He helped himself to another sandwich, and looked inquiringly at me.
‘I suppose,’ I told him, ‘that you are wanting me to say that your experiment has shown that what one of the boys knows, all the boys know, though the girls do not; and vice versa. All right then, that is what it appears to show – unless there is a catch somewhere.’
‘My dear fellow – !’
‘Well, you must admit that what it appears to show is a little more than anyone is likely to be able to swallow at one gulp.’
‘I see. Yes. Of course, I myself arrived at it by stages,’ he nodded.
‘But,’ I said, ‘it is what we were intended to infer?’
‘Of course, my dear fellow. Could it be clearer?’ He took the linked nails from his pocket and dropped them on the table. ‘Take these, and try for yourselves – or, better still, devise your own little test, and apply it. You’ll find the inference – at least the preliminary inference – inescapable.’
‘To appreciate takes longer than to grasp,’ I said, ‘but let’s regard it as a hypothesis which I accept for the moment -‘
‘Wait a minute,’ put in Janet. ‘Mr Zellaby, are you claiming that if I were to tell anything to any one of the boys, all the rest would know it?’
‘Certainly – provided, of course, that it was something simple enough for them to understand at this stage.’
Janet looked highly sceptical.
Zellaby sighed.
‘The old trouble,’ he said. ‘Lynch Darwin, and you show the impossibility of evolution. But, as I said, you’ve only to apply your own tests.’ He turned back to me. ‘You were allowing the hypothesis …?’ he suggested.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘and you said that was the preliminary inference. What is the next one?’
‘I should have thought that just that one contained implications enough to capsize our social system.’
‘Couldn’t this be something like – I mean, a more developed form of the sort of sympathetic understanding that’s sometimes found between twins?’ Janet asked.
Zellaby shook his head.
‘I think not – or else it has developed far enough to have acquired new features. Besides, we don’t have here one single group en rapport; we have two separate groups of rapport, apparently without cross-connexions. Now, if that is so, and we have seen that it is, a question that immediately presents itself is this: to what extent is any of these Children an individual? Each is physically an individual, as we can see – but is he so in other ways? If he is sharing consciousness with the rest of the group, instead of having to communicate with others with difficulty, as we do, can he be said to have a mind of his own, a separate personality as we understand it? I don’t see that he can. It seems perfectly clear that if A, B, and C share a common consciousness, then what A expresses is also what B and C are thinking, and that way action taken by B in particular circumstances is exactly that which would be taken by A and C in those circumstances – subject only to modifications arising from physical differences between them, which may, in fact, be considerable in so far as conduct is very susceptible to conditions of the glands, and other factors in the physical individual.
‘In other words if I ask a question to any of these boys I shall get exactly the same answer from whichever I choose to ask: if I ask him to perform an action, I shall get more or less the same result, but it is likely to be more successful with some who happen to have better physical coordination than others – though, in point of fact, with such close similarity as there is among the Children the variation will be small.
‘But my point is this: it will not be an individual who answers me, or performs what I ask, it will be an item of the group. And in that alone lie plenty of further questions, and implications.’
Janet was frowning. ‘I still don’t quite -‘
‘Let me put it differently,’ said Zellaby. ‘What we have seemed to have here is fifty-eight little individual entities. But appearances have been deceptive, and we find that what we actually have are two entities only – a boy, and a girl: though the boy has thirty component parts each with the physical structure and appearance of individual boys; and the girl has twenty-eight component parts.’
There was a pause. Presently:
‘I find that rather hard to take,’ said Janet, with careful understatement.
‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Zellaby. ‘So did I.’
‘Look here,’ I said, after a further pause. ‘You are putting this forward as a serious proposition? I mean, it isn’t just a dramatic manner of speaking?’
‘I am stating a fact – having shown you the evidence first.’
I shook my head. ‘All you showed us was that they are able to communicate in some way that I don’t understand. To proceed from that to your theory of non-individualism is too much of a jump.’
‘On that piece of evidence alone, perhaps so. But you must remember that, though this is the first you have seen, I have already conducted a number of tests, and not one of them has contradicted the idea of what I prefer to call collective-individualism. Moreover, it is not as strange, per se, as it appears at first sight. It is quite a well established evolutionary dodge for getting round a shortcoming. A number of forms that appear at first sight to be individuals turn out to be colonies – and many forms cannot survive at all unless they create colonies which operate as individuals. Admittedly the best examples are among the lower forms, but there’s no reason why it should be confined to them. Many of the insects come pretty near it. The laws of physics prevent them increasing in size, so they contrive greater efficiency by acting as a group. We ourselves combine in groups consciously, instead of by instinct, for the same purposes. Very well, why shouldn’t nature produce a more efficient version of the method by which we clumsily contrive to overcome our own weakness? Another case of nature copying art, perhaps?
‘After all, we are up against the barriers to further development, and we have been for some time – unless we are to stagnate we must find some way of getting round them. G. B. S. proposed, you will remember, that the first step should be to extend the term of human life to three hundred years. That might be one way – and no doubt the extension of individual life would have a strong appeal to so determined an individualist – but there are others, and, though this is not perhaps a line of evolution one would expect to find among the higher animals, it is obviously not impracticable – though, of course, that is by no means to say that it is bound to be successful.’
A quick glance at Janet’s expression showed me that she had dropped out. When she has decided that someone is talking nonsense she makes a quick decision to waste no more effort upon it, and pulls down an impervious mental curtain. I went on pondering, looking out of the window.
‘I feel, I think,’ I said presently, ‘rather like a chameleon placed on a colour it can’t quite manage. If I have followed you, you are saying that in each of these two groups the minds are in some way – well – pooled. Would that imply that the boys have, collectively, a normal brain-power multiplied by thirty, and the girls have it multiplied by twenty-eight?’
‘I think not,’ said Zellaby, quite seriously, ‘and it certainly does not mean normal abilities to the power of thirty, thank heaven – that would be beyond any comprehension. It does appear to mean multiplication of intelligence in some degree, but at their present stage I don’t see how that can be estimated – if it ever could be. That may portend tremendous things. But what seems to me of more immediate importance is the degree of willpower that has been produced – the potentialities of that strike me as very serious indeed. One has no idea how these compulsions are exerted, but I fancy that if it can be explored we might find that when a certain degree of will is, so as to speak, concentrated in one vessel a Hegelian change takes place – that is, that in more than a critical quantity it begins to display a new quality. In this case, a power of direct imposition.
‘That, however, I frankly admit is speculative – and I can now foresee a devil of a lot to speculate about and investigate.’
‘The whole thing sounds incredibly complicated to me – if you are right.’
‘In detail, in the mechanics, yes,’ Zellaby admitted, ‘but in principle, I think, not nearly so much as would appear at first sight. After all, you would agree that the essential quality of man is the embodiment of a spirit?’