Transformism

“ In fact, the tendency to discard superficial, and to retain only fundamental, uniformities, is dangerous to the theory of Transformism. When we confine our attention to what is really basic, we find that the resemblances become so generalized and widespread that specific conclusions as to descent become impossible, and we lose all sense of direction in a clueless labyrinth of innumerable, yet mutually contradictory, possibilities. ”

“ But let us waive the evasion, and reason as though the dog were radically incapable of representing his thoughts by symbols. Would not absolute transformism, that is, the applicability of transformism to man, receive a mortal blow? I do not believe it. The only really legitimate conclusion would be, that not all species are indefinitely perfectible, but that only a few species, perhaps only one, have really entered upon the road to infinite progress, while the others have gone into a kind of blind alley. ”

“ To sum up: we expected that a rational system might be a biological result of the future, but we could not claim at all to possess such a system. We said that transformism might be proved one day to be a true evolution, governed by one immanent principle, which then would have to be regarded as a new primary factor in nature, but we did not know the least about that principle. ”

“ As we ourselves feel absolutely incapable of adding anything specific to the general statement that there must be an unknown principle of transformism, if the hypothesis of descent is justified at all, we may here close our discussion of the subject. ”

“ Whatever is to be thought of the theory of the beginnings of life, one or more first living beings having appeared upon the earth, after the latter had become capable of supporting them, the question arises as to the transition from the primitive simplicity to the enormous degree of variety now existing. Here we have the problem of the origin of species, which is solved by the theory of descent, sometimes denominated transformism. ”

“ Unless there be a simplification, a reduction of plurality to unity, a resolution of many particular problems into a common general problem, we have no explanation worthy of the name. Granting, therefore, that uniformitarian fixism does not recur to the anomalous or the miraculous, it still lies open to the charge of failing in its function as an explanation, because it multiplies origins in both space and time. Transformism, on the contrary, is said to elucidate matters, inasmuch as it unifies origins spatially and temporally. ”

“ The transmutation theory insists that they owe their origin to gradual transformations, and are not, therefore, the result of distinct creative acts. All agree, however, that we arrive at a lower stratum where no trace of life is to be found. ”

“ We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress: personally I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form. It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image; to make it something that we see already in our minds. Evolution is a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling. Progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a road—very likely the wrong road. But reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape. ”

“ Absolute necessity of admitting transmutation of forms. The biography of the earth is thus, on the great scale, typical of individual life, even that of man, and the succession of species in the [356] progress of numberless ages is the counterpart of the transmutation of an individual from form to form. As in a dissolving view, new objects emerge from old ones, and new forms spontaneously appear without the exercise of any periodical creative act.
Life of man from infancy to maturity in accordance with his anatomy.For some days after birth the actions of the human being are merely reflex. ”

“ And here let us not omit to note that along with the notion of transmutation is involved the notion of duality. These things have obviously two states of existence.
Much evidence forces on the primitive man the notion that things can change their forms as well as their substances. Did we not thoughtlessly assume that truths which culture has made obvious to us are naturally obvious, we should see that an unlimited belief in metamorphosis is one which the savage cannot avoid. ”

“ True, he states the method or law of that change. But the method is discovered by induction. Induction is in turn annihilated by evolution. The fabric as it rises loses its foundation, and floats in the air, a baseless vision. ”

“ Our actual transformation, which is the final word in science, is in full accord with the theory of reincarnation. What is transformation except the idea that living things transform themselves, progressing one into another? Nature presents herself to us under the aspect of a spark, elaborately perfecting without ceasing to create, to attain an ideal which will be the millennium. Whatever Nature does for the body she does for the soul. ”

“ In each conquest he wins again the smiling love and life-giving mother—images which belong to the intuitive depths of human feeling, the features of which have become mutilated and irrecognizable through the progressive development of the surface of the human mind. The stern necessity of adaptation works ceaselessly to obliterate the last traces of these primitive landmarks of the period of the origin of the human mind, and to replace them along lines which are to denote more and more clearly the nature of real objects. ”

“ Transformations have passed, transformations are on the way. For mercy's sake, cannot they show us transformations in the act? Must the facts of the past and the facts of the future necessarily exclude the facts of the present? ”

“ It is evident that by the combined action of appropriate forces any material form can be transformed into any other: just as out of a “shapeless” mass of clay the potter or the sculptor models his artistic product; or just as we attribute to Nature herself the power to effect the gradual and successive transformation of the simplest into the most complex organism. In like manner it is possible, at least theoretically, to cause the outline of any closed curve to appear as a projection of any other whatsoever. ”

“ Why should there be in the future a change that has not yet occurred? The elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters: they hold sound for ever, and so the All holds sound. And even supposing these elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists: the ground of all the change must itself be changeless. ”

“ Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual's life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a 'transformation.'
These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided. ”

“ Unless there be some other gradual process besides transmutation, to bridge the interval between the creative fiat and the eventual appearance of modern types, there seems to be no escape from the dilemma. ”

“ Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for what we term "independent creation," or the direct intervention of the Supreme Cause, must simply be considered as an avowal that we deem the question to lie beyond the domain of science. ”

“ The change is everywhere, but inward; we localize it here and there, but outwardly; and thus we constitute bodies which are both stable as to their qualities and mobile as to their positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the universal transformation. ”

“ In point of fact, the contention of the transformists is different. They do not refuse to recognise the grouping of living beings, according to their degrees of similarity, into varieties and species; but they grant to species only a momentary fixedness in time and space. It does not exist, it is not a natural type, it is transitionally a stable variation; the individual is the reality. From our point of view, this signifies that the specific characters isolated by abstraction are of value only as practical means of simplification in no way helping us to penetrate into the nature of things. ”

“ It would have shocked Confucius.
The Origin of Life and Motion.
There is a Life that is uncreated;
There is a Transformer who is changeless.
The Uncreated alone can produce life;
The Changeless alone can evolve change.
That Life cannot but produce;
That Transformer cannot but transform.
Wherefore creations and transformations are perpetual,
And these perpetual creations and transformations continue through all time. ”

“ The outrages which I have described are preparing a future parasite. The transformists dogmatize about the past and dogmatize about the future, but as seldom as possible talk to us about the present. Transformations have taken place, transformations will take place; the pity of it is that they are not actually taking place. Of the three tenses, one is lacking, the very one which directly interests us and which alone is clear of the incubus of theory. ”

“ In the present day we are too apt to regard the doctrine of transmutation, which formed the basis of alchemy, as a mere hallucination of the human mind; and to look upon the men who entertained it with mixed feelings of pity and contempt. ”

“ Neither those who were inclined towards the 'progressive transmutation' or 'development' doctrine, as it was then called, nor those who were opposed to it, had the slightest suspicion that the tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact ”

“ We cannot speak legitimately of changes in the point of view and the intervening medium until we have already constructed some world more stable than that of momentary sensation. Our discussion of the blue spectacles and the walk round the table has, I hope, made this clear. But what remains far from clear is the nature of the reconstruction required. ”

“ A glance, almost at random, at current literature in which the conception of evolution is employed in philosophical and theological discussion, shows that the theory has suffered a sea-change. It has now come to mean, to many who use it freely, not the unfolding of the implicit, but the production or appearance of something essentially new, a creative synthesis or epigenesis. Bergson, James Ward, Baron von Hügel and Loisy are among those who use the term in this sense. ”

“ Did we not thoughtlessly accept as innate the conceptions slowly elaborated during civilization and acquired insensibly during our early days, we should at once see that these ideas which the primitive man forms are inevitably formed. The laws of mental association necessitate these primitive notions of transmutation, of metamorphosis, of duality ”

“ We, who thousands of years ago passed through the transition, from the personal, animal view of life to the socialized view, imagine that that transition was an inevitable and natural one; but this transition through which we have been passing for the last eighteen hundred years seems arbitrary, unnatural, and alarming. ”

“ But, of course, everything in the process of adaptation to artistic purposes is under the necessity of translation or transformation, and any form or tint in nature must be re-stated in the terms proper to the art or craft under its own conditions and limitations as being essential to the character and beauty of the result, suggestion, rather than imitation of nature, being the principle to follow. ”

“ All I am [115] necessitated to think is a real event—a real, physical, dynamical transmutation—proceeding quite independently of my perception or presence; and if I can only manage to realise that I must, for philosophical purposes, eliminate my reference to visual as well as to audible or other sensations, I will understand that all I am entitled to, and all I can, without hopeless contradiction, postulate as real thing existing independently of my perception, is a transmutation of Energy. ”

“ But the power of adaptation is mainly dependent on the power of thinking certain new things sufficiently like certain others to which we have been accustomed for us not to be too much incommoded by the change—upon the power, in fact, of mistaking the new for the old. ”

“ But where a special adaptation in some one variety of the same class of constructions is needful to accomplish an object peculiar to a new variety, the necessary amount of power never fails to be exerted. ”

“ Men of Genius Cause the Mutations Which Permit Progress.—The toiling multitudes always use the products of some inventive genius. Some individual with specialized mental traits plans something different from social usages or industrial life which changes tradition and modifies the customs and habits of the mass. Whether he be statesman, inventor, philosopher, scientist, discoverer, or military leader, he usually receives credit for the great progressive mutation which he has originated. ”

“ It merely indicates that no one straight line of descent, or of consecutive transformation, exists; but on the contrary, that among human and anthropoid types, recent and extinct, we have to do with a complex problem of divergent, rather than of continuous, variation. ”