The law within / by Sir Bampfylde Fuller.

  • Fuller, Bampfylde, Sir, 1854-1937.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The law within / by Sir Bampfylde Fuller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Behaviour can no more be dissociated from the internal energies that actuate it than can the vibrations of a telephone from the electric current that is their cause. Yet there are psychologists who appear to regard feelings as merely accompanying actions and utter¬ ances—as a “ descant ” upon them, so to speak—so that one is afraid because he runs away, or sorrowful because he weeps. There is, no doubt, something in experience that supports this inversion of the real order of things. It is a fact that bjr deliberately smiling .we can keep up our spirits, that anger grows if we express it violently, so that in a measure it is true that “ manners makyth man ”. But these are simply illustrations of auto-suggestive, or memorial, re¬ stimulation, and this commonly runs backwards. Apart from it, conduct and speech are the outcome of internal nervous conditions which urge external activity, and are relieved by it. Is there any¬ one who, under the influence of strong emotion, has not felt the relief that is given by doing or saying something ? The sciences of Biology and Physiology have been similarly pre¬ judiced by the idea that functional are wholly distinct from “ motiv¬ ing ” activities, so that physical researches can logically stop short of investigating passions and thoughts—conditions which exist as actually as secretion or fatigue. Moreover, these sciences have closed their eyes to the duality which must exist in the constitution of all living organisms—whether animals or plants—that are formed by the combination of two sexual elements. Consequently the mass of facts which they have accumulated tends to obscure truths of a general kind rather than to reveal them. The law of evolution was a great discovery. It is a fact that an individual comes to maturity by the growth of new points out of old ; and it seems clear that individuals have been diversified, and new species created, by a similar process of differentiating growth. But the cause of evolution, and the instruments by which it introduces its novelties, are still in dispute. Influenced by the utilitarian spirit of the age, biologists have clung to the belief that the changes which have come about in the forms and faculties of living things were always purposeful, in the sense that they were of service in enabling a plant or animal to struggle for its life or propagate its kind. They have, for instance, eagerly seized hold of any instances in which form or colour may have a protective use, and have ignored the multitude of cases in which they advertise an animal’s existence to its enemies. If one butterfly is so coloured as to be inconspicuous, hundreds gaily flaunt them¬ selves in bravado. How dangerous, from the utilitarian point of view, is the song of a bird ! It betrays its whereabouts to its