stupid for not understanding our
business, how capable do we show ourselves of understanding theirs?
Can we form even the faintest conception of the way in which a seed
from a rose-tree turns earth, air, warmth and water into a rose
full- blown? Where does it get its colour from? From the earth,
air, &c.? Yes—but how? Those petals of such ineffable
texture—that hue that outvies the cheek of a child—that
scent again? Look at earth, air, and water—these are all the
raw material that the rose has got to work with; does it show any
sign of want of intelligence in the alchemy with which it turns mud
into rose-leaves? What chemist can do anything comparable? Why does
no one try? Simply because every one knows that no human
intelligence is equal to the task. We give it up. It is the
rose’s department; let the rose attend to it—and be
dubbed unintelligent because it baffles us by the miracles it
works, and the unconcerned business-like way in which it works
them.
“See what pains, again, plants take to protect themselves
against their enemies. They scratch, cut, sting, make bad smells,
secrete the most dreadful poisons (which Heaven only knows how they
contrive to make), cover their precious seeds with spines like
those of a hedgehog, frighten insects with delicate nervous systems
by assuming portentous shapes, hide themselves, grow in
inaccessible places, and tell lies so plausibly as to deceive even
their subtlest foes.
“They lay traps smeared with bird-lime, to catch insects,
and persuade them to drown themselves in pitchers which they have
made of their leaves, and fill with water; others make themselves,
as it were, into living rat-traps, which close with a spring on any
insect that settles upon them; others make their flowers into the
shape of a certain fly that is a great pillager of honey, so that
when the real fly comes it thinks that the flowers are bespoke, and
goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever as even to overreach
themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled up and eaten
for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself against
underground enemies. If, on the other hand, they think that any
insect can be of service to them, see how pretty they make
themselves.
“What is to be intelligent if to know how to do what one
wants to do, and to do it repeatedly, is not to be intelligent?
Some say that the rose-seed does not want to grow into a rose-bush.
Why, then, in the name of all that is reasonable, does it grow?
Likely enough it is unaware of the want that is spurring it on to
action. We have no reason to suppose that a human embryo knows that
it wants to grow into a baby, or a baby into a man. Nothing ever
shows signs of knowing what it is either wanting or doing, when its
convictions both as to what it wants, and how to get it, have been
settled beyond further power of question. The less signs living
creatures give of knowing what they do, provided they do it, and do
it repeatedly and well, the greater proof they give that in reality
they know how to do it, and have done it already on an infinite
number of past occasions.
“Some one may say,” he continued, “‘What
do you mean by talking about an infinite number of past occasions?
When did a rose-seed make itself into a rose-bush on any past
occasion?’
“I answer this question with another. ‘Did the
rose-seed ever form part of the identity of the rose-bush on which
it grew?’ Who can say that it did not? Again I ask:
‘Was this rose-bush ever linked by all those links that we
commonly consider as constituting personal identity, with the seed
from which it in its turn grew?’ Who can say that it was
not?
“Then, if rose-seed number two is a continuation of the
personality of its parent rose-bush, and if that rose-bush is a
continuation of the personality of the rose-seed from which it
sprang, rose-seed number two must also be a continuation of the
personality of the earlier rose-seed. And this rose-seed must be a
continuation of the personality of the preceding
rose-seed—and so back and back ad infinitum. Hence it is
impossible to deny continued personality between any existing
rose-seed and the earliest seed that can be called a rose-seed at
all.
“The answer, then, to our objector is not far to seek. The
rose- seed did what it now does in the persons of its
ancestors—to whom it has been so linked as to be able to
remember what those ancestors did when they were placed as the
rose-seed now is. Each stage of development brings back the
recollection of the course taken in the preceding stage, and the
development has been so often repeated, that all doubt—and
with all doubt, all consciousness of action—is suspended.
“But an objector may still say, ‘Granted that the
linking between all successive generations has been so close and
unbroken, that each one of them may be conceived as able to
remember what it did in the persons of its ancestors—how do
you show that it actually did remember?’
“The answer is: ‘By the action which each generation
takes—an action which repeats all the phenomena that we
commonly associate with memory—which is explicable on the
supposition that it has been guided by memory—and which has
neither been explained, nor seems ever likely to be explained on
any other theory than the supposition that there is an abiding
memory between successive generations.’
“Will any one bring an example of any living creature
whose action we can understand, performing an ineffably difficult
and intricate action, time after time, with invariable success, and
yet not knowing how to do it, and never having done it before? Show
me the example and I will say no more, but until it is shown me, I
shall credit action where I cannot watch it, with being controlled
by the same laws as when it is within our ken. It will become
unconscious as soon as the skill that directs it has become
perfected. Neither rose-seed, therefore, nor embryo should be
expected to show signs of knowing that they know what they
know—if they showed such signs the fact of their knowing what
they want, and how to get it, might more reasonably be
doubted.”
Some of the passages already given in Chapter XXIII were
obviously inspired by the one just quoted. As I read it, in a
reprint shown me by a Professor who had edited much of the early
literature on the subject, I could not but remember the one in
which our Lord tells His disciples to consider the lilies of the
field, who neither toil nor spin, but whose raiment surpasses even
that of Solomon in all his glory.
“They toil not, neither do they spin?” Is that so?
“Toil not?” Perhaps not, now that the method of
procedure is so well known as to admit of no further
question—but it is not likely that lilies came to make
themselves so beautifully without having ever taken any pains about
the matter. “Neither do they spin?” Not with a
spinning-wheel; but is there no textile fabric in a leaf?
What would the lilies of the field say if they heard one of us
declaring that they neither toil nor spin? They would say, I take
it, much what we should if we were to hear of their preaching
humility on the text of Solomons, and saying, “Consider the
Solomons in all their glory, they toil not neither do they
spin.” We should say that the lilies were talking about
things that they did not understand, and that though the Solomons
do not toil nor spin, yet there had been no lack of either toiling
or spinning before they came to be arrayed so gorgeously.
Let me now return to the Professor. I have said enough to show
the general drift of the arguments on which he relied in order to
show that vegetables are only animals under another name, but have
not stated his case in anything like the fullness with which he
laid it before the public. The conclusion he drew, or pretended to
draw, was that if it was sinful to kill and eat animals, it was not
less sinful to do the like by vegetables, or their seeds. None
such, he said, should be eaten, save what had died a natural death,
such as fruit that was lying on the ground and about to rot, or
cabbage- leaves that had turned yellow in late autumn. These and
other like garbage he declared to be the only food that might be
eaten with a clear conscience. Even so the eater must plant the
pips of any apples or pears that he may have eaten, or any
plum-stones, cherry- stones, and the like, or he would come near to
incurring the guilt of infanticide. The grain of cereals, according
to him, was out of the question, for every such grain had a living
soul as much as man had, and had as good a right as man to possess
that soul in peace.
Having thus driven his fellow countrymen into a corner at the
point of a logical bayonet from which they felt that there was no
escape, he proposed that the question what was to be done should be
referred to an oracle in which the whole country had the greatest
confidence, and to which recourse was always had in times of
special perplexity. It was whispered that a near relation of the
philosopher’s was lady’s-maid to the priestess who
delivered the oracle, and the Puritan party declared that the
strangely unequivocal answer of the oracle was obtained by
backstairs influence; but whether this was so or no, the response
as nearly as I can translate it was as follows:-
“He who sins aught Sins more than he ought; But he who
sins nought Has much to be taught. Beat or be beaten, Eat or be
eaten, Be killed or kill; Choose which you will.”
It was clear that this response sanctioned at any rate the
destruction of vegetable life when wanted as food by man; and so
forcibly had the philosopher shown that what was sauce for
vegetables was so also for animals, that, though the Puritan party
made a furious outcry, the acts forbidding the use of meat were
repealed by a considerable majority. Thus, after several hundred
years of wandering in the wilderness of philosophy, the country
reached the conclusions that common sense had long since arrived
at. Even the Puritans after a vain attempt to subsist on a kind of
jam made of apples and yellow cabbage leaves, succumbed to the
inevitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef and
mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-table.
One would have thought that the dance they had been led by the
old prophet, and that still madder dance which the Professor of
botany had gravely, but as I believe insidiously, proposed to lead
them, would have made the Erewhonians for a long time suspicious of
prophets whether they professed to have communications with an
unseen power or no; but so engrained in the human heart is the
desire to believe that some people really do know what they say
they know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking for
themselves, that in a short time would-be philosophers and faddists
became more powerful than ever, and gradually led their countrymen
to accept all those absurd views of life, some account of which I
have given in my earlier chapters. Indeed I can see no hope for the
Erewhonians till they have got to understand that reason
uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by
reason.