INITIAL VARIATIONS AND TOTAL EXPERIENCE 33 



two toads may be in their little shelters, they receive stimuli different 

 in strength and number. On another bank in the same garden 

 less exposed to view, and altogether more sheltered from sun and 

 wind and enemies, a robin has built a well-hidden nest. If the six 

 fledglings in the nest are watched when the mother is absent they 

 are seen to occupy very different positions of comfort, pressure and 

 warmth. When the mother-bird returns from marketing she is 

 hardly impartial in the amount of food she puts into their open 

 beaks. But the slight and perhaps unimportant inequality of 

 their experiences as fledglings is nothing to that which follows when 

 they fly abroad, and which continues to the end of their lives, the 

 life of a robin being somewhere about ten years long. The differences 

 of the total experience of the six young robins is easy to picture. 

 Again, surely, the total experience of two fleas on the body of one 

 plague-rat must be for such small creatures of importance to their 

 welfare, according as their respective " pitches " are on the abdomen, 

 back or legs of the host. When the life-history of a human being 

 is told in full the discontinuity of his total experience needs no 

 proof. The proof is written large before our eyes. But, perhaps, 

 one example may be given. There are two very eminent living 

 writers, whose light has certainly for some years not been hidden 

 under a bushel, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. George Bernard Shaw. We 

 may be said to know them well. Leaving out of sight the Celtic 

 strain claimed by one, and indeed all inherited differences, we see 

 two men of perhaps equal ability, near of an age, both living in 

 London, both living by their pen, both in easy circumstances. 

 When one considers for a moment the different company these two 

 men keep, their different and opposing outlook on life, their different 

 and opposing forms of diet for their minds and bodies (I know which 

 of the two diets of those men I would choose and with which of 

 them I would prefer to be cast on a desert island) one can only say 

 that the total experience of Mr. Chesterton differs from that of 

 Mr. Shaw as cheese from chalk, which things, incidentally, are an 

 allegory in the philosophy of life. 



The thought here briefly expressed falls well into line with 

 Prof. Bateson's statement that the directing cause of the environment 

 is essential to the theory of Lamarck, ai d I do not hesitate to add 

 to it the assertion that all environment, in the wide sense of total 

 experience, is discontinuous. There are no such phenomena in 

 total experience as unit-characters of allied forms, small variations 

 are the rule. Without doubt a large proportion of the stimuli 

 received by an organism are as figures written or a slate and at once 

 wiped off. They are as the snows of y ester year. The most they 



