Why cant you talk and walk and paint and behave decently?’
To that question Baby Raphael had no answer.
All he could have said was that this is how evolution
or transformation happens. The time may come
when the same force that compressed the development
of millions of years into nine months may pack many
more millions into even a shorter space; so that Raphaels
may be born painters as they are now born breathers
and blood circulators. But they will still begin
as specks of protoplasm, and acquire the faculty of
painting in their mother’s womb at quite a late
stage of their embryonic life. They must recapitulate
the history of mankind in their own persons, however
briefly they may condense it.
Nothing was so astonishing and significant in the
discoveries of the embryologists, nor anything so
absurdly little appreciated, as this recapitulation,
as it is now called: this power of hurrying up
into months a process which was once so long and tedious
that the mere contemplation of it is unendurable by
men whose span of life is three-score-and-ten.
It widened human possibilities to the extent of enabling
us to hope that the most prolonged and difficult operation
of our minds may yet become instantaneous, or, as
we call it, instinctive. It also directed our
attention to examples of this packing up of centuries
into seconds which were staring us in the face in all
directions. As I write these lines the newspapers
are occupied by the exploits of a child of eight,
who has just defeated twenty adult chess players in
twenty games played simultaneously, and has been able
afterwards to reconstruct all the twenty games without
any apparent effort of memory. Most people, including
myself, play chess (when they play it at all) from
hand to mouth, and can hardly recall the last move
but one, or foresee the next but two. Also, when
I have to make an arithmetical calculation, I have
to do it step by step with pencil and paper, slowly,
reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result
that I dare not act on it without ‘proving’
the sum by a further calculation involving more ciphering.
But there are men who can neither read, write, nor
cipher, to whom the answer to such sums as I can do
is instantly obvious without any conscious calculation
at all; and the result is infallible. Yet some
of these natural arithmeticians have but a small vocabulary;
are at a loss when they have to find words for any
but the simplest everyday occasions; and cannot for
the life of them describe mechanical operations which
they perform daily in the course of their trade; whereas
to me the whole vocabulary of English literature,
from Shakespear to the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, is so completely and instantaneously at
my call that I have never had to consult even a thesaurus
except once or twice when for some reason I wanted
a third or fourth synonym. Again, though I have
tried and failed to draw recognizable portraits of
persons I have seen every day for years, Mr Bernard
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