Bracebridge Hemyng - "Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - "Die Juden"

William English Walling - "Socialism As It Is"

Amanda Minnie Douglas - "A Little Girl in Old Salem"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Form and Function

E >> E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell >> Form and Function




Lamarck's affinity with the transcendentalists was in many ways a close
one, but he differed essentially in being before all a systematist. Nor
is the direct influence of the German transcendentalists traceable in
his work--his spiritual ancestors are the men of his own race, the
materialists Condillac and Cabanis, and Buffon, whose friend he was. The
idea of a gradation of all animals from the lowest to the highest was
always present in Lamarck's mind, and links him up, perhaps through
Buffon, with the school of Bonnet. The idea of the _Echelle des etres_
had for him much less a morphological orientation than it had even for
the transcendentalists, for he was lacking almost completely in the
sense for morphology. Lamarck's scientific, as distinguished from his
speculative work, was exclusively systematic, and it was systematics of
a very high order. He introduced many reforms into the general
classification of animals. He was the first clearly to separate
Crustacea (1799), and a little later (1800) Arachnids, from insects. He
reduced to a certain orderliness the neglected tribes of the
Invertebrates, and wrote what was for long the standard work on their
systematics--the _Histoire naturelle des Animaux sans Vertebres_
(1816-22). His speculative work on biology is contained in three
publications, the small book entitled _Considerations sur l'organisation
des corps vivants_ (1802), the larger work of 1809, the _Philosophie
zoologique_, and the introductory matter to his _Animaux sans Vertebres_
(vol. i., 1816).

It is no easy matter to give in short compass an account of Lamarck's
biological philosophy. He is an obscure writer, and often
self-contradictory.

In the first part of the _Philosophie zoologique_ Lamarck is largely
pre-occupied with the problem of whether species are really distinct, or
do not rather grade insensibly into one another. As a systematist of
vast experience Lamarck knew how difficult it is in practice to
distinguish species from varieties. "The more," he writes, "we collect
the productions of Nature, the richer our collections become, the more
do we see almost all the gaps filled up and the lines of separation
effaced. We find ourselves reduced to an arbitrary determination, which
sometimes leads us to seize upon the slightest differences of varieties,
and form from them the distinctive character of what we call a species,
and at other times leads us to consider as a variety of a certain
species individuals a little bit different, which others regard as
forming a separate species."[340]

For Lamarck, as for Darwin later, the chief problem was not the
evolution and differentiation of types of structure, but the mode of
origin of species.

Lamarck is at great pains to show how arbitrary are our determinations
of species, and how artificial the classificatory groups which we
distinguish in Nature. Strictly speaking, there are in Nature only
individuals, "... this is certain, that among her products Nature has in
reality formed neither classes, nor orders, nor families, nor genera,
nor constant species, but only individuals which succeed one another and
resemble those that produced them. Now, these individuals belong to
infinitely diversified races, which shade into one another under all the
forms and in all the degrees of organisation, and each of which
maintains itself without change, so long as no cause of change acts upon
it" (p. 41).

But there is a natural order in the animal kingdom, a progression from
the simpler to the more complex organisations, a natural _Echelle des
etres_.

This order is shown by the relation to one another of the large
classificatory groups, for they can be arranged in series from the
simplest to the most complex, somewhat as follows:--

1. Infusoria.
2. Polyps.
3. Radiates.
4. Worms.
5. Insects.
6. Arachnids.
7. Crustacea.
8. Annelids.
9. Cirripedes.
10. Molluscs.
11. Fishes.
12. Reptiles.
13. Birds.
14. Mammals.

But the order of Nature is essentially continuous, and the limits of
even the best defined of these classes are in reality artificial--"if
the order of Nature were perfectly known in a kingdom, the classes which
we should be forced to establish in it would always constitute entirely
artificial sections" (p. 45).

In the same way the lesser classificatory groups represent smaller
sections of the one unique order of Nature. Note that Lamarck's
_Echelle_ is in no way a morphological one, and was not intended to be
such. It is a scale of increasing physiological differentiation, and the
stages of it are marked by the acquirement of this or that new organ
(_cf._ Oken). "Observation of their state convinces one that in order to
produce them successively Nature has proceeded gradually from the
simpler to the more complex. Now Nature, having had in mind the
realisation of a plan of organisation which would permit of the greatest
perfecting (that of the Vertebrates), a plan very different from those
which she has been obliged to form as a preliminary to reaching it, one
understands that, among the multitude of animals, one must necessarily
come across not a single system of organisation which has become
progressively perfected, but diverse very distinct systems, each of
which has come into existence at the moment when each primary organ
first put in its appearance" (p. 171).

For Lamarck this order of Nature was not merely ideal--Nature had
actually formed the classes successively, proceeding from the simpler to
the more complex; she had brought about this evolution by transforming
the primitive species of animals, raising them to higher degrees of
organisation, and modifying them in relation to the environment in which
they found themselves.

Lamarck's theory of evolution is worked out in great detail in his
_Philosophie zoologique_, but the exposition is diffuse and
disconnected; it is better in giving an account of it to follow the more
concise, mature and general exposition which he gives in the
Introduction to his _Histoire naturelle des Animaux sans Vertebres_.[341]
Near the beginning of the Introduction Lamarck gives us in a few short
"Fundamental Principles" the main lines of his general philosophy. He is
a confirmed materialist. Every fact and phenomenon is essentially
physical and owes its existence or production entirely to material
bodies or to relations between them. All change and all movement is in
the last resort due to mechanical causes. Every fact or phenomenon
observed in a living body is at once a physical fact or phenomenon and a
product of organisation (p. 19). Life, thought and sensation are not
properties of matter, but result from particular material combinations.

His thorough-going materialism is most clearly shown in its relation to
living things in the first three of the "Zoological Principles and
Axioms," which are developed further on in the book.

These are as follows:--"1. No kind or particle of matter can have in
itself the power of moving, living, feeling, thinking, nor of having
ideas; and if, outside of man, we observe bodies endowed with all or one
of these faculties, we ought to consider these faculties as physical
phenomena which Nature has been able to produce, not by employing some
particular kind of matter which itself possesses one or other of these
faculties, but by the order and state of things which she has
constituted in each organisation and in each particular system of
organs.

"2. Every animal faculty, of whatever nature it may be, is an organic
phenomenon, and results from a system of organs or an organ-apparatus
which gives rise to it and upon which it is necessarily dependent.

"3. The more highly a faculty is developed the more complex is the
system of organs which produces it, and the higher the general
organisation; the more difficult also does it become to grasp its
mechanism. But the faculty is none the less a phenomenon of
organisation, and for that reason purely physical" (p. 104).

According to these "axioms" function is a direct and mechanical effect
of structure.

The curious thing is that in spite of his avowed materialism, Lamarck's
conception of life and evolution is profoundly psychological, and from
the conflict of his materialism and his vitalism (of which he was
himself hardly conscious), arise most of the obscurities and the
irreductible self-contradiction of his theory.

Lamarck divided animals (psychologically!) into three great
groups--apathetic or insensitive animals, animals endowed with
sensation, and intelligent animals. The first group, which comprise all
the lower Invertebrates, are distinguished from other animals by the
fact that their actions are directly and mechanically due to the
excitations of the environment; they have no principle of reaction to
external influences, but passively prolong into action the excitations
they receive from without. They are _irritable_ merely. The second group
are distinguished from the first by their possessing, in addition to
irritability, a power which Lamarck calls the _sentiment interieur_. He
has some difficulty in defining exactly what he means by it:--"I have no
term to express this internal power possessed not only by intelligent
animals but also by those that are endowed merely with the faculty of
sensation; it is a power which, when set in action by the feeling of a
need, causes the individual to act at once, _i.e._, in the very moment
of the sensation it experiences; and if the individual is of those that
are endowed with intelligence it nevertheless acts in such a case
entirely without premeditation and before any mental operation has
brought its _will_ into play" (p. 24).

It is the power we call instinct in animals (p. 25), and it implies
neither consciousness nor will. It acts by transforming external into
internal excitations.

To this second group of animals, possessing the _sentiment interieur_,
belong the higher Invertebrates, notably insects and molluscs. Only
animals possessed of a more or less centralised nervous system can
manifest this _sentiment_, or principle of (unconscious) reaction to
external stimuli.

The higher animals, or the four Vertebrate classes, form the group of
"intelligent animals." In virtue of their more complex organisation they
possess in addition to the _sentiment interieur_ the faculties of
intelligence and will.

Now, broadly put, Lamarck's theory of evolution is that new organs are
formed in direct reaction to needs (_besoins_) experienced by the
_sentiment interieur_. The _sentiment interieur_ is therefore the cause
not only of instinctive action but also of all morphogenetic processes.
Will and intelligence (which are confined to a relatively small number
of animals) have little or nothing to do directly with evolution.

To understand the working-out of Lamarck's evolution-theory we must
revert to his conception of the _Echelle des etres_. What he wrote in
the _Philosophie zoologique_ is here repeated in the work of 1816 with
little modification.

There is a real progression from the simpler to the more complex
organisations; Nature has gradually complicated her creatures by giving
them new organs and therefore new faculties.

It is interesting to note that Lamarck expressly refers to Bonnet (p.
110), but refuses to accept his view of an _Echelle_ extending down into
the inorganic. Like Bonnet, however, and like the German
transcendentalists, Lamarck makes man the goal of evolution (p. 116). He
makes it quite clear that his _Echelle_ is a functional one, for he
links Vertebrates to molluscs even while expressly admitting that they
are not connected by any structural intermediates (p. 123). He does not
fall into the error of the transcendentalists and assume that
Vertebrates and Invertebrates alike are formed upon one common plan of
structure.

The progression of organisation shown by the animal kingdom has not been
altogether regular and uninterrupted:--"The progression in complexity of
organisation shows here and there, in the general animal series,
anomalies induced by the influence of environment and by the influence
of the habits contracted" (_Phil. zool._, i., p. 145).

There are thus really two causes at work to produce the variety of
organisation as it appears to us, one which tends to produce a regular
increase in complexity, and one which disturbs and diversifies this
regular advance.

The first cause Lamarck calls the vital power (_pouvoir de la vie_); the
other may be called the influence of circumstance (_Anim. s. Vert._, p.
134). To the latter cause are due the lacunae, the blind alleys, and the
complications which the otherwise simple scale of perfection shows.

To explain both these aspects of evolution Lamarck propounded in his
volume of 1816 four laws, which read as follows:--

"_First Law_.--Life, by its own forces, tends continually to increase
the volume of every body possessing it, and to extend the dimensions of
its parts, up to a limit which it brings about itself.

"_Second Law_.--The production of a new organ in an animal body results
from the arisal and continuance of a new need, and from the new movement
which this need brings into being and sustains.

"_Third Law_.--The degree of development of organs and their force of
action are always proportionate to the use made of these organs.

"_Fourth Law_.--All that has been acquired, imprinted or changed in the
organisation of the individual during the course of its life is
preserved by generation and transmitted to the new individuals that
descend from the individual so modified" (pp. 151-2).

It is mainly but not entirely by reason of the first of these laws that
organisation tends to progress, and mainly by reason of the second and
third that difference of environment brings about diversity of
organisation. In virtue of the fourth law the acquirements of the
individual become the property of the race.

Lamarck's exposition of his first law, that life tends by its own powers
to enlarge and extend its bodily instrument, is vague and difficult to
understand. He has already explained some pages back how the first
organisms arose by spontaneous generation in the form of minute
gelatinous utricles (_cf._ Oken). He conceives that it is in the
movements of the fluids proper to the organism that the power resides to
enlarge and extend the body. Nutrition alone is not sufficient to bring
about extension; a special force is required, acting from within
outwards (p. 153). In the most primitive organisms the movements of the
vital fluids are weak and slow, but in the course of evolution they
gradually accelerate, and, becoming more rapid, trace out canals in the
delicate tissue which contains them, and finally form organs.

Subtle fluids play a great part in Lamarck's biology: they take the
place of the soul or entelechy which the vitalists would postulate to
explain organic happenings. Lamarck seems in this to follow certain of
the old materialists, who conceived the soul to be formed of a matter
more subtle than the ordinary.[342]

In his second law Lamarck's essentially vitalistic attitude comes out
very clearly, for it states that a psychological moment enters into all
new production of form, that the ultimate cause of the development of
new form is the need felt by the organism. This need is of course not a
conscious one, it is a need perceived by the _sentiment interieur_.

In the large group of apathetic or insensitive animals, which do not
possess this faculty, needs cannot be experienced; accordingly new
organs are here formed directly and mechanically, by the movements of
the vital fluids set in action by excitations from without--the
evolution, like the behaviour, of these animals is due to the direct and
physical action of the environment. "But this is not the case with the
more highly organised animals which possess _feeling_. They experience
needs, and each need felt, acting upon their 'inner feeling,'
immediately directs the fluids and the forces to the part of the body
where action can satisfy the need. Now, if there exists at this point an
organ capable of performing the required action, it is quickly
stimulated to act; and if the organ does not exist and the need is
pressing and sustained, bit by bit the organ is produced and developed
in proportion to the continuity and the energy of its use" (p. 155).

In intelligent animals the _sentiment interieur_ may be moved by thought
or will.

As an example of the way in which the law works Lamarck takes the
hypothetical case of a gastropod mollusc, which as it creeps along
experiences dimly the need to feel the objects in front of it. It makes
an effort (unconscious, be it noted) to touch these objects with the
anterior portions of its head, and sends forward continually to these
parts a great volume of nervous and other fluids. From these efforts and
the repeated afflux of fluids there must result a development of the
nerves supplying these parts. And as, along with the nervous fluids,
nutritive juices constantly flow to the parts, there must result the
formation of two or four tentacles in the places to which these fluids
are directed. A curious mixture of mechanistic "explanations" and
vitalistic hypothesis!

In his third law, that use and disuse are powerful to modify organs,
Lamarck is upon more solid ground, and can point to many instances of
the visible effect of these factors of change. It is of course rather
closely bound up with his second law and may even be regarded as an
extension of it.

The law has reference to one of the most powerful means employed by
Nature to diversify species, a means which comes into play whenever the
environment changes. The cause of the great diversity shown by animal
species is indeed ultimately to be sought in the environment. As the
imperfect and earliest forms developed they spread over the earth and
invaded the utmost corners of it:--"One can imagine what an enormous
variety of habitats, stations, climates, available foods, environing
media, etc., animals and plants have had to endure, as the existing
species were forced to change their place of abode. And although these
changes have taken place with extreme slowness ... their reality,
necessitated by various causes, has none the less induced the species
affected by them slowly to change their manner of life and their
habitual actions. Through the effects of the second and third of the
laws cited above, these induced activity-changes must have brought into
being new organs, and must have been able to develop them further if
more frequent use was made of them; they must in the same way have been
capable of bringing about the degeneration and finally the complete
disappearance of existing organs which had become useless" (p. 161).

On the other hand, if the environment does not change, species remain
constant.

It is to be noted that change in environment is rather the occasion than
the cause of modification; the environment induces the organism to
change its habitual way of life; it sets up new needs, to satisfy which
the organism must modify its structure. It is the organism that takes
the active part in all this, the action of the environment is indirect.

Of Lamarck's fourth law, which asserts the transmission of acquired
characters, little need here be said in the way of exposition. Upon the
truth of it depends of course Lamarck's whole theory. He himself never
dreamed that anyone would ever dispute it.

Lamarck sums up as follows:--"By the four laws which I have just
enunciated all the facts of organisation seem to me to be easily
explained; the progression in the complexity of organisation of animals,
and in their faculties, seems to me easy to conceive; so, too, the means
which Nature has employed to diversify animals, and bring them to the
state in which we now see them, become easily determinable" (p. 168).

It is never made quite clear, we may note in passing, how far his second
and third laws tend to bring about an increase in complexity, in
addition to diversifying animals.[343]

"The function creates the organ," this would seem to be the kernel of
Lamarck's doctrine. But how does he reconcile this essentially
vitalistic conception with his strictly materialistic philosophy?

We have seen that irritability, the _sentiment interieur_, and
intelligence itself, are the effects of organisation. We are told
farther on that both the _sentiment_ and intelligence are caused by
nervous fluids. A great part of both the _Philosophie zoologique_ and
the introduction to the _Animaux sans Vertebres_ is given up to the
exposition of a materialistic psychology of animals and man, based
entirely upon this hypothesis of nervous fluids. Thus habits are due to
the fluids hollowing out definite paths for themselves.

The _sentiment interieur_ acts by directing the movements of the subtle
fluids of the body (which are themselves modifications of the nervous
fluids) upon the parts where a new organ is needed. But if it is itself
only a result of the movement of nervous fluids? Again, how can a need
be "felt" by a nervous fluid? This is an entirely psychological notion
and cannot be applied to a purely material system. Whence arises the
power of the _sentiment interieur_ to canalise the energies of the
organism, so to direct and co-ordinate them that they build up purposive
structures, or effect purposive actions (as in all instinctive
behaviour)? Either the _sentiment interieur_ is a psychological faculty,
or it is nothing.

There is no doubt that, as expressed by Lamarck, the conception conceals
a radical confusion of thought. It is not possible to be a
thorough-going materialist, and at the same time to believe that new
organs are formed in direct response to needs felt by the organism.
Lamarck could never resolve this antinomy, and his speculations were
thrown into confusion by it. To this cause is due the frequent obscurity
of his writings.

Should we be right in laying stress upon the psychological side of
Lamarck's theory, and disregarding the materialistic dress in which,
perhaps under the influence of the materialism current in his youth, he
clothed his essentially vitalistic thought? Everything goes to prove
it--his constant preoccupation with psychological questions, his tacit
assimilation of organ-formation to instinctive behaviour, his constant
insistence on the importance of _besoin_ and _habitude_.

Let us not forget the profundity of his main idea, that, exception made
for the lower forms, the animal is essentially active, that it always
_reacts_ to the external world, is never passively acted upon. Let us
not forget that he pointed out the essentially psychological moment
implied in all processes of individual adaptation. With keen insight he
realised that conscious intelligence counts for little in evolution, and
focussed attention upon the unconscious but obscurely psychical
processes of instinct and morphogenesis.

Not without reason have the later schools of evolutionary thought, who
developed the psychological and vitalistic side of his doctrine, called
themselves Neo-Lamarckians.

We shall say then that Lamarck, in spite of his materialism, was the
founder of the "psychological" theory of evolution.

Lamarck stood curiously aloof and apart from the scientific thought of
his day.[344] He took no interest in the morphological problems that
filled the minds of Cuvier and Geoffroy; he had indeed no feeling at all
for morphology. He did not realise, like Cuvier, the _convenance des
parties_, the marvellous co-ordination of parts to form a whole; he had
little conception of what is really implied in the word "organism." He
was not, like Geoffroy, imbued with a lively sense of the unity of plan
and composition, and of the significance of vestigial organs as
witnesses to that unity. He seems not to have known of the
recapitulation theory, of which he might have made such good use as
powerful evidence for evolution. Even with the German
transcendentalists, with whom in the looseness of his generalisations he
shows some affinity, he seems not to have been specially acquainted.

He was interested more in the problems suggested to him by his daily
work in the museum. He wanted to know why species graded so annoyingly
into one another; he wanted to examine critically his haunting suspicion
that species were really not distinct, and that classification was
purely conventional. The question, too, of the adaptation of species to
their environment, the problem of ecological adaptation, in distinction
to that of functional adaptation which interested Cuvier so greatly,
came vividly before him as he worked through the vast collections of the
museum. He was the first systematist to occupy himself in a
philosophical manner with the problems of general biology. He introduced
new problems and a new way of looking at old. With Lamarck the problem
of species and the problem of ecological adaptation enter into general
biology.

The one point in which he does definitely carry on the thought of his
predecessors is his conception of the animal kingdom as forming a scale
of (functional) perfection. He did not go to the same extreme as Bonnet;
he did not even consider that the animal series was a continuation of
the vegetable series; in his opinion they formed two diverging scales.
He recognised, too, that among animals there was no simple and regular
gradation from the lowest to the highest, but that the orderly
progression was disturbed and diverted by the necessity of adaptation to
different environments. It is interesting to note that in developing
this idea he arrived at a roughly accurate distinction between
homologous and analogous structures. More importance, he thought, was to
be attributed in classifying animals to characters which appeared due to
the "plan of Nature" than to such as were produced by an external
modifying cause (p. 299). But he did not formulate the distinction in
any strictly morphological way.

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