Transcribed from the 1910 A. C. Fifield edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

Unconscious Memory

By
Samuel Butler

Author of
“Life and Habit,” “Erewhon,” “The
Way of All Flesh,” etc.

New Edition, entirely reset, with
an Introduction
by Marcus Hartog, M.A., D.SC., F.L.S., F.R.H.S., Pro-
fessor of Zoology in University College, Cork.

Op.
5

London
A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford’s Inn, E.C.
1910

“As this paper contains nothing which
deserves the name either of experiment or discovery, and as it
is, in fact, destitute of every species of merit, we should have
allowed it to pass among the multitude of those articles which
must always find their way into the collections of a society
which is pledged to publish two or three volumes every year. . .
.  We wish to raise our feeble voice against innovations,
that can have no other effect than to check the progress of
science, and renew all those wild phantoms of the imagination
which Bacon and Newton put to flight from her
temple.”—Opening Paragraph of a Review of Dr.
Young’s Bakerian Lecture.  Edinburgh
Review, January 1803, p. 450.

“Young’s work was laid before the Royal society,
and was made the 1801 Bakerian Lecture.  But he was before
his time.  The second number of the Edinburgh Review
contained an article levelled against him by Henry (afterwards
Lord) Brougham, and this was so severe an attack that
Young’s ideas were absolutely quenched for fifteen
years.  Brougham was then only twenty-four years of
age.  Young’s theory was reproduced in France by
Fresnel.  In our days it is the accepted theory, and is
found to explain all the phenomena of
light.”—Times Report of a Lecture by Professor
Tyndall on Light, April 27, 1880.

This Book

Is inscribed to

Richard
Garnett, Esq.

(Of the British Museum)

In grateful acknowledgment of the
unwearying kindness
with which he has so often placed at my disposal
his varied store of information.

Contents

p.
viiiNote

For many years a link in the chain
of Samuel Butler’s biological works has been missing. 
“Unconscious Memory” was originally published thirty
years ago, but for fully half that period it has been out of
print, owing to the destruction of a large number of the unbound
sheets in a fire at the premises of the printers some years
ago.  The present reprint comes, I think, at a peculiarly
fortunate moment, since the attention of the general public has
of late been drawn to Butler’s biological theories in a
marked manner by several distinguished men of science, notably by
Dr. Francis Darwin, who, in his presidential address to the
British Association in 1908, quoted from the translation of
Hering’s address on “Memory as a Universal Function
of Original Matter,” which Butler incorporated into
“Unconscious Memory,” and spoke in the highest terms
of Butler himself.  It is not necessary for me to do more
than refer to the changed attitude of scientific authorities with
regard to Butler and his theories, since Professor Marcus Hartog
has most kindly consented to contribute an introduction to the
present edition of “Unconscious Memory,” summarising
Butler’s views upon biology, and defining his position in
the world of science.  A word must be said as to the
controversy between Butler and Darwin, with which Chapter IV is
concerned.  I have been told that in reissuing the book at
all I am committing a grievous error of taste, that the world is
no longer interested in these “old, unhappy far-off things
and battles long ago,” and that Butler himself, by
refraining from republishing “Unconscious Memory,”
tacitly admitted that he wished the controversy to be consigned
to oblivion.  This last suggestion, at any rate, has no
foundation in fact.  Butler desired nothing less than that
his vindication of himself against what he considered unfair
treatment should be forgotten.  He would have republished
“Unconscious Memory” himself, had not the latter
years of his life been devoted to all-engrossing work in other
fields.  In issuing the present edition I am fulfilling a
wish that he expressed to me shortly before his death.

R. A. Streatfeild.

April, 1910.

p.
ixIntroduction
By Marcus Hartog, M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S., F.R.H.S.

In reviewing Samuel Butler’s
works, “Unconscious Memory” gives us an invaluable
lead; for it tells us (Chaps. II, III) how the author came to
write the Book of the Machines in “Erewhon” (1872),
with its foreshadowing of the later theory, “Life and
Habit,” (1878), “Evolution, Old and New”
(1879), as well as “Unconscious Memory” (1880)
itself.  His fourth book on biological theory was
“Luck? or Cunning?” (1887). [0a]

Besides these books, his contributions to biology comprise
several essays: “Remarks on Romanes’ Mental
Evolution in Animals, contained in “Selections from
Previous Works” (1884) incorporated into “Luck? or
Cunning,” “The Deadlock in Darwinism”
(Universal Review, April-June, 1890), republished in the
posthumous volume of “Essays on Life, Art, and
Science” (1904), and, finally, some of the “Extracts
from the Notebooks of the late Samuel Butler,” edited by
Mr. H. Festing Jones, now in course of publication in the New
Quarterly Review.

Of all these, “LIFE AND HABIT” (1878) is the most
important, the main building to which the other writings are
buttresses or, at most, annexes.  Its teaching has been
summarised in “Unconscious Memory” in four main
principles: “(1) the oneness of personality between parent
and offspring; (2) memory on the part of the offspring of certain
actions which it did when in the persons of its forefathers; (3)
the latency of that memory until it is rekindled by a recurrence
of the associated ideas; (4) the unconsciousness with which
habitual actions come to be performed.”  To these we
must add a fifth: the purposiveness of the actions of living
beings, as of the machines which they make or select.

Butler tells (“Life and Habit,” p. 33) that he
sometimes hoped “that this book would be regarded as a
valuable adjunct to Darwinism.”  He was bitterly
disappointed in the event, for the book, as a whole, was received
by professional biologists as a gigantic joke—a joke,
moreover, not in the best possible taste.  True, its central
ideas, largely those of Lamarck, had been presented by Hering in
1870 (as Butler found shortly after his publication); they had
been favourably received, developed by Haeckel, expounded and
praised by Ray Lankester.  Coming from Butler, they met with
contumely, even from such men as Romanes, who, as Butler had no
difficulty in proving, were unconsciously inspired by the same
ideas—“Nur mit ein bischen ander’n
Wörter.”

It is easy, looking back, to see why “Life and
Habit” so missed its mark.  Charles Darwin’s
presentation of the evolution theory had, for the first time,
rendered it possible for a “sound naturalist” to
accept the doctrine of common descent with divergence; and so
given a real meaning to the term “natural
relationship,” which had forced itself upon the older
naturalists, despite their belief in special and independent
creations.  The immediate aim of the naturalists of the day
was now to fill up the gaps in their knowledge, so as to
strengthen the fabric of a unified biology.  For this
purpose they found their actual scientific equipment so
inadequate that they were fully occupied in inventing fresh
technique, and working therewith at facts—save a few
critics, such as St. George Mivart, who was regarded as
negligible, since he evidently held a brief for a party standing
outside the scientific world.

Butler introduced himself as what we now call “The Man
in the Street,” far too bare of scientific clothing to
satisfy the Mrs. Grundy of the domain: lacking all recognised
tools of science and all sense of the difficulties in his way, he
proceeded to tackle the problems of science with little save the
deft pen of the literary expert in his hand.  His very
failure to appreciate the difficulties gave greater power to his
work—much as Tartarin of Tarascon ascended the Jungfrau and
faced successfully all dangers of Alpine travel, so long as he
believed them to be the mere “blagues de
réclame” of the wily Swiss host.  His brilliant
qualities of style and irony themselves told heavily against
him.  Was he not already known for having written the most
trenchant satire that had appeared since “Gulliver’s
Travels”?  Had he not sneered therein at the very
foundations of society, and followed up its success by a
pseudo-biography that had taken in the “Record” and
the “Rock”?  In “Life and Habit,” at
the very start, he goes out of his way to heap scorn at the
respected names of Marcus Aurelius, Lord Bacon, Goethe, Arnold of
Rugby, and Dr. W. B. Carpenter.  He expressed the lowest
opinion of the Fellows of the Royal Society.  To him the
professional man of science, with self-conscious knowledge for
his ideal and aim, was a medicine-man, priest,
augur—useful, perhaps, in his way, but to be carefully
watched by all who value freedom of thought and person, lest with
opportunity he develop into a persecutor of the worst type. 
Not content with blackguarding the audience to whom his work
should most appeal, he went on to depreciate that work itself and
its author in his finest vein of irony.  Having argued that
our best and highest knowledge is that of whose possession we are
most ignorant, he proceeds: “Above all, let no unwary
reader do me the injustice of believing in me.  In that I
write at all I am among the damned.”

His writing of “EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW” (1879) was
due to his conviction that scant justice had been done by Charles
Darwin and Alfred Wallace and their admirers to the pioneering
work of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck.  To repair this
he gives a brilliant exposition of what seemed to him the most
valuable portion of their teachings on evolution.  His
analysis of Buffon’s true meaning, veiled by the reticences
due to the conditions under which he wrote, is as masterly as the
English in which he develops it.  His sense of wounded
justice explains the vigorous polemic which here, as in all his
later writings, he carries to the extreme.

As a matter of fact, he never realised Charles Darwin’s
utter lack of sympathetic understanding of the work of his French
precursors, let alone his own grandfather, Erasmus.  Yet
this practical ignorance, which to Butler was so strange as to
transcend belief, was altogether genuine, and easy to realise
when we recall the position of Natural Science in the early
thirties in Darwin’s student days at Cambridge, and for a
decade or two later.  Catastropharianism was the tenet of
the day: to the last it commended itself to his Professors of
Botany and Geology,—for whom Darwin held the fervent
allegiance of the Indian scholar, or chela, to his
guru.  As Geikie has recently pointed out, it was
only later, when Lyell had shown that the breaks in the
succession of the rocks were only partial and local, without
involving the universal catastrophes that destroyed all life and
rendered fresh creations thereof necessary, that any general
acceptance of a descent theory could be expected.  We may be
very sure that Darwin must have received many solemn warnings
against the dangerous speculations of the “French
Revolutionary School.”  He himself was far too busy at
the time with the reception and assimilation of new facts to be
awake to the deeper interest of far-reaching theories.

It is the more unfortunate that Butler’s lack of
appreciation on these points should have led to the enormous
proportion of bitter personal controversy that we find in the
remainder of his biological writings.  Possibly, as
suggested by George Bernard Shaw, his acquaintance and admirer,
he was also swayed by philosophical resentment at that banishment
of mind from the organic universe, which was generally thought to
have been achieved by Charles Darwin’s theory.  Still,
we must remember that this mindless view is not implicit in
Charles Darwin’s presentment of his own theory, nor was it
accepted by him as it has been by so many of his professed
disciples.

“UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY” (1880).—We have already
alluded to an anticipation of Butler’s main theses. 
In 1870 Dr. Ewald Hering, one of the most eminent physiologists
of the day, Professor at Vienna, gave an Inaugural Address to the
Imperial Royal Academy of Sciences: “Das Gedächtniss
als allgemeine Funktion der organisirter Substanz”
(“Memory as a Universal Function of Organised
Matter”).  When “Life and Habit” was well
advanced, Francis Darwin, at the time a frequent visitor, called
Butler’s attention to this essay, which he himself only
knew from an article in “Nature.”  Herein
Professor E. Ray Lankester had referred to it with admiring
sympathy in connection with its further development by Haeckel in
a pamphlet entitled “Die Perigenese der
Plastidule.”  We may note, however, that in his
collected Essays, “The Advancement of Science”
(1890), Sir Ray Lankester, while including this Essay, inserts on
the blank page [0b]—we had almost written “the
white sheet”—at the back of it an apology for having
ever advocated the possibility of the transmission of acquired
characters.

“Unconscious Memory” was largely written to show
the relation of Butler’s views to Hering’s, and
contains an exquisitely written translation of the Address. 
Hering does, indeed, anticipate Butler, and that in language far
more suitable to the persuasion of the scientific public. 
It contains a subsidiary hypothesis that memory has for its
mechanism special vibrations of the protoplasm, and the acquired
capacity to respond to such vibrations once felt upon their
repetition.  I do not think that the theory gains anything
by the introduction of this even as a mere formal hypothesis; and
there is no evidence for its being anything more.  Butler,
however, gives it a warm, nay, enthusiastic, reception in Chapter
V (Introduction to Professor Hering’s lecture), and in his
notes to the translation of the Address, which bulks so large in
this book, but points out that he was “not committed to
this hypothesis, though inclined to accept it on a prima
facie view.”  Later on, as we shall see, he
attached more importance to it.

The Hering Address is followed in “Unconscious
Memory” by translations of selected passages from Von
Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” and
annotations to explain the difference from this personification
of “The Unconscious” as a mighty all-ruling,
all-creating personality, and his own scientific recognition of
the great part played by unconscious processes in the
region of mind and memory.

These are the essentials of the book as a contribution to
biological philosophy.  The closing chapters contain a lucid
statement of objections to his theory as they might be put by a
rigid necessitarian, and a refutation of that interpretation as
applied to human action.

But in the second chapter Butler states his recession from the
strong logical position he had hitherto developed in his writings
from “Erewhon” onwards; so far he had not only
distinguished the living from the non-living, but distinguished
among the latter machines or tools from things
at large. [0c]  Machines or tools are the
external organs of living beings, as organs are their internal
machines: they are fashioned, assembled, or selected by the
beings for a purposes so they have a future purpose, as
well as a past history.  “Things at
large” have a past history, but no purpose (so long as some
being does not convert them into tools and give them a purpose):
Machines have a Why? as well as a How?: “things at
large” have a How? only.

In “Unconscious Memory” the allurements of unitary
or monistic views have gained the upper hand, and Butler writes
(p. 23):—

“The only thing of which I am sure is, that
the distinction between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary;
that it is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more
acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, and
then deduce death as the breaking up of an association or
corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle
life into them; and that, therefore, what we call the inorganic
world must be regarded as up to a certain point living, and
instinct, within certain limits, with consciousness, volition,
and power of concerted action.  It is only of late,
however, that I have come to this
opinion.”

I have italicised the last sentence, to show that Butler was
more or less conscious of its irreconcilability with much of his
most characteristic doctrine.  Again, in the closing
chapter, Butler writes (p. 275):—

“We should endeavour to see the so-called
inorganic as living in respect of the qualities it has in common
with the organic, rather than the organic as non-living in
respect of the qualities it has in common with the
inorganic.”

We conclude our survey of this book by mentioning the literary
controversial part chiefly to be found in Chapter IV, but
cropping up elsewhere.  It refers to interpolations made in
the authorised translation of Krause’s “Life of
Erasmus Darwin.”  Only one side is presented; and we
are not called upon, here or elsewhere, to discuss the merits of
the question.

“LUCK, OR CUNNING, as the Main Means of Organic
Modification? an Attempt to throw Additional Light upon the late
Mr. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection”
(1887), completes the series of biological books.  This is
mainly a book of strenuous polemic.  It brings out still
more forcibly the Hering-Butler doctrine of continued personality
from generation to generation, and of the working of unconscious
memory throughout; and points out that, while this is implicit in
much of the teaching of Herbert Spencer, Romanes, and others, it
was nowhere—even after the appearance of “Life and
Habit”—explicitly recognised by them, but, on the
contrary, masked by inconsistent statements and teaching. 
Not Luck but Cunning, not the uninspired weeding out by Natural
Selection but the intelligent striving of the organism, is at the
bottom of the useful variety of organic life.  And the
parallel is drawn that not the happy accident of time and place,
but the Machiavellian cunning of Charles Darwin, succeeded in
imposing, as entirely his own, on the civilised world an
uninspired and inadequate theory of evolution wherein luck played
the leading part; while the more inspired and inspiring views of
the older evolutionists had failed by the inferiority of their
luck.  On this controversy I am bound to say that I do not
in the very least share Butler’s opinions; and I must
ascribe them to his lack of personal familiarity with the
biologists of the day and their modes of thought and of
work.  Butler everywhere undervalues the important work of
elimination played by Natural Selection in its widest sense.

The “Conclusion” of “Luck, or
Cunning?” shows a strong advance in monistic views, and a
yet more marked development in the vibration hypothesis of memory
given by Hering and only adopted with the greatest reserve in
“Unconscious Memory.”

“Our conception, then, concerning the nature
of any matter depends solely upon its kind and degree of unrest,
that is to say, on the characteristics of the vibrations that are
going on within it.  The exterior object vibrating in a
certain way imparts some of its vibrations to our brain; but if
the state of the thing itself depends upon its vibrations, it
[the thing] must be considered as to all intents and purposes the
vibrations themselves—plus, of course, the underlying
substance that is vibrating. . . .  The same vibrations,
therefore, form the substance remembered, introduce an
infinitesimal dose of it within the brain, modify the substance
remembering, and, in the course of time, create and further
modify the mechanism of both the sensory and the motor
nerves.  Thought and thing are one.

“I commend these two last speculations to the
reader’s charitable consideration, as feeling that I am
here travelling beyond the ground on which I can safely venture.
. . .  I believe they are both substantially
true.”

In 1885 he had written an abstract of these ideas in his
notebooks (see New Quarterly Review, 1910, p. 116), and as
in “Luck, or Cunning?” associated them vaguely with
the unitary conceptions introduced into chemistry by Newlands and
Mendelejeff.  Judging himself as an outsider, the author of
“Life and Habit” would certainly have considered the
mild expression of faith, “I believe they are both
substantially true,” equivalent to one of extreme
doubt.  Thus “the fact of the Archbishop’s
recognising this as among the number of his beliefs is conclusive
evidence, with those who have devoted attention to the laws of
thought, that his mind is not yet clear” on the matter of
the belief avowed (see “Life and Habit,” pp. 24,
25).

To sum up: Butler’s fundamental attitude to the
vibration hypothesis was all through that taken in
“Unconscious Memory”; he played with it as a pretty
pet, and fancied it more and more as time went on; but instead of
backing it for all he was worth, like the main theses of
“Life and Habit,” he put a big stake on it—and
then hedged.

The last of Butler’s biological writings is the Essay,
“THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM,” containing much valuable
criticism on Wallace and Weismann.  It is in allusion to the
misnomer of Wallace’s book, “Darwinism,” that
he introduces the term “Wallaceism” [0d] for a theory of descent that excludes
the transmission of acquired characters.  This was, indeed,
the chief factor that led Charles Darwin to invent his hypothesis
of pangenesis, which, unacceptable as it has proved, had far more
to recommend it as a formal hypothesis than the equally formal
germ-plasm hypothesis of Weismann.

The chief difficulty in accepting the main theses of Butler
and Hering is one familiar to every biologist, and not at all
difficult to understand by the layman.  Everyone knows that
the complicated beings that we term “Animals” and
“Plants,” consist of a number of more or less
individualised units, the cells, each analogous to a simpler
being, a Protist—save in so far as the character of the
cell unit of the Higher being is modified in accordance with the
part it plays in that complex being as a whole.  Most
people, too, are familiar with the fact that the complex being
starts as a single cell, separated from its parent; or, where
bisexual reproduction occurs, from a cell due to the fusion of
two cells, each detached from its parent.  Such cells are
called “Germ-cells.”  The germ-cell, whether of
single or of dual origin, starts by dividing repeatedly, so as to
form the primary embryonic cells, a complex mass of cells,
at first essentially similar, which, however, as they go on
multiplying, undergo differentiations and migrations, losing
their simplicity as they do so.  Those cells that are
modified to take part in the proper work of the whole are called
tissue-cells.  In virtue of their activities, their growth
and reproductive power are limited—much more in Animals
than in Plants, in Higher than in Lower beings.  It is these
tissues, or some of them, that receive the impressions from the
outside which leave the imprint of memory.  Other cells,
which may be closely associated into a continuous organ, or more
or less surrounded by tissue-cells, whose part it is to nourish
them, are called “secondary embryonic cells,” or
“germ-cells.”  The germ-cells may be
differentiated in the young organism at a very early stage, but
in Plants they are separated at a much later date from the less
isolated embryonic regions that provide for the Plant’s
branching; in all cases we find embryonic and germ-cells screened
from the life processes of the complex organism, or taking no
very obvious part in it, save to form new tissues or new organs,
notably in Plants.

Again, in ourselves, and to a greater or less extent in all
Animals, we find a system of special tissues set apart for the
reception and storage of impressions from the outer world, and
for guiding the other organs in their appropriate
responses—the “Nervous System”; and when this
system is ill-developed or out of gear the remaining organs work
badly from lack of proper skilled guidance and
co-ordination.  How can we, then, speak of
“memory” in a germ-cell which has been screened from
the experiences of the organism, which is too simple in structure
to realise them if it were exposed to them?  My own answer
is that we cannot form any theory on the subject, the only
question is whether we have any right to infer this
“memory” from the behaviour of living beings;
and Butler, like Hering, Haeckel, and some more modern authors,
has shown that the inference is a very strong presumption. 
Again, it is easy to over-value such complex instruments as we
possess.  The possessor of an up-to-date camera, well
instructed in the function and manipulation of every part, but
ignorant of all optics save a hand-to-mouth knowledge of the
properties of his own lens, might say that a priori no
picture could be taken with a cigar-box perforated by a pin-hole;
and our ignorance of the mechanism of the Psychology of any
organism is greater by many times than that of my supposed
photographer.  We know that Plants are able to do many
things that can only be accounted for by ascribing to them a
“psyche,” and these co-ordinated enough to satisfy
their needs; and yet they possess no central organ comparable to
the brain, no highly specialised system for intercommunication
like our nerve trunks and fibres.  As Oscar Hertwig says, we
are as ignorant of the mechanism of the development of the
individual as we are of that of hereditary transmission of
acquired characters, and the absence of such mechanism in either
case is no reason for rejecting the proven fact.

However, the relations of germ and body just described led
Jäger, Nussbaum, Galton, Lankester, and, above all,
Weismann, to the view that the germ-cells or “stirp”
(Galton) were in the body, but not of it. 
Indeed, in the body and out of it, whether as reproductive cells
set free, or in the developing embryo, they are regarded as
forming one continuous homogeneity, in contrast to the
differentiation of the body; and it is to these cells, regarded
as a continuum, that the terms stirp, germ-plasm, are especially
applied.  Yet on this view, so eagerly advocated by its
supporters, we have to substitute for the hypothesis of memory,
which they declare to have no real meaning here, the far more
fantastic hypotheses of Weismann: by these they explain the
process of differentiation in the young embryo into new germ and
body; and in the young body the differentiation of its cells,
each in due time and place, into the varied tissue cells and
organs.  Such views might perhaps be acceptable if it could
be shown that over each cell-division there presided a wise
all-guiding genie of transcending intellect, to which
Clerk-Maxwell’s sorting demons were mere infants.  Yet
these views have so enchanted many distinguished biologists, that
in dealing with the subject they have actually ignored the
existence of equally able workers who hesitate to share the
extremest of their views.  The phenomenon is one well known
in hypnotic practice.  So long as the non-Weismannians deal
with matters outside this discussion, their existence and their
work is rated at its just value; but any work of theirs on this
point so affects the orthodox Weismannite (whether he accept this
label or reject it does not matter), that for the time being
their existence and the good work they have done are alike
non-existent. [0e]

Butler founded no school, and wished to found none.  He
desired that what was true in his work should prevail, and he
looked forward calmly to the time when the recognition of that
truth and of his share in advancing it should give him in the
lives of others that immortality for which alone he craved.

Lamarckian views have never lacked defenders here and in
America.  Of the English, Herbert Spencer, who however, was
averse to the vitalistic attitude, Vines and Henslow among
botanists, Cunningham among zoologists, have always resisted
Weismannism; but, I think, none of these was distinctly
influenced by Hering and Butler.  In America the majority of
the great school of palæontologists have been strong
Lamarckians, notably Cope, who has pointed out, moreover, that
the transformations of energy in living beings are peculiar to
them.

We have already adverted to Haeckel’s acceptance and
development of Hering’s ideas in his “Perigenese der
Plastidule.”  Oscar Hertwig has been a consistent
Lamarckian, like Yves Delage of the Sorbonne, and these occupy
pre-eminent positions not only as observers, but as
discriminating theorists and historians of the recent progress of
biology.  We may also cite as a Lamarckian—of a
sort—Felix Le Dantec, the leader of the chemico-physical
school of the present day.

But we must seek elsewhere for special attention to the points
which Butler regarded as the essentials of “Life and
Habit.”  In 1893 Henry P. Orr, Professor of Biology in
the University of Louisiana, published a little book entitled
“A Theory of Heredity.”  Herein he insists on
the nervous control of the whole body, and on the transmission to
the reproductive cells of such stimuli, received by the body, as
will guide them on their path until they shall have acquired
adequate experience of their own in the new body they have
formed.  I have found the name of neither Butler nor Hering,
but the treatment is essentially on their lines, and is both
clear and interesting.

In 1896 I wrote an essay on “The Fundamental Principles
of Heredity,” primarily directed to the man in the
street.  This, after being held over for more than a year by
one leading review, was “declined with regret,” and
again after some weeks met the same fate from another
editor.  It appeared in the pages of “Natural
Science” for October, 1897, and in the “Biologisches
Centralblatt” for the same year.  I reproduce its
closing paragraph:—

“This theory [Hering-Butler’s] has,
indeed, a tentative character, and lacks symmetrical
completeness, but is the more welcome as not aiming at the
impossible.  A whole series of phenomena in organic beings
are correlated under the term of memory, conscious and
unconscious, patent and latent. . . .  Of the
order of unconscious memory, latent till the arrival of the
appropriate stimulus, is all the co-operative growth and work of
the organism, including its development from the reproductive
cells.  Concerning the modus operandi we know
nothing: the phenomena may be due, as Hering suggests, to
molecular vibrations, which must be at least as distinct from
ordinary physical disturbances as Röntgen’s rays are
from ordinary light; or it may be correlated, as we ourselves are
inclined to think, with complex chemical changes in an intricate
but orderly succession.  For the present, at least, the
problem of heredity can only be elucidated by the light of
mental, and not material processes.”

It will be seen that I express doubts as to the validity of
Hering’s invocation of molecular vibrations as the
mechanism of memory, and suggest as an alternative rhythmic
chemical changes.  This view has recently been put forth in
detail by J. J. Cunningham in his essay on the “Hormone [0f] Theory of Heredity,” in the
Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik (1909), but I have
failed to note any direct effect of my essay on the trend of
biological thought.

Among post-Darwinian controversies the one that has latterly
assumed the greatest prominence is that of the relative
importance of small variations in the way of more or less
“fluctuations,” and of “discontinuous
variations,” or “mutations,” as De Vries has
called them.  Darwin, in the first four editions of the
“Origin of Species,” attached more importance to the
latter than in subsequent editions; he was swayed in his
attitude, as is well known, by an article of the physicist,
Fleeming Jenkin, which appeared in the North British
Review.  The mathematics of this article were
unimpeachable, but they were founded on the assumption that
exceptional variations would only occur in single individuals,
which is, indeed, often the case among those domesticated races
on which Darwin especially studied the phenomena of
variation.  Darwin was no mathematician or physicist, and we
are told in his biography that he regarded every tool-shop rule
or optician’s thermometer as an instrument of precision: so
he appears to have regarded Fleeming Jenkin’s demonstration
as a mathematical deduction which he was bound to accept without
criticism.

Mr. William Bateson, late Professor of Biology in the
University of Cambridge, as early as 1894 laid great stress on
the importance of discontinuous variations, collecting and
collating the known facts in his “Materials for the Study
of Variations”; but this important work, now become rare
and valuable, at the time excited so little interest as to be
‘remaindered’ within a very few years after
publication.

In 1901 Hugo De Vries, Professor of Botany in the University
of Amsterdam, published “Die Mutationstheorie,”
wherein he showed that mutations or discontinuous variations in
various directions may appear simultaneously in many individuals,
and in various directions.  In the gardener’s phrase,
the species may take to sporting in various directions at the
same time, and each sport may be represented by numerous
specimens.

De Vries shows the probability that species go on for long
periods showing only fluctuations, and then suddenly take to
sporting in the way described, short periods of mutation
alternating with long intervals of relative constancy.  It
is to mutations that De Vries and his school, as well as Luther
Burbank, the great former of new fruit- and flower-plants, look
for those variations which form the material of Natural
Selection.  In “God the Known and God the
Unknown,” which appeared in the Examiner (May, June,
and July), 1879, but though then revised was only published
posthumously in 1909, Butler anticipates this
distinction:—

“Under these circumstances organism must act
in one or other of these two ways: it must either change slowly
and continuously with the surroundings, paying cash for
everything, meeting the smallest change with a corresponding
modification, so far as is found convenient, or it must put off
change as long as possible, and then make larger and more
sweeping changes.

“Both these courses are the same in principle, the
difference being one of scale, and the one being a miniature of
the other, as a ripple is an Atlantic wave in little; both have
their advantages and disadvantages, so that most organisms will
take the one course for one set of things and the other for
another.  They will deal promptly with things which they can
get at easily, and which lie more upon the surface; those,
however, which are more troublesome to reach,
and lie deeper, will be handled upon more cataclysmic
principles, being allowed longer periods of repose
followed by short periods of greater activity . . . it may be
questioned whether what is called a sport is not the organic
expression of discontent which has been long felt, but which has
not been attended to, nor been met step by step by as much small
remedial modification as was found practicable: so that when a
change does come it comes by way of revolution.  Or, again
(only that it comes to much the same thing), it may be compared
to one of those happy thoughts which sometimes come to us
unbidden after we have been thinking for a long time what to do,
or how to arrange our ideas, and have yet been unable to come to
any conclusion” (pp. 14, 15). [0g]

We come to another order of mind in Hans Driesch.  At the
time he began his work biologists were largely busy in a region
indicated by Darwin, and roughly mapped out by Haeckel—that
of phylogeny.  From the facts of development of the
individual, from the comparison of fossils in successive strata,
they set to work at the construction of pedigrees, and strove to
bring into line the principles of classification with the more or
less hypothetical “stemtrees.”  Driesch
considered this futile, since we never could reconstruct from
such evidence anything certain in the history of the past. 
He therefore asserted that a more complete knowledge of the
physics and chemistry of the organic world might give a
scientific explanation of the phenomena, and maintained that the
proper work of the biologist was to deepen our knowledge in these
respects.  He embodied his views, seeking the explanation on
this track, filling up gaps and tracing projected roads along
lines of probable truth in his “Analytische Theorie der
organische Entwicklung.”  But his own work convinced
him of the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken, and he has
become as strenuous a vitalist as Butler.  The most complete
statement of his present views is to be found in “The
Philosophy of Life” (1908–9), being the Giffold
Lectures for 1907–8.  Herein he postulates a quality
(“psychoid”) in all living beings, directing energy
and matter for the purpose of the organism, and to this he
applies the Aristotelian designation
“Entelechy.”  The question of the transmission
of acquired characters is regarded as doubtful, and he does not
emphasise—if he accepts—the doctrine of continuous
personality.  His early youthful impatience with descent
theories and hypotheses has, however, disappeared.

In the next work the influence of Hering and Butler is
definitely present and recognised.  In 1906 Signor Eugenio
Rignano, an engineer keenly interested in all branches of
science, and a little later the founder of the international
review, Rivistà di Scienza (now simply called
Scientia), published in French a volume entitled
“Sur la transmissibilité des Caractères
acquis—Hypothèse d’un
Centro-épigenèse.”  Into the details of
the author’s work we will not enter fully.  Suffice it
to know that he accepts the Hering-Butler theory, and makes a
distinct advance on Hering’s rather crude hypothesis of
persistent vibrations by suggesting that the remembering centres
store slightly different forms of energy, to give out energy of
the same kind as they have received, like electrical
accumulators.  The last chapter, “Le
Phénomène mnémonique et le
Phénomène vital,” is frankly based on
Hering.

In “The Lesson of Evolution” (1907, posthumous,
and only published for private circulation) Frederick Wollaston
Hutton, F.R.S., late Professor of Biology and Geology, first at
Dunedin and after at Christchurch, New Zealand, puts forward a
strongly vitalistic view, and adopts Hering’s
teaching.  After stating this he adds, “The same idea
of heredity being due to unconscious memory was advocated by Mr.
Samuel Butler in his “Life and Habit.”

Dr. James Mark Baldwin, Stuart Professor of Psychology in
Princeton University, U.S.A., called attention early in the
90’s to a reaction characteristic of all living beings,
which he terms the “Circular Reaction.”  We take
his most recent account of this from his “Development and
Evolution” (1902):—[0h]

“The general fact is that the organism
reacts by concentration upon the locality stimulated for the
continuance of the conditions, movements, stimulations,
which are vitally beneficial, and for the cessation of the
conditions, movements, stimulations which are vitally
depressing.”

This amounts to saying in the terminology of Jenning (see
below) that the living organism alters its “physiological
states” either for its direct benefit, or for its indirect
benefit in the reduction of harmful conditions.

Again:—

“This form of concentration of energy on
stimulated localities, with the resulting renewal through
movement of conditions that are pleasure-giving and beneficial,
and the consequent repetition of the movements is called
‘circular reaction.’”

Of course, the inhibition of such movements as would be
painful on repetition is merely the negative case of the circular
reaction.  We must not put too much of our own ideas into
the author’s mind; he nowhere says explicitly that the
animal or plant shows its sense and does this because it likes
the one thing and wants it repeated, or dislikes the other and
stops its repetition, as Butler would have said.  Baldwin is
very strong in insisting that no full explanation can be given of
living processes, any more than of history, on purely
chemico-physical grounds.

The same view is put differently and independently by H. S.
Jennings, [0i] who started his investigations of
living Protista, the simplest of living beings, with the idea
that only accurate and ample observation was needed to enable us
to explain all their activities on a mechanical basis, and
devised ingenious models of protoplastic movements.  He was
led, like Driesch, to renounce such efforts as illusory, and has
come to the conviction that in the behaviour of these lowly
beings there is a purposive and a tentative character—a
method of “trial and error”—that can only be
interpreted by the invocation of psychology.  He points out
that after stimulation the “state” of the organism
may be altered, so that the response to the same stimulus on
repetition is other.  Or, as he puts it, the first stimulus
has caused the organism to pass into a new “physiological
state.”  As the change of state from what we may call
the “primary indifferent state” is advantageous to
the organism, we may regard this as equivalent to the doctrine of
the “circular reaction,” and also as containing the
essence of Semon’s doctrine of “engrams” or
imprints which we are about to consider.  We cite one
passage which for audacity of thought (underlying, it is true,
most guarded expression) may well compare with many of the
boldest flights in “Life and Habit”:—

“It may be noted that regulation in the
manner we have set forth is what, in the behaviour of higher
organisms, at least, is called intelligence [the examples have
been taken from Protista, Corals, and the Lowest Worms].  If
the same method of regulation is found in other fields, there is
no reason for refusing to compare the action to
intelligence.  Comparison of the regulatory processes that
are shown in internal physiological changes and in regeneration
to intelligence seems to be looked upon sometimes as heretical
and unscientific.  Yet intelligence is a name applied to
processes that actually exist in the regulation of movements, and
there is, a priori, no reason why similar processes should
not occur in regulation in other fields.  When we analyse
regulation objectively there seems indeed reason to think that
the processes are of the same character in behaviour as
elsewhere.  If the term intelligence be reserved for the
subjective accompaniments of such regulation, then of course we
have no direct knowledge of its existence in any of the fields of
regulation outside of the self, and in the self perhaps only in
behaviour.  But in a purely objective consideration there
seems no reason to suppose that regulation in behaviour
(intelligence) is of a fundamentally different character from
regulation elsewhere.”  (“Method of
Regulation,” p. 492.)

Jennings makes no mention of questions of the theory of
heredity.  He has made some experiments on the transmission
of an acquired character in Protozoa; but it was a
mutilation-character, which is, as has been often shown, [0j] not to the point.

One of the most obvious criticisms of Hering’s
exposition is based upon the extended use he makes of the word
“Memory”: this he had foreseen and deprecated.

“We have a perfect right,” he says,
“to extend our conception of memory so as to make it
embrace involuntary [and also unconscious] reproductions of
sensations, ideas, perceptions, and efforts; but we find, on
having done so, that we have so far enlarged her boundaries that
she proves to be an ultimate and original power, the source and,
at the same time, the unifying bond, of our whole conscious
life.”  (“Unconscious Memory,” p. 68.)

This sentence, coupled with Hering’s omission to give to
the concept of memory so enlarged a new name, clear alike of the
limitations and of the stains of habitual use, may well have been
the inspiration of the next work on our list.  Richard Semon
is a professional zoologist and anthropologist of such high
status for his original observations and researches in the mere
technical sense, that in these countries he would assuredly have
been acclaimed as one of the Fellows of the Royal Society who
were Samuel Butler’s special aversion.  The full title
of his book is “Die Mneme als
erhaltende Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens”
(Munich, Ed.  1, 1904; Ed. 2, 1908).  We may translate
it “Mneme, a Principle of
Conservation in the Transformations of Organic
Existence.”

From this I quote in free translation the opening passage of
Chapter II:—

“We have shown that in very many cases,
whether in Protist, Plant, or Animal, when an organism has passed
into an indifferent state after the reaction to a stimulus has
ceased, its irritable substance has suffered a lasting change: I
call this after-action of the stimulus its ‘imprint’
or ‘engraphic’ action, since it penetrates and
imprints itself in the organic substance; and I term the change
so effected an ‘imprint’ or ‘engram’ of
the stimulus; and the sum of all the imprints possessed by the
organism may be called its ‘store of imprints,’
wherein we must distinguish between those which it has inherited
from its forbears and those which it has acquired itself. 
Any phenomenon displayed by an organism as the result either of a
single imprint or of a sum of them, I term a ‘mnemic
phenomenon’; and the mnemic possibilities of an organism
may be termed, collectively, its ‘Mneme.’

“I have selected my own terms for the concepts that I
have just defined.  On many grounds I refrain from making
any use of the good German terms ‘Gedächtniss,
Erinnerungsbild.’  The first and chiefest ground is
that for my purpose I should have to employ the German words in a
much wider sense than what they usually convey, and thus leave
the door open to countless misunderstandings and idle
controversies.  It would, indeed, even amount to an error of
fact to give to the wider concept the name already current in the
narrower sense—nay, actually limited, like
‘Erinnerungsbild,’ to phenomena of consciousness. . .
.  In Animals, during the course of history, one set of
organs has, so to speak, specialised itself for the reception and
transmission of stimuli—the Nervous System.  But from
this specialisation we are not justified in ascribing to the
nervous system any monopoly of the function, even when it is as
highly developed as in Man. . . .  Just as the direct
excitability of the nervous system has progressed in the history
of the race, so has its capacity for receiving imprints; but
neither susceptibility nor retentiveness is its monopoly; and,
indeed, retentiveness seems inseparable from susceptibility in
living matter.”

Semen here takes the instance of stimulus and imprint actions
affecting the nervous system of a dog

“who has up till now never experienced aught
but kindness from the Lord of Creation, and then one day that he
is out alone is pelted with stones by a boy. . . .  Here he
is affected at once by two sets of stimuli: (1) the optic
stimulus of seeing the boy stoop for stones and throw them, and
(2) the skin stimulus of the pain felt when they hit him. 
Here both stimuli leave their imprints; and the organism is
permanently changed in relation to the recurrence of the
stimuli.  Hitherto the sight of a human figure quickly
stooping had produced no constant special reaction.  Now the
reaction is constant, and may remain so till death. . . . 
The dog tucks in its tail between its legs and takes flight,
often with a howl [as of] pain.”

“Here we gain on one side a deeper insight into the
imprint action of stimuli.  It reposes on the lasting change
in the conditions of the living matter, so that the repetition of
the immediate or synchronous reaction to its first stimulus (in
this case the stooping of the boy, the flying stones, and the
pain on the ribs), no longer demands, as in the original state of
indifference, the full stimulus a, but may be called forth
by a partial or different stimulus, b (in this case the
mere stooping to the ground).  I term the influences by
which such changed reaction are rendered possible,
‘outcome-reactions,’ and when such influences assume
the form of stimuli, ‘outcome-stimuli.’”

They are termed “outcome” (“ecphoria”)
stimuli, because the author regards them and would have us regard
them as the outcome, manifestation, or efference of an imprint of
a previous stimulus.  We have noted that the imprint is
equivalent to the changed “physiological state” of
Jennings.  Again, the capacity for gaining imprints and
revealing them by outcomes favourable to the individual is the
“circular reaction” of Baldwin, but Semon gives no
reference to either author. [0k]

In the preface to his first edition (reprinted in the second)
Semon writes, after discussing the work of Hering and
Haeckel:—

“The problem received a more detailed
treatment in Samuel Butler’s book, ‘Life and
Habit,’ published in 1878.  Though he only made
acquaintance with Hering’s essay after this publication,
Butler gave what was in many respects a more detailed view of the
coincidences of these different phenomena of organic reproduction
than did Hering.  With much that is untenable,
Butler’s writings present many a brilliant idea; yet, on
the whole, they are rather a retrogression than an advance upon
Hering.  Evidently they failed to exercise any marked
influence upon the literature of the day.”

This judgment needs a little examination.  Butler
claimed, justly, that his “Life and Habit” was an
advance on Hering in its dealing with questions of hybridity, and
of longevity puberty and sterility.  Since Semon’s
extended treatment of the phenomena of crosses might almost be
regarded as the rewriting of the corresponding section of
“Life and Habit” in the “Mneme”
terminology, we may infer that this view of the question was one
of Butler’s “brilliant ideas.”  That
Butler shrank from accepting such a formal explanation of memory
as Hering did with his hypothesis should certainly be counted as
a distinct “advance upon Hering,” for Semon also
avoids any attempt at an explanation of
“Mneme.”  I think, however, we may gather the
real meaning of Semon’s strictures from the following
passages:—

“I refrain here from a discussion of the
development of this theory of Lamarck’s by those
Neo-Lamarckians who would ascribe to the individual elementary
organism an equipment of complex psychical powers—so to
say, anthropomorphic perception and volitions.  This
treatment is no longer directed by the scientific principle of
referring complex phenomena to simpler laws, of deducing even
human intellect and will from simpler elements.  On the
contrary, they follow that most abhorrent method of taking the
most complex and unresolved as a datum, and employing it as an
explanation.  The adoption of such a method, as formerly by
Samuel Butler, and recently by Pauly, I regard as a big and
dangerous step backward” (ed. 2, pp. 380–1,
note).

Thus Butler’s alleged retrogressions belong to the same
order of thinking that we have seen shared by Driesch, Baldwin,
and Jennings, and most explicitly avowed, as we shall see, by
Francis Darwin.  Semon makes one rather candid admission,
“The impossibility of interpreting the phenomena of
physiological stimulation by those of direct reaction, and the
undeception of those who had put faith in this being possible,
have led many on the backward path of
vitalism.”  Semon assuredly will never be able to
complete his theory of “Mneme” until, guided by the
experience of Jennings and Driesch, he forsakes the blind alley
of mechanisticism and retraces his steps to reasonable
vitalism.

But the most notable publications bearing on our matter are
incidental to the Darwin Celebrations of 1908–9.  Dr.
Francis Darwin, son, collaborator, and biographer of Charles
Darwin, was selected to preside over the Meeting of the British
Association held in Dublin in 1908, the jubilee of the first
publications on Natural Selection by his father and Alfred Russel
Wallace.  In this address we find the theory of Hering,
Butler, Rignano, and Semon taking its proper place as a vera
causa of that variation which Natural Selection must find
before it can act, and recognised as the basis of a rational
theory of the development of the individual and of the
race.  The organism is essentially purposive: the
impossibility of devising any adequate accounts of organic form
and function without taking account of the psychical side is most
strenuously asserted.  And with our regret that past
misunderstandings should be so prominent in Butler’s works,
it was very pleasant to hear Francis Darwin’s quotation
from Butler’s translation of Hering [0l] followed by a personal tribute to
Butler himself.

In commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles
Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the
“Origin of Species,” at the suggestion of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society, the University Press published
during the current year a volume entitled “Darwin and
Modern Science,” edited by Mr. A. C. Seward, Professor of
Botany in the University.  Of the twenty-nine essays by men
of science of the highest distinction, one is of peculiar
interest to the readers of Samuel Butler: “Heredity and
Variation in Modern Lights,” by Professor W. Bateson, F.R.S., to whose work on
“Discontinuous Variations” we have already
referred.  Here once more Butler receives from an official
biologist of the first rank full recognition for his wonderful
insight and keen critical power.  This is the more
noteworthy because Bateson has apparently no faith in the
transmission of acquired characters; but such a passage as this
would have commended itself to Butler’s
admiration:—

“All this indicates a definiteness and
specific order in heredity, and therefore in variation. 
This order cannot by the nature of the case be dependent on
Natural Selection for its existence, but must be a consequence of
the fundamental chemical and physical nature of living
things.  The study of Variation had from the first shown
that an orderliness of this kind was present.  The bodies
and properties of living things are cosmic, not chaotic.  No
matter how low in the scale we go, never do we find the slightest
hint of a diminution in that all-pervading orderliness, nor can
we conceive an organism existing for one moment in any other
state.”

We have now before us the materials to determine the problem
of Butler’s relation to biology and to biologists.  He
was, we have seen, anticipated by Hering; but his attitude was
his own, fresh and original.  He did not hamper his
exposition, like Hering, by a subsidiary hypothesis of vibrations
which may or may not be true, which burdens the theory without
giving it greater carrying power or persuasiveness, which is
based on no objective facts, and which, as Semon has practically
demonstrated, is needless for the detailed working out of the
theory.  Butler failed to impress the biologists of his day,
even those on whom, like Romanes, he might have reasonably
counted for understanding and for support.  But he kept
alive Hering’s work when it bade fair to sink into the
limbo of obsolete hypotheses.  To use Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s phrase, he “depolarised” evolutionary
thought.  We quote the words of a young biologist, who, when
an ardent and dogmatic Weismannist of the most pronounced type,
was induced to read “Life and Habit”: “The book
was to me a transformation and an inspiration.”  Such
learned writings as Semon’s or Hering’s could never
produce such an effect: they do not penetrate to the heart of
man; they cannot carry conviction to the intellect already filled
full with rival theories, and with the unreasoned faith that
to-morrow or next day a new discovery will obliterate all
distinction between Man and his makings.  The mind must
needs be open for the reception of truth, for the rejection of
prejudice; and the violence of a Samuel Butler may in the future
as in the past be needed to shatter the coat of mail forged by
too exclusively professional a training.

MARCUS HARTOG

Cork, April, 1910

p.
xxxviiAuthor’s Preface

Not finding the “well-known
German scientific journal Kosmos” [0m] entered in the British Museum
Catalogue, I have presented the Museum with a copy of the number
for February 1879, which contains the article by Dr. Krause of
which Mr. Charles Darwin has given a translation, the accuracy of
which is guaranteed—so he informs us—by the
translator’s “scientific reputation together with his
knowledge of German.” [0n]

I have marked the copy, so that the reader can see at a glance
what passages has been suppressed and where matter has been
interpolated.

I have also present a copy of “Erasmus
Darwin.”  I have marked this too, so that the genuine
and spurious passages can be easily distinguished.

I understand that both the “Erasmus Darwin” and
the number of Kosmos have been sent to the Keeper of
Printed Books, with instructions that they shall be at once
catalogued and made accessible to readers, and do not doubt that
this will have been done before the present volume is
published.  The reader, therefore, who may be sufficiently
interested in the matter to care to see exactly what has been
done will now have an opportunity of doing so.

October 25, 1880.

p. 1Chapter
I

Introduction—General ignorance on the
subject of evolution at the time the “Origin of
Species” was published in 1859.

There are few things which strike
us with more surprise, when we review the course taken by opinion
in the last century, than the suddenness with which belief in
witchcraft and demoniacal possession came to an end.  This
has been often remarked upon, but I am not acquainted with any
record of the fact as it appeared to those under whose eyes the
change was taking place, nor have I seen any contemporary
explanation of the reasons which led to the apparently sudden
overthrow of a belief which had seemed hitherto to be deeply
rooted in the minds of almost all men.  As a parallel to
this, though in respect of the rapid spread of an opinion, and
not its decadence, it is probable that those of our descendants
who take an interest in ourselves will note the suddenness with
which the theory of evolution, from having been generally
ridiculed during a period of over a hundred years, came into
popularity and almost universal acceptance among educated
people.

It is indisputable that this has been the case; nor is it less
indisputable that the works of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace have
been the main agents in the change that has been brought about in
our opinions.  The names of Cobden and Bright do not stand
more prominently forward in connection with the repeal of the
Corn Laws than do those of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace in
connection with the general acceptance of the theory of
evolution.  There is no living philosopher who has anything
like Mr. Darwin’s popularity with Englishmen generally; and
not only this, but his power of fascination extends all over
Europe, and indeed in every country in which civilisation has
obtained footing: not among the illiterate masses, though these
are rapidly following the suit of the educated classes, but among
experts and those who are most capable of judging.  France,
indeed—the country of Buffon and Lamarck—must be
counted an exception to the general rule, but in England and
Germany there are few men of scientific reputation who do not
accept Mr. Darwin as the founder of what is commonly called
“Darwinism,” and regard him as perhaps the most
penetrative and profound philosopher of modern times.

To quote an example from the last few weeks only, [2] I have observed that Professor Huxley
has celebrated the twenty-first year since the “Origin of
Species” was published by a lecture at the Royal
Institution, and am told that he described Mr. Darwin’s
candour as something actually “terrible” (I give
Professor Huxley’s own word, as reported by one who heard
it); and on opening a small book entitled
“Degeneration,” by Professor Ray Lankester, published
a few days before these lines were written, I find the following
passage amid more that is to the same purport:—

“Suddenly one of those great guesses which
occasionally appear in the history of science was given to the
science of biology by the imaginative insight of that greatest of
living naturalists—I would say that greatest of living
men—Charles Darwin.”—Degeneration, p.
10.

This is very strong language, but it is hardly stronger than
that habitually employed by the leading men of science when they
speak of Mr. Darwin.  To go farther afield, in February 1879
the Germans devoted an entire number of one of their scientific
periodicals [3] to the celebration of Mr. Darwin’s
seventieth birthday.  There is no other Englishman now
living who has been able to win such a compliment as this from
foreigners, who should be disinterested judges.

Under these circumstances, it must seem the height of
presumption to differ from so great an authority, and to join the
small band of malcontents who hold that Mr. Darwin’s
reputation as a philosopher, though it has grown up with the
rapidity of Jonah’s gourd, will yet not be permanent. 
I believe, however, that though we must always gladly and
gratefully owe it to Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace that the public
mind has been brought to accept evolution, the admiration now
generally felt for the “Origin of Species” will
appear as unaccountable to our descendants some fifty or eighty
years hence as the enthusiasm of our grandfathers for the poetry
of Dr. Erasmus Darwin does to ourselves; and as one who has
yielded to none in respect of the fascination Mr. Darwin has
exercised over him, I would fain say a few words of explanation
which may make the matter clearer to our future historians. 
I do this the more readily because I can at the same time explain
thus better than in any other way the steps which led me to the
theory which I afterwards advanced in “Life and
Habit.”

This last, indeed, is perhaps the main purpose of the earlier
chapters of this book.  I shall presently give a translation
of a lecture by Professor Ewald Hering of Prague, which appeared
ten years ago, and which contains so exactly the theory I
subsequently advocated myself, that I am half uneasy lest it
should be supposed that I knew of Professor Hering’s work
and made no reference to it.  A friend to whom I submitted
my translation in MS., asking him how closely he thought it
resembled “Life and Habit,” wrote back that it gave
my own ideas almost in my own words.  As far as the ideas
are concerned this is certainly the case, and considering that
Professor Hering wrote between seven and eight years before I
did, I think it due to him, and to my readers as well as to
myself, to explain the steps which led me to my conclusions, and,
while putting Professor Hering’s lecture before them, to
show cause for thinking that I arrived at an almost identical
conclusion, as it would appear, by an almost identical road, yet,
nevertheless, quite independently, I must ask the reader,
therefore, to regard these earlier chapters as in some measure a
personal explanation, as well as a contribution to the history of
an important feature in the developments of the last twenty
years.  I hope also, by showing the steps by which I was led
to my conclusions, to make the conclusions themselves more
acceptable and easy of comprehension.

Being on my way to New Zealand when the “Origin of
Species” appeared, I did not get it till 1860 or
1861.  When I read it, I found “the theory of natural
selection” repeatedly spoken of as though it were a synonym
for “the theory of descent with modification”; this
is especially the case in the recapitulation chapter of the
work.  I failed to see how important it was that these two
theories—if indeed “natural selection” can be
called a theory—should not be confounded together, and that
a “theory of descent with modification” might be
true, while a “theory of descent with modification through
natural selection” [4] might not stand being
looked into.

If any one had asked me to state in brief what Mr.
Darwin’s theory was, I am afraid I might have answered
“natural selection,” or “descent with
modification,” whichever came first, as though the one
meant much the same as the other.  I observe that most of
the leading writers on the subject are still unable to catch
sight of the distinction here alluded to, and console myself for
my want of acumen by reflecting that, if I was misled, I was
misled in good company.

I—and I may add, the public generally—failed also
to see what the unaided reader who was new to the subject would
be almost certain to overlook.  I mean, that, according to
Mr. Darwin, the variations whose accumulation resulted in
diversity of species and genus were indefinite, fortuitous,
attributable but in small degree to any known causes, and without
a general principle underlying them which would cause them to
appear steadily in a given direction for many successive
generations and in a considerable number of individuals at the
same time.  We did not know that the theory of evolution was
one that had been quietly but steadily gaining ground during the
last hundred years.  Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded
too like “buffoon” for any good to come from
him.  We had heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a
kind of French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his doctrine
save through the caricatures promulgated by his opponents, or the
misrepresentations of those who had another kind of interest in
disparaging him.  Dr. Erasmus Darwin we believed to be a
forgotten minor poet, but ninety-nine out of every hundred of us
had never so much as heard of the “Zoonomia.” 
We were little likely, therefore, to know that Lamarck drew very
largely from Buffon, and probably also from Dr. Erasmus Darwin,
and that this last-named writer, though essentially original, was
founded upon Buffon, who was greatly more in advance of any
predecessor than any successor has been in advance of him.

We did not know, then, that according to the earlier writers
the variations whose accumulation results in species were not
fortuitous and definite, but were due to a known principle of
universal application—namely, “sense of
need”—or apprehend the difference between a theory of
evolution which has a backbone, as it were, in the tolerably
constant or slowly varying needs of large numbers of individuals
for long periods together, and one which has no such backbone,
but according to which the progress of one generation is always
liable to be cancelled and obliterated by that of the next. 
We did not know that the new theory in a quiet way professed to
tell us less than the old had done, and declared that it could
throw little if any light upon the matter which the earlier
writers had endeavoured to illuminate as the central point in
their system.  We took it for granted that more light must
be being thrown instead of less; and reading in perfect good
faith, we rose from our perusal with the impression that Mr.
Darwin was advocating the descent of all existing forms of life
from a single, or from, at any rate, a very few primordial types;
that no one else had done this hitherto, or that, if they had,
they had got the whole subject into a mess, which mess, whatever
it was—for we were never told this—was now being
removed once for all by Mr. Darwin.

The evolution part of the story, that is to say, the fact of
evolution, remained in our minds as by far the most prominent
feature in Mr. Darwin’s book; and being grateful for it, we
were very ready to take Mr. Darwin’s work at the estimate
tacitly claimed for it by himself, and vehemently insisted upon
by reviewers in influential journals, who took much the same line
towards the earlier writers on evolution as Mr. Darwin himself
had taken.  But perhaps nothing more prepossessed us in Mr.
Darwin’s favour than the air of candour that was
omnipresent throughout his work.  The prominence given to
the arguments of opponents completely carried us away; it was
this which threw us off our guard.  It never occurred to us
that there might be other and more dangerous opponents who were
not brought forward.  Mr. Darwin did not tell us what his
grandfather and Lamarck would have had to say to this or
that.  Moreover, there was an unobtrusive parade of hidden
learning and of difficulties at last overcome which was
particularly grateful to us.  Whatever opinion might be
ultimately come to concerning the value of his theory, there
could be but one about the value of the example he had set to men
of science generally by the perfect frankness and unselfishness
of his work.  Friends and foes alike combined to do homage
to Mr. Darwin in this respect.

For, brilliant as the reception of the “Origin of
Species” was, it met in the first instance with hardly less
hostile than friendly criticism.  But the attacks were
ill-directed; they came from a suspected quarter, and those who
led them did not detect more than the general public had done
what were the really weak places in Mr. Darwin’s
armour.  They attacked him where he was strongest; and above
all, they were, as a general rule, stamped with a
disingenuousness which at that time we believed to be peculiar to
theological writers and alien to the spirit of science. 
Seeing, therefore, that the men of science ranged themselves more
and more decidedly on Mr. Darwin’s side, while his
opponents had manifestly—so far as I can remember, all the
more prominent among them—a bias to which their hostility
was attributable, we left off looking at the arguments against
“Darwinism,” as we now began to call it, and
pigeon-holed the matter to the effect that there was one
evolution, and that Mr. Darwin was its prophet.

The blame of our errors and oversights rests primarily with
Mr. Darwin himself.  The first, and far the most important,
edition of the “Origin of Species” came out as a kind
of literary Melchisedec, without father and without mother in the
works of other people.  Here is its opening
paragraph:—

“When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle’
as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the
distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the
geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of
that continent.  These facts seemed to me to throw some
light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries,
as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. 
On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something
might be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and
reflecting upon all sorts of facts which could possibly have any
bearing on it.  After five years’ work I allowed
myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes;
these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions which
then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I
have steadily pursued the same object.  I hope that I may be
excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to
show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.”
[8a]

In the latest edition this passage remains unaltered, except
in one unimportant respect.  What could more completely
throw us off the scent of the earlier writers?  If they had
written anything worthy of our attention, or indeed if there had
been any earlier writers at all, Mr. Darwin would have been the
first to tell us about them, and to award them their due meed of
recognition.  But, no; the whole thing was an original
growth in Mr. Darwin’s mind, and he had never so much as
heard of his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.

Dr. Krause, indeed, thought otherwise.  In the number of
Kosmos for February 1879 he represented Mr. Darwin as in
his youth approaching the works of his grandfather with all the
devotion which people usually feel for the writings of a renowned
poet. [8b]  This should perhaps be a
delicately ironical way of hinting that Mr. Darwin did not read
his grandfather’s books closely; but I hardly think that
Dr. Krause looked at the matter in this light, for he goes on to
say that “almost every single work of the younger Darwin
may be paralleled by at least a chapter in the works of his
ancestor: the mystery of heredity, adaptation, the protective
arrangements of animals and plants, sexual selection,
insectivorous plants, and the analysis of the emotions and
sociological impulses; nay, even the studies on infants are to be
found already discussed in the pages of the elder Darwin.”
[8c]

Nevertheless, innocent as Mr. Darwin’s opening sentence
appeared, it contained enough to have put us upon our
guard.  When he informed us that, on his return from a long
voyage, “it occurred to” him that the way to make
anything out about his subject was to collect and reflect upon
the facts that bore upon it, it should have occurred to us in our
turn, that when people betray a return of consciousness upon such
matters as this, they are on the confines of that state in which
other and not less elementary matters will not “occur
to” them.  The introduction of the word
“patiently” should have been conclusive.  I will
not analyse more of the sentence, but will repeat the next two
lines:—“After five years of work, I allowed myself to
speculate upon the subject, and drew up some short
notes.”  We read this, thousands of us, and were
blind.

If Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s name was not mentioned in the
first edition of the “Origin of Species,” we should
not be surprised at there being no notice taken of Buffon, or at
Lamarck’s being referred to only twice—on the first
occasion to be serenely waved aside, he and all his works; [9a] on the second, [9b] to be commended on a point of
detail.  The author of the “Vestiges of
Creation” was more widely known to English readers, having
written more recently and nearer home.  He was dealt with
summarily, on an early and prominent page, by a
misrepresentation, which was silently expunged in later editions
of the “Origin of Species.”  In his later
editions (I believe first in his third, when 6000 copies had been
already sold), Mr. Darwin did indeed introduce a few pages in
which he gave what he designated as a “brief but imperfect
sketch” of the progress of opinion on the origin of species
prior to the appearance of his own work; but the general
impression which a book conveys to, and leaves upon, the public
is conveyed by the first edition—the one which is alone,
with rare exceptions, reviewed; and in the first edition of the
“Origin of Species” Mr. Darwin’s great
precursors were all either ignored or misrepresented. 
Moreover, the “brief but imperfect sketch,” when it
did come, was so very brief, but, in spite of this (for this is
what I suppose Mr. Darwin must mean), so very imperfect, that it
might as well have been left unwritten for all the help it gave
the reader to see the true question at issue between the original
propounders of the theory of evolution and Mr. Charles Darwin
himself.

That question is this: Whether variation is in the main
attributable to a known general principle, or whether it is
not?—whether the minute variations whose accumulation
results in specific and generic differences are referable to
something which will ensure their appearing in a certain definite
direction, or in certain definite directions, for long periods
together, and in many individuals, or whether they are
not?—whether, in a word, these variations are in the main
definite or indefinite?

It is observable that the leading men of science seem rarely
to understand this even now.  I am told that Professor
Huxley, in his recent lecture on the coming of age of the
“Origin of Species,” never so much as alluded to the
existence of any such division of opinion as this.  He did
not even, I am assured, mention “natural selection,”
but appeared to believe, with Professor Tyndall, [10a] that “evolution” is
“Mr. Darwin’s theory.”  In his article on
evolution in the latest edition of the “Encyclopædia
Britannica,” I find only a veiled perception of the point
wherein Mr. Darwin is at variance with his precursors. 
Professor Huxley evidently knows little of these writers beyond
their names; if he had known more, it is impossible he should
have written that “Buffon contributed nothing to the
general doctrine of evolution,” [10b] and that Erasmus Darwin, “though
a zealous evolutionist, can hardly be said to have made any real
advance on his predecessors.” [11]  The article is
in a high degree unsatisfactory, and betrays at once an amount of
ignorance and of perception which leaves an uncomfortable
impression.

If this is the state of things that prevails even now, it is
not surprising that in 1860 the general public should, with few
exceptions, have known of only one evolution, namely, that
propounded by Mr. Darwin.  As a member of the general
public, at that time residing eighteen miles from the nearest
human habitation, and three days’ journey on horseback from
a bookseller’s shop, I became one of Mr. Darwin’s
many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophical dialogue
(the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into
supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon
the “Origin of Species.”  This production
appeared in the Press, Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1861 or
1862, but I have long lost the only copy I had.

p.
12Chapter II

How I came to write “Life and
Habit,” and the circumstances of its completion.

It was impossible, however, for Mr.
Darwin’s readers to leave the matter as Mr. Darwin had left
it.  We wanted to know whence came that germ or those germs
of life which, if Mr. Darwin was right, were once the
world’s only inhabitants.  They could hardly have come
hither from some other world; they could not in their wet, cold,
slimy state have travelled through the dry ethereal medium which
we call space, and yet remained alive.  If they travelled
slowly, they would die; if fast, they would catch fire, as
meteors do on entering the earth’s atmosphere.  The
idea, again, of their having been created by a
quasi-anthropomorphic being out of the matter upon the earth was
at variance with the whole spirit of evolution, which indicated
that no such being could exist except as himself the result, and
not the cause, of evolution.  Having got back from ourselves
to the monad, we were suddenly to begin again with something
which was either unthinkable, or was only ourselves again upon a
larger scale—to return to the same point as that from which
we had started, only made harder for us to stand upon.

There was only one other conception possible, namely, that the
germs had been developed in the course of time from some thing or
things that were not what we called living at all; that they had
grown up, in fact, out of the material substances and forces of
the world in some manner more or less analogous to that in which
man had been developed from themselves.

I first asked myself whether life might not, after all,
resolve itself into the complexity of arrangement of an
inconceivably intricate mechanism.  Kittens think our
shoe-strings are alive when they see us lacing them, because they
see the tag at the end jump about without understanding all the
ins and outs of how it comes to do so.  “Of
course,” they argue, “if we cannot understand how a
thing comes to move, it must move of itself, for there can be no
motion beyond our comprehension but what is spontaneous; if the
motion is spontaneous, the thing moving must he alive, for
nothing can move of itself or without our understanding why
unless it is alive.  Everything that is alive and not too
large can be tortured, and perhaps eaten; let us therefore spring
upon the tag” and they spring upon it.  Cats are above
this; yet give the cat something which presents a few more of
those appearances which she is accustomed to see whenever she
sees life, and she will fall as easy a prey to the power which
association exercises over all that lives as the kitten
itself.  Show her a toy-mouse that can run a few yards after
being wound up; the form, colour, and action of a mouse being
here, there is no good cat which will not conclude that so many
of the appearances of mousehood could not be present at the same
time without the presence also of the remainder.  She will,
therefore, spring upon the toy as eagerly as the kitten upon the
tag.

Suppose the toy more complex still, so that it might run a few
yards, stop, and run on again without an additional winding up;
and suppose it so constructed that it could imitate eating and
drinking, and could make as though the mouse were cleaning its
face with its paws.  Should we not at first be taken in
ourselves, and assume the presence of the remaining facts of
life, though in reality they were not there?  Query,
therefore, whether a machine so complex as to be prepared with a
corresponding manner of action for each one of the successive
emergencies of life as it arose, would not take us in for good
and all, and look so much as if it were alive that, whether we
liked it or not, we should be compelled to think it and call it
so; and whether the being alive was not simply the being an
exceedingly complicated machine, whose parts were set in motion
by the action upon them of exterior circumstances; whether, in
fact, man was not a kind of toy-mouse in the shape of a man, only
capable of going for seventy or eighty years, instead of half as
many seconds, and as much more versatile as he is more
durable?  Of course I had an uneasy feeling that if I thus
made all plants and men into machines, these machines must have
what all other machines have if they are machines at all—a
designer, and some one to wind them up and work them; but I
thought this might wait for the present, and was perfectly ready
then, as now, to accept a designer from without, if the facts
upon examination rendered such a belief reasonable.

If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were only
machines of so complicated a make that it was less trouble to us
to cut the difficulty and say that that kind of mechanism was
“being alive,” why should not machines ultimately
become as complicated as we are, or at any rate complicated
enough to be called living, and to be indeed as living as it was
in the nature of anything at all to be?  If it was only a
case of their becoming more complicated, we were certainly doing
our best to make them so.

I do not suppose I at that time saw that this view comes to
much the same as denying that there are such qualities as life
and consciousness at all, and that this, again, works round to
the assertion of their omnipresence in every molecule of matter,
inasmuch as it destroys the separation between the organic and
inorganic, and maintains that whatever the organic is the
inorganic is also.  Deny it in theory as much as we please,
we shall still always feel that an organic body, unless dead, is
living and conscious to a greater or less degree. 
Therefore, if we once break down the wall of partition between
the organic and inorganic, the inorganic must be living and
conscious also, up to a certain point.

I have been at work on this subject now for nearly twenty
years, what I have published being only a small part of what I
have written and destroyed.  I cannot, therefore, remember
exactly how I stood in 1863.  Nor can I pretend to see far
into the matter even now; for when I think of life, I find it so
difficult, that I take refuge in death or mechanism; and when I
think of death or mechanism, I find it so inconceivable, that it
is easier to call it life again.  The only thing of which I
am sure is, that the distinction between the organic and
inorganic is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other
ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every
molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the breaking
up of an association or corporation, than to start with inanimate
molecules and smuggle life into them; and that, therefore, what
we call the inorganic world must be regarded as up to a certain
point living, and instinct, within certain limits, with
consciousness, volition, and power of concerted action.  It
is only of late, however, that I have come to this opinion.

One must start with a hypothesis, no matter how much one
distrusts it; so I started with man as a mechanism, this being
the strand of the knot that I could then pick at most
easily.  Having worked upon it a certain time, I drew the
inference about machines becoming animate, and in 1862 or 1863
wrote the sketch of the chapter on machines which I afterwards
rewrote in “Erewhon.”  This sketch appeared in
the Press, Canterbury, N.Z., June 13, 1863; a copy of it
is in the British Museum.

I soon felt that though there was plenty of amusement to be
got out of this line, it was one that I should have to leave
sooner or later; I therefore left it at once for the view that
machines were limbs which we had made, and carried outside our
bodies instead of incorporating them with ourselves.  A few
days or weeks later than June 13, 1863, I published a second
letter in the Press putting this view forward.  Of
this letter I have lost the only copy I had; I have not seen it
for years.  The first was certainly not good; the second, if
I remember rightly, was a good deal worse, though I believed more
in the views it put forward than in those of the first
letter.  I had lost my copy before I wrote
“Erewhon,” and therefore only gave a couple of pages
to it in that book; besides, there was more amusement in the
other view.  I should perhaps say there was an intermediate
extension of the first letter which appeared in the
Reasoner, July 1, 1865.

In 1870 and 1871, when I was writing “Erewhon,” I
thought the best way of looking at machines was to see them as
limbs which we had made and carried about with us or left at home
at pleasure.  I was not, however, satisfied, and should have
gone on with the subject at once if I had not been anxious to
write “The Fair Haven,” a book which is a development
of a pamphlet I wrote in New Zealand and published in London in
1865.

As soon as I had finished this, I returned to the old subject,
on which I had already been engaged for nearly a dozen years as
continuously as other business would allow, and proposed to
myself to see not only machines as limbs, but also limbs as
machines.  I felt immediately that I was upon firmer
ground.  The use of the word “organ” for a limb
told its own story; the word could not have become so current
under this meaning unless the idea of a limb as a tool or machine
had been agreeable to common sense.  What would follow,
then, if we regarded our limbs and organs as things that we had
ourselves manufactured for our convenience?

The first question that suggested itself was, how did we come
to make them without knowing anything about it?  And this
raised another, namely, how comes anybody to do anything
unconsciously?  The answer “habit” was not far
to seek.  But can a person be said to do a thing by force of
habit or routine when it is his ancestors, and not he, that has
done it hitherto?  Not unless he and his ancestors are one
and the same person.  Perhaps, then, they are the
same person after all.  What is sameness?  I remembered
Bishop Butler’s sermon on “Personal Identity,”
read it again, and saw very plainly that if a man of eighty may
consider himself identical with the baby from whom he has
developed, so that he may say, “I am the person who at six
months old did this or that,” then the baby may just as
fairly claim identity with its father and mother, and say to its
parents on being born, “I was you only a few months
ago.”  By parity of reasoning each living form now on
the earth must be able to claim identity with each generation of
its ancestors up to the primordial cell inclusive.

Again, if the octogenarian may claim personal identity with
the infant, the infant may certainly do so with the impregnate
ovum from which it has developed.  If so, the octogenarian
will prove to have been a fish once in this his present
life.  This is as certain as that he was living yesterday,
and stands on exactly the same foundation.

I am aware that Professor Huxley maintains otherwise.  He
writes: “It is not true, for example, . . . that a reptile
was ever a fish, but it is true that the reptile embryo”
(and what is said here of the reptile holds good also for the
human embryo), “at one stage of its development, is an
organism, which, if it had an independent existence, must be
classified among fishes.” [17]

This is like saying, “It is not true that such and such
a picture was rejected for the Academy, but it is true that it
was submitted to the President and Council of the Royal Academy,
with a view to acceptance at their next forthcoming annual
exhibition, and that the President and Council regretted they
were unable through want of space, &c.,
&c.”—and as much more as the reader
chooses.  I shall venture, therefore, to stick to it that
the octogenarian was once a fish, or if Professor Huxley prefers
it, “an organism which must be classified among
fishes.”

But if a man was a fish once, he may have been a fish a
million times over, for aught he knows; for he must admit that
his conscious recollection is at fault, and has nothing whatever
to do with the matter, which must be decided, not, as it were,
upon his own evidence as to what deeds he may or may not
recollect having executed, but by the production of his
signatures in court, with satisfactory proof that he has
delivered each document as his act and deed.

This made things very much simpler.  The processes of
embryonic development, and instinctive actions, might be now seen
as repetitions of the same kind of action by the same individual
in successive generations.  It was natural, therefore, that
they should come in the course of time to be done unconsciously,
and a consideration of the most obvious facts of memory removed
all further doubt that habit—which is based on
memory—was at the bottom of all the phenomena of
heredity.

I had got to this point about the spring of 1874, and had
begun to write, when I was compelled to go to Canada, and for the
next year and a half did hardly any writing.  The first
passage in “Life and Habit” which I can date with
certainty is the one on page 52, which runs as
follows:—

“It is one against legion when a man tries
to differ from his own past selves.  He must yield or die if
he wants to differ widely, so as to lack natural instincts, such
as hunger or thirst, and not to gratify them.  It is more
righteous in a man that he should ‘eat strange food,’
and that his cheek should ‘so much as lank not,’ than
that he should starve if the strange food be at his
command.  His past selves are living in him at this moment
with the accumulated life of centuries.  ‘Do this,
this, this, which we too have done, and found out profit in
it,’ cry the souls of his forefathers within him. 
Faint are the far ones, coming and going as the sound of bells
wafted on to a high mountain; loud and clear are the near ones,
urgent as an alarm of fire.”

This was written a few days after my arrival in Canada, June
1874.  I was on Montreal mountain for the first time, and
was struck with its extreme beauty.  It was a magnificent
Summer’s evening; the noble St. Lawrence flowed almost
immediately beneath, and the vast expanse of country beyond it
was suffused with a colour which even Italy cannot surpass. 
Sitting down for a while, I began making notes for “Life
and Habit,” of which I was then continually thinking, and
had written the first few lines of the above, when the bells of
Notre Dame in Montreal began to ring, and their sound was carried
to and fro in a remarkably beautiful manner.  I took
advantage of the incident to insert then and there the last lines
of the piece just quoted.  I kept the whole passage with
hardly any alteration, and am thus able to date it
accurately.

Though so occupied in Canada that writing a book was
impossible, I nevertheless got many notes together for future
use.  I left Canada at the end of 1875, and early in 1876
began putting these notes into more coherent form.  I did
this in thirty pages of closely written matter, of which a
pressed copy remains in my commonplace-book.  I find two
dates among them—the first, “Sunday, Feb. 6,
1876”; and the second, at the end of the notes, “Feb.
12, 1876.”

From these notes I find that by this time I had the theory
contained in “Life and Habit” completely before me,
with the four main principles which it involves, namely, the
oneness of personality between parents and offspring; memory on
the part of offspring of certain actions which it did when in the
persons of its forefathers; the latency of that memory until it
is rekindled by a recurrence of the associated ideas; and the
unconsciousness with which habitual actions come to be
performed.

The first half-page of these notes may serve as a sample, and
runs thus:—

“Those habits and functions which we have in
common with the lower animals come mainly within the womb, or are
done involuntarily, as our [growth of] limbs, eyes, &c., and
our power of digesting food, &c. . . .

“We say of the chicken that it knows how to run about as
soon as it is hatched, . . . but had it no knowledge before it
was hatched?

“It knew how to make a great many things before it was
hatched.

“It grew eyes and feathers and bones.

“Yet we say it knew nothing about all this.

“After it is born it grows more feathers, and makes its
bones larger, and develops a reproductive system.

“Again we say it knows nothing about all this.

“What then does it know?

“Whatever it does not know so well as to be unconscious
of knowing it.

“Knowledge dwells upon the confines of uncertainty.

“When we are very certain, we do not know that we
know.  When we will very strongly, we do not know that we
will.”

I then began my book, but considering myself still a painter
by profession, I gave comparatively little time to writing, and
got on but slowly.  I left England for North Italy in the
middle of May 1876 and returned early in August.  It was
perhaps thus that I failed to hear of the account of Professor
Hering’s lecture given by Professor Ray Lankester in
Nature, July 13 1876; though, never at that time seeing
Nature, I should probably have missed it under any
circumstances.  On my return I continued slowly
writing.  By August 1877 I considered that I had to all
intents and purposes completed my book.  My first proof
bears date October 13, 1877.

At this time I had not been able to find that anything like
what I was advancing had been said already.  I asked many
friends, but not one of them knew of anything more than I did; to
them, as to me, it seemed an idea so new as to be almost
preposterous; but knowing how things turn up after one has
written, of the existence of which one had not known before, I
was particularly careful to guard against being supposed to claim
originality.  I neither claimed it nor wished for it; for if
a theory has any truth in it, it is almost sure to occur to
several people much about the same time, and a reasonable person
will look upon his work with great suspicion unless he can
confirm it with the support of others who have gone before
him.  Still I knew of nothing in the least resembling it,
and was so afraid of what I was doing, that though I could see no
flaw in the argument, nor any loophole for escape from the
conclusion it led to, yet I did not dare to put it forward with
the seriousness and sobriety with which I should have treated the
subject if I had not been in continual fear of a mine being
sprung upon me from some unexpected quarter.  I am
exceedingly glad now that I knew nothing of Professor
Hering’s lecture, for it is much better that two people
should think a thing out as far as they can independently before
they become aware of each other’s works but if I had seen
it, I should either, as is most likely, not have written at all,
or I should have pitched my book in another key.

Among the additions I intended making while the book was in
the press, was a chapter on Mr. Darwin’s provisional theory
of Pangenesis, which I felt convinced must be right if it was Mr.
Darwin’s, and which I was sure, if I could once understand
it, must have an important bearing on “Life and
Habit.”  I had not as yet seen that the principle I
was contending for was Darwinian, not Neo-Darwinian.  My
pages still teemed with allusions to “natural
selection,” and I sometimes allowed myself to hope that
“Life and Habit” was going to be an adjunct to
Darwinism which no one would welcome more gladly than Mr. Darwin
himself.  At this time I had a visit from a friend, who
kindly called to answer a question of mine, relative, if I
remember rightly, to “Pangenesis.”  He came,
September 26, 1877.  One of the first things he said was,
that the theory which had pleased him more than anything he had
heard of for some time was one referring all life to
memory.  I said that was exactly what I was doing myself,
and inquired where he had met with his theory.  He replied
that Professor Ray Lankester had written a letter about it in
Nature some time ago, but he could not remember exactly
when, and had given extracts from a lecture by Professor Ewald
Hering, who had originated the theory.  I said I should not
look at it, as I had completed that part of my work, and was on
the point of going to press.  I could not recast my work if,
as was most likely, I should find something, when I saw what
Professor Hering had said, which would make me wish to rewrite my
own book; it was too late in the day and I did not feel equal to
making any radical alteration; and so the matter ended with very
little said upon either side.  I wrote, however, afterwards
to my friend asking him to tell me the number of Nature
which contained the lecture if he could find it, but he was
unable to do so, and I was well enough content.

A few days before this I had met another friend, and had
explained to him what I was doing.  He told me I ought to
read Professor Mivart’s “Genesis of Species,”
and that if I did so I should find there were two sides to
“natural selection.”  Thinking, as so many
people do—and no wonder—that “natural
selection” and evolution were much the same thing, and
having found so many attacks upon evolution produce no effect
upon me, I declined to read it.  I had as yet no idea that a
writer could attack Neo-Darwinism without attacking
evolution.  But my friend kindly sent me a copy; and when I
read it, I found myself in the presence of arguments different
from those I had met with hitherto, and did not see my way to
answering them.  I had, however, read only a small part of
Professor Mivart’s work, and was not fully awake to the
position, when the friend referred to in the preceding paragraph
called on me.

When I had finished the “Genesis of Species,” I
felt that something was certainly wanted which should give a
definite aim to the variations whose accumulation was to amount
ultimately to specific and generic differences, and that without
this there could have been no progress in organic
development.  I got the latest edition of the “Origin
of Species” in order to see how Mr. Darwin met Professor
Mivart, and found his answers in many respects
unsatisfactory.  I had lost my original copy of the
“Origin of Species,” and had not read the book for
some years.  I now set about reading it again, and came to
the chapter on instinct, where I was horrified to find the
following passage:—

“But it would be a serious error to suppose
that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit
in one generation and then transmitted by inheritance to the
succeeding generations.  It can be clearly shown that the
most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely,
those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have
been acquired by habit.” [23a]

This showed that, according to Mr. Darwin, I had fallen into
serious error, and my faith in him, though somewhat shaken, was
far too great to be destroyed by a few days’ course of
Professor Mivart, the full importance of whose work I had not yet
apprehended.  I continued to read, and when I had finished
the chapter felt sure that I must indeed have been
blundering.  The concluding words, “I am surprised
that no one has hitherto advanced this demonstrative case of
neuter insects against the well-known doctrine of inherited habit
as advanced by Lamarck,” [23b] were positively
awful.  There was a quiet consciousness of strength about
them which was more convincing than any amount of more detailed
explanation.  This was the first I had heard of any doctrine
of inherited habit as having been propounded by Lamarck (the
passage stands in the first edition, “the well-known
doctrine of Lamarck,” p. 242); and now to find that I had
been only busying myself with a stale theory of this long-since
exploded charlatan—with my book three parts written and
already in the press—it was a serious scare.

On reflection, however, I was again met with the overwhelming
weight of the evidence in favour of structure and habit being
mainly due to memory.  I accordingly gathered as much as I
could second-hand of what Lamarck had said, reserving a study of
his “Philosophie Zoologique” for another occasion,
and read as much about ants and bees as I could find in readily
accessible works.  In a few days I saw my way again; and
now, reading the “Origin of Species” more closely,
and I may say more sceptically, the antagonism between Mr. Darwin
and Lamarck became fully apparent to me, and I saw how incoherent
and unworkable in practice the later view was in comparison with
the earlier.  Then I read Mr. Darwin’s answers to
miscellaneous objections, and was met, and this time brought up,
by the passage beginning “In the earlier editions of this
work,” [24a] &c., on which I wrote very
severely in “Life and Habit”; [24b] for I felt by this time that the
difference of opinion between us was radical, and that the matter
must be fought out according to the rules of the game. 
After this I went through the earlier part of my book, and cut
out the expressions which I had used inadvertently, and which
were inconsistent with a teleological view.  This
necessitated only verbal alterations; for, though I had not known
it, the spirit of the book was throughout teleological.

I now saw that I had got my hands full, and abandoned my
intention of touching upon “Pangenesis.”  I took
up the words of Mr. Darwin quoted above, to the effect that it
would be a serious error to ascribe the greater number of
instincts to transmitted habit.  I wrote chapter xi. of
“Life and Habit,” which is headed “Instincts as
Inherited Memory”; I also wrote the four subsequent
chapters, “Instincts of Neuter Insects,”
“Lamarck and Mr. Darwin,” “Mr. Mivart and Mr.
Darwin,” and the concluding chapter, all of them in the
month of October and the early part of November 1877, the
complete book leaving the binder’s hands December 4, 1877,
but, according to trade custom, being dated 1878.  It will
be seen that these five concluding chapters were rapidly written,
and this may account in part for the directness with which I said
anything I had to say about Mr. Darwin; partly this, and partly I
felt I was in for a penny and might as well be in for a
pound.  I therefore wrote about Mr. Darwin’s work
exactly as I should about any one else’s, bearing in mind
the inestimable services he had undoubtedly—and must always
be counted to have—rendered to evolution.

p.
26Chapter III

How I came to write “Evolution, Old and
New”—Mr Darwin’s “brief but
imperfect” sketch of the opinions of the writers on
evolution who had preceded him—The reception which
“Evolution, Old and New,” met with.

Though my book was out in 1877, it
was not till January 1878 that I took an opportunity of looking
up Professor Ray Lankester’s account of Professor
Hering’s lecture.  I can hardly say how relieved I was
to find that it sprung no mine upon me, but that, so far as I
could gather, Professor Hering and I had come to pretty much the
same conclusion.  I had already found the passage in Dr.
Erasmus Darwin which I quoted in “Evolution, Old and
New,” but may perhaps as well repeat it here.  It
runs—

“Owing to the imperfection of language, the
offspring is termed a new animal; but is, in truth, a branch or
elongation of the parent, since a part of the embryon animal is
or was a part of the parent, and, therefore, in strict language,
cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production,
and, therefore, it may retain some of the habits of the parent
system.” [26]

When, then, the Athenæum reviewed “Life and
Habit” (January 26, 1878), I took the opportunity to write
to that paper, calling attention to Professor Hering’s
lecture, and also to the passage just quoted from Dr. Erasmus
Darwin.  The editor kindly inserted my letter in his issue
of February 9, 1878.  I felt that I had now done all in the
way of acknowledgment to Professor Hering which it was, for the
time, in my power to do.

I again took up Mr. Darwin’s “Origin of
Species,” this time, I admit, in a spirit of
scepticism.  I read his “brief but imperfect”
sketch of the progress of opinion on the origin of species, and
turned to each one of the writers he had mentioned.  First,
I read all the parts of the “Zoonomia” that were not
purely medical, and was astonished to find that, as Dr. Krause
has since said in his essay on Erasmus Darwin, “he was
the first who proposed and persistently carried out a
well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living
world” [27] (italics in original).

This is undoubtedly the case, and I was surprised at finding
Professor Huxley say concerning this very eminent man that he
could “hardly be said to have made any real advance upon
his predecessors.”  Still more was I surprised at
remembering that, in the first edition of the “Origin of
Species,” Dr. Erasmus Darwin had never been so much as
named; while in the “brief but imperfect” sketch he
was dismissed with a line of half-contemptuous patronage, as
though the mingled tribute of admiration and curiosity which
attaches to scientific prophecies, as distinguished from
discoveries, was the utmost he was entitled to.  “It
is curious,” says Mr. Darwin innocently, in the middle of a
note in the smallest possible type, “how largely my
grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the views and
erroneous grounds of opinion of Lamarck in his
‘Zoonomia’ (vol. i. pp. 500–510), published in
1794”; this was all he had to say about the founder of
“Darwinism,” until I myself unearthed Dr. Erasmus
Darwin, and put his work fairly before the present generation in
“Evolution, Old and New.”  Six months after I
had done this, I had the satisfaction of seeing that Mr. Darwin
had woke up to the propriety of doing much the same thing, and
that he had published an interesting and charmingly written
memoir of his grandfather, of which more anon.

Not that Dr. Darwin was the first to catch sight of a complete
theory of evolution.  Buffon was the first to point out
that, in view of the known modifications which had been effected
among our domesticated animals and cultivated plants, the ass and
the horse should be considered as, in all probability, descended
from a common ancestor; yet, if this is so, he writes—if
the point “were once gained that among animals and
vegetables there had been, I do not say several species, but even
a single one, which had been produced in the course of direct
descent from another species; if, for example, it could be once
shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse, then
there is no further limit to be set to the power of Nature, and
we should not be wrong in supposing that, with sufficient time,
she has evolved all other organised forms from one primordial
type” [28a] (et l’on n’auroit pas
tort de supposer, que d’un seul être elle a su
tirer avec le temps tous les autres êtres
organisés).

This, I imagine, in spite of Professor Huxley’s dictum,
is contributing a good deal to the general doctrine of evolution;
for though Descartes and Leibnitz may have thrown out hints
pointing more or less broadly in the direction of evolution, some
of which Professor Huxley has quoted, he has adduced nothing
approaching to the passage from Buffon given above, either in
respect of the clearness with which the conclusion intended to be
arrived at is pointed out, or the breadth of view with which the
whole ground of animal and vegetable nature is covered.  The
passage referred to is only one of many to the same effect, and
must be connected with one quoted in “Evolution, Old and
New,” [28b] from p. 13 of Buffon’s first
volume, which appeared in 1749, and than which nothing can well
point more plainly in the direction of evolution.  It is not
easy, therefore, to understand why Professor Huxley should give
1753–78 as the date of Buffon’s work, nor yet why he
should say that Buffon was “at first a partisan of the
absolute immutability of species,” [29a] unless, indeed, we suppose he has been
content to follow that very unsatisfactory writer, Isidore
Geoffroy St. Hilaire (who falls into this error, and says that
Buffon’s first volume on animals appeared 1753), without
verifying him, and without making any reference to him.

Professor Huxley quotes a passage from the
“Palingénésie Philosophique” of Bonnet,
of which he says that, making allowance for his peculiar views on
the subject of generation, they bear no small resemblance to what
is understood by “evolution” at the present
day.  The most important parts of the passage quoted are as
follows:—

“Should I be going too far if I were to
conjecture that the plants and animals of the present day have
arisen by a sort of natural evolution from the organised beings
which peopled the world in its original state as it left the
hands of the Creator? . . .  In the outset organised beings
were probably very different from what they are now—as
different as the original world is from our present one.  We
have no means of estimating the amount of these differences, but
it is possible that even our ablest naturalist, if transplanted
to the original world, would entirely fail to recognise our
plants and animals therein.” [29b]

But this is feeble in comparison with Buffon, and did not
appear till 1769, when Buffon had been writing on evolution for
fully twenty years with the eyes of scientific Europe upon
him.  Whatever concession to the opinion of Buffon Bonnet
may have been inclined to make in 1769, in 1764, when he
published his “Contemplation de la Nature,” and in
1762 when his “Considérations sur les Corps
Organes” appeared, he cannot be considered to have been a
supporter of evolution.  I went through these works in 1878
when I was writing “Evolution, Old and New,” to see
whether I could claim him as on my side; but though frequently
delighted with his work, I found it impossible to press him into
my service.

The pre-eminent claim of Buffon to be considered as the father
of the modern doctrine of evolution cannot be reasonably
disputed, though he was doubtless led to his conclusions by the
works of Descartes and Leibnitz, of both of whom he was an avowed
and very warm admirer.  His claim does not rest upon a
passage here or there, but upon the spirit of forty quartos
written over a period of about as many years.  Nevertheless
he wrote, as I have shown in “Evolution, Old and
New,” of set purpose enigmatically, whereas there was no
beating about the bush with Dr. Darwin.  He speaks straight
out, and Dr. Krause is justified in saying of him “that
he was the first who proposed and persistently carried out a
well-rounded theory” of evolution.

I now turned to Lamarck.  I read the first volume of the
“Philosophie Zoologique,” analysed it and translated
the most important parts.  The second volume was beside my
purpose, dealing as it does rather with the origin of life than
of species, and travelling too fast and too far for me to be able
to keep up with him.  Again I was astonished at the little
mention Mr. Darwin had made of this illustrious writer, at the
manner in which he had motioned him away, as it were, with his
hand in the first edition of the “Origin of Species,”
and at the brevity and imperfection of the remarks made upon him
in the subsequent historical sketch.

I got Isidore Geoffroy’s “Histoire Naturelle
Générale,” which Mr. Darwin commends in the
note on the second page of the historical sketch, as giving
“an excellent history of opinion” upon the subject of
evolution, and a full account of Buffon’s conclusions upon
the same subject.  This at least is what I supposed Mr.
Darwin to mean.  What he said was that Isidore Geoffroy
gives an excellent history of opinion on the subject of the date
of the first publication of Lamarck, and that in his work there
is a full account of Buffon’s fluctuating conclusions upon
the same subject. [31]  But Mr. Darwin
is a more than commonly puzzling writer.  I read what M.
Geoffroy had to say upon Buffon, and was surprised to find that,
after all, according to M. Geoffroy, Buffon, and not Lamarck, was
the founder of the theory of evolution.  His name, as I have
already said, was never mentioned in the first edition of the
“Origin of Species.”

M. Geoffroy goes into the accusations of having fluctuated in
his opinions, which he tells us have been brought against Buffon,
and comes to the conclusion that they are unjust, as any one else
will do who turns to Buffon himself.  Mr. Darwin, however,
in the “brief but imperfect sketch,” catches at the
accusation, and repeats it while saying nothing whatever about
the defence.  The following is still all he says: “The
first author who in modern times has treated” evolution
“in a scientific spirit was Buffon.  But as his
opinions fluctuated greatly at different periods, and as he does
not enter on the causes or means of the transformation of
species, I need not here enter on details.”  On the
next page, in the note last quoted, Mr. Darwin originally
repeated the accusation of Buffon’s having been fluctuating
in his opinions, and appeared to give it the imprimatur of
Isidore Geoffroy’s approval; the fact being that Isidore
Geoffroy only quoted the accusation in order to refute it; and
though, I suppose, meaning well, did not make half the case he
might have done, and abounds with misstatements.  My readers
will find this matter particularly dealt with in
“Evolution, Old and New,” Chapter X.

I gather that some one must have complained to Mr. Darwin of
his saying that Isidore Geoffroy gave an account of
Buffon’s “fluctuating conclusions” concerning
evolution, when he was doing all he knew to maintain that
Buffon’s conclusions did not fluctuate; for I see that in
the edition of 1876 the word “fluctuating” has
dropped out of the note in question, and we now learn that
Isidore Geoffroy gives “a full account of Buffon’s
conclusions,” without the “fluctuating.” 
But Buffon has not taken much by this, for his opinions are still
left fluctuating greatly at different periods on the preceding
page, and though he still was the first to treat evolution in a
scientific spirit, he still does not enter upon the causes or
means of the transformation of species.  No one can
understand Mr. Darwin who does not collate the different editions
of the “Origin of Species” with some attention. 
When he has done this, he will know what Newton meant by saying
he felt like a child playing with pebbles upon the seashore.

One word more upon this note before I leave it.  Mr.
Darwin speaks of Isidore Geoffroy’s history of opinion as
“excellent,” and his account of Buffon’s
opinions as “full.”  I wonder how well qualified
he is to be a judge of these matters?  If he knows much
about the earlier writers, he is the more inexcusable for having
said so little about them.  If little, what is his opinion
worth?

To return to the “brief but imperfect
sketch.”  I do not think I can ever again be surprised
at anything Mr. Darwin may say or do, but if I could, I should
wonder how a writer who did not “enter upon the causes or
means of the transformation of species,” and whose opinions
“fluctuated greatly at different periods,” can be
held to have treated evolution “in a scientific
spirit.”  Nevertheless, when I reflect upon the
scientific reputation Mr. Darwin has attained, and the means by
which he has won it, I suppose the scientific spirit must be much
what he here implies.  I see Mr. Darwin says of his own
father, Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury, that he does not
consider him to have had a scientific mind.  Mr. Darwin
cannot tell why he does not think his father’s mind to have
been fitted for advancing science, “for he was fond of
theorising, and was incomparably the best observer” Mr.
Darwin ever knew. [33a]  From the
hint given in the “brief but imperfect sketch,” I
fancy I can help Mr. Darwin to see why he does not think his
father’s mind to have been a scientific one.  It is
possible that Dr. Robert Darwin’s opinions did not
fluctuate sufficiently at different periods, and that Mr. Darwin
considered him as having in some way entered upon the causes or
means of the transformation of species.  Certainly those who
read Mr. Darwin’s own works attentively will find no lack
of fluctuation in his case; and reflection will show them that a
theory of evolution which relies mainly on the accumulation of
accidental variations comes very close to not entering upon the
causes or means of the transformation of species. [33b]

I have shown, however, in “Evolution, Old and
New,” that the assertion that Buffon does not enter on the
causes or means of the transformation of species is absolutely
without foundation, and that, on the contrary, he is continually
dealing with this very matter, and devotes to it one of his
longest and most important chapters, [33c] but I admit that
he is less satisfactory on this head than either Dr. Erasmus
Darwin or Lamarck.

As a matter of fact, Buffon is much more of a Neo-Darwinian
than either Dr. Erasmus Darwin or Lamarck, for with him the
variations are sometimes fortuitous.  In the case of the
dog, he speaks of them as making their appearance “by
some chance common enough with Nature,” [33d] and being perpetuated by man’s
selection.  This is exactly the “if any slight
favourable variation happen to arise” of Mr. Charles
Darwin.  Buffon also speaks of the variations among pigeons
arising “par hasard.”  But these
expressions are only ships; his main cause of variation is the
direct action of changed conditions of existence, while with Dr.
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck the action of the conditions of
existence is indirect, the direct action being that of the
animals or plants themselves, in consequence of changed sense of
need under changed conditions.

I should say that the sketch so often referred to is at first
sight now no longer imperfect in Mr. Darwin’s
opinion.  It was “brief but imperfect” in 1861
and in 1866, but in 1876 I see that it is brief only.  Of
course, discovering that it was no longer imperfect, I expected
to find it briefer.  What, then, was my surprise at finding
that it had become rather longer?  I have found no perfectly
satisfactory explanation of this inconsistency, but, on the
whole, incline to think that the “greatest of living
men” felt himself unequal to prolonging his struggle with
the word “but,” and resolved to lay that conjunction
at all hazards, even though the doing so might cost him the
balance of his adjectives; for I think he must know that his
sketch is still imperfect.

From Isidore Geoffroy I turned to Buffon himself, and had not
long to wait before I felt that I was now brought into
communication with the master-mind of all those who have up to
the present time busied themselves with evolution.  For a
brief and imperfect sketch of him, I must refer my readers to
“Evolution, Old and New.”

I have no great respect for the author of the “Vestiges
of Creation,” who behaved hardly better to the writers upon
whom his own work was founded than Mr. Darwin himself has
done.  Nevertheless, I could not forget the gravity of the
misrepresentation with which he was assailed on page 3 of the
first edition of the “Origin of Species,” nor impugn
the justice of his rejoinder in the following year, [34] when he replied that it was to be
regretted Mr. Darwin had read his work “almost as much
amiss as if, like its declared opponents, he had an interest in
misrepresenting it.” [35a]  I could not,
again, forget that, though Mr. Darwin did not venture to stand by
the passage in question, it was expunged without a word of
apology or explanation of how it was that he had come to write
it.  A writer with any claim to our consideration will never
fall into serious error about another writer without hastening to
make a public apology as soon as he becomes aware of what he has
done.

Reflecting upon the substance of what I have written in the
last few pages, I thought it right that people should have a
chance of knowing more about the earlier writers on evolution
than they were likely to hear from any of our leading scientists
(no matter how many lectures they may give on the coming of age
of the “Origin of Species”) except Professor
Mivart.  A book pointing the difference between teleological
and non-teleological views of evolution seemed likely to be
useful, and would afford me the opportunity I wanted for giving a
résumé of the views of each one of the three
chief founders of the theory, and of contrasting them with those
of Mr. Charles Darwin, as well as for calling attention to
Professor Hering’s lecture.  I accordingly wrote
“Evolution, Old and New,” which was prominently
announced in the leading literary periodicals at the end of
February, or on the very first days of March 1879, [35b] as “a comparison of the theories
of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with that of Mr.
Charles Darwin, with copious extracts from the works of the three
first-named writers.”  In this book I was hardly able
to conceal the fact that, in spite of the obligations under which
we must always remain to Mr. Darwin, I had lost my respect for
him and for his work.

I should point out that this announcement, coupled with what I
had written in “Life and Habit,” would enable Mr.
Darwin and his friends to form a pretty shrewd guess as to what I
was likely to say, and to quote from Dr. Erasmus Darwin in my
forthcoming book.  The announcement, indeed, would tell
almost as much as the book itself to those who knew the works of
Erasmus Darwin.

As may be supposed, “Evolution, Old and New,” met
with a very unfavourable reception at the hands of many of its
reviewers.  The Saturday Review was furious. 
“When a writer,” it exclaimed, “who has not
given as many weeks to the subject as Mr. Darwin has given years,
is not content to air his own crude though clever fallacies, but
assumes to criticise Mr. Darwin with the superciliousness of a
young schoolmaster looking over a boy’s theme, it is
difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves or
perhaps desires.  One would think that Mr. Butler was the
travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the
pert speculator who takes all his facts at secondhand.” [36]

The lady or gentleman who writes in such a strain as this
should not be too hard upon others whom she or he may consider to
write like schoolmasters.  It is true I have
travelled—not much, but still as much as many others, and
have endeavoured to keep my eyes open to the facts before me; but
I cannot think that I made any reference to my travels in
“Evolution, Old and New.”  I did not quite see
what that had to do with the matter.  A man may get to know
a good deal without ever going beyond the four-mile radius from
Charing Cross.  Much less did I imply that Mr. Darwin was
pert: pert is one of the last words that can be applied to Mr.
Darwin.  Nor, again, had I blamed him for taking his facts
at secondhand; no one is to be blamed for this, provided he takes
well-established facts and acknowledges his sources.  Mr.
Darwin has generally gone to good sources.  The ground of
complaint against him is that he muddied the water after he had
drawn it, and tacitly claimed to be the rightful owner of the
spring, on the score of the damage he had effected.

Notwithstanding, however, the generally hostile, or more or
less contemptuous, reception which “Evolution, Old and
New,” met with, there were some reviews—as, for
example, those in the Field, [37a] the Daily
Chronicle, [37b] the Athenæum, [37c] the Journal of Science, [37d] the British Journal of
Homæopathy, [37e] the Daily
News, [37f] the Popular Science Review [37g]—which were all I could expect or
wish.

p.
38Chapter IV

The manner in which Mr. Darwin met
“Evolution, Old and New.”

By far the most important notice of
“Evolution, Old and New,” was that taken by Mr.
Darwin himself; for I can hardly be mistaken in believing that
Dr. Krause’s article would have been allowed to repose
unaltered in the pages of the well-known German scientific
journal, Kosmos, unless something had happened to make Mr.
Darwin feel that his reticence concerning his grandfather must
now be ended.

Mr. Darwin, indeed, gives me the impression of wishing me to
understand that this is not the case.  At the beginning of
this year he wrote to me, in a letter which I will presently give
in full, that he had obtained Dr. Krause’s consent for a
translation, and had arranged with Mr. Dallas, before my book was
“announced.”  “I remember this,” he
continues, “because Mr. Dallas wrote to tell me of the
advertisement.”  But Mr. Darwin is not a clear writer,
and it is impossible to say whether he is referring to the
announcement of “Evolution, Old and New”—in
which case he means that the arrangements for the translation of
Dr. Krause’s article were made before the end of February
1879, and before any public intimation could have reached him as
to the substance of the book on which I was then engaged—or
to the advertisements of its being now published, which appeared
at the beginning of May; in which case, as I have said above, Mr.
Darwin and his friends had for some time had full opportunity of
knowing what I was about.  I believe, however, Mr. Darwin to
intend that he remembered the arrangements having been made
before the beginning of May—his use of the word
“announced,” instead of “advertised,”
being an accident; but let this pass.

Some time after Mr. Darwin’s work appeared in November
1879, I got it, and looking at the last page of the book, I read
as follows:—

“They” (the elder Darwin and Lamarck)
“explain the adaptation to purpose of organisms by an
obscure impulse or sense of what is purpose-like; yet even with
regard to man we are in the habit of saying, that one can never
know what so-and-so is good for.  The purpose-like is that
which approves itself, and not always that which is struggled for
by obscure impulses and desires.  Just in the same way the
beautiful is what pleases.”

I had a sort of feeling as though the writer of the above
might have had “Evolution, Old and New,” in his mind,
but went on to the next sentence, which ran—

“Erasmus Darwin’s system was in itself
a most significant first step in the path of knowledge which his
grandson has opened up for us, but to wish to revive it at the
present day, as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a
weakness of thought and a mental anachronism which no one can
envy.”

“That’s me,” said I to myself
promptly.  I noticed also the position in which the sentence
stood, which made it both one of the first that would be likely
to catch a reader’s eye, and the last he would carry away
with him.  I therefore expected to find an open reply to
some parts of “Evolution, Old and New,” and turned to
Mr. Darwin’s preface.

To my surprise, I there found that what I had been reading
could not by any possibility refer to me, for the preface ran as
follows:—

“In the February number of a well-known
German scientific journal, Kosmos, [39] Dr. Ernest Krause published a sketch of
the ‘Life of Erasmus Darwin,’ the author of the
‘Zoonomia,’ ‘Botanic Garden,’ and other
works.  This article bears the title of a
‘Contribution to the History of the Descent Theory’;
and Dr. Krause has kindly allowed my brother Erasmus and myself
to have a translation made of it for publication in this
country.”

Then came a note as follows:—

“Mr. Dallas has undertaken the translation,
and his scientific reputation, together with his knowledge of
German, is a guarantee for its accuracy.”

I ought to have suspected inaccuracy where I found so much
consciousness of accuracy, but I did not.  However this may
be, Mr. Darwin pins himself down with every circumstance of
preciseness to giving Dr. Krause’s article as it appeared
in Kosmos,—the whole article, and nothing but the
article.  No one could know this better than Mr. Darwin.

On the second page of Mr. Darwin’s preface there is a
small-type note saying that my work, “Evolution, Old and
New,” had appeared since the publication of Dr.
Krause’s article.  Mr. Darwin thus distinctly
precludes his readers from supposing that any passage they might
meet with could have been written in reference to, or by the
light of, my book.  If anything appeared condemnatory of
that book, it was an undesigned coincidence, and would show how
little worthy of consideration I must be when my opinions were
refuted in advance by one who could have no bias in regard to
them.

Knowing that if the article I was about to read appeared in
February, it must have been published before my book, which was
not out till three months later, I saw nothing in Mr.
Darwin’s preface to complain of, and felt that this was
only another instance of my absurd vanity having led me to rush
to conclusions without sufficient grounds,—as if it was
likely, indeed, that Mr. Darwin should think what I had said of
sufficient importance to be affected by it.  It was plain
that some one besides myself, of whom I as yet knew nothing, had
been writing about the elder Darwin, and had taken much the same
line concerning him that I had done.  It was for the benefit
of this person, then, that Dr. Krause’s paragraph was
intended.  I returned to a becoming sense of my own
insignificance, and began to read what I supposed to be an
accurate translation of Dr. Krause’s article as it
originally appeared, before “Evolution, Old and New,”
was published.

On pp. 3 and 4 of Dr. Krause’s part of Mr.
Darwin’s book (pp. 133 and 134 of the book itself), I
detected a sub-apologetic tone which a little surprised me, and a
notice of the fact that Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet
had used the word “Darwinising.”  Mr. R. Garnett
had called my attention to this, and I had mentioned it in
“Evolution, Old and New,” but the paragraph only
struck me as being a little odd.

When I got a few pages farther on (p. 147 of Mr.
Darwin’s book), I found a long quotation from Buffon about
rudimentary organs, which I had quoted in “Evolution, Old
and New.”  I observed that Dr. Krause used the same
edition of Buffon that I did, and began his quotation two lines
from the beginning of Buffon’s paragraph, exactly as I had
done; also that he had taken his nominative from the omitted part
of the sentence across a full stop, as I had myself taken
it.  A little lower I found a line of Buffon’s omitted
which I had given, but I found that at that place I had
inadvertently left two pair of inverted commas which ought to
have come out, [41] having intended to end my quotation,
but changed my mind and continued it without erasing the
commas.  It seemed to me that these commas had bothered Dr.
Krause, and made him think it safer to leave something out, for
the line he omits is a very good one.  I noticed that he
translated “Mais comme nous voulons toujours tout rapporter
à un certain but,” “But we, always wishing to
refer,” &c., while I had it, “But we, ever on the
look-out to refer,” &c.; and “Nous ne faisons pas
attention que nous altérons la philosophie,”
“We fail to see that thus we deprive philosophy of her true
character,” whereas I had “We fail to see that we
thus rob philosophy of her true character.”  This last
was too much; and though it might turn out that Dr. Krause had
quoted this passage before I had done so, had used the same
edition as I had, had begun two lines from the beginning of a
paragraph as I had done, and that the later resemblances were
merely due to Mr. Dallas having compared Dr. Krause’s
German translation of Buffon with my English, and very properly
made use of it when he thought fit, it looked primâ
facie more as though my quotation had been copied in English
as it stood, and then altered, but not quite altered
enough.  This, in the face of the preface, was incredible;
but so many points had such an unpleasant aspect, that I thought
it better to send for Kosmos and see what I could make
out.

At this time I knew not one word of German.  On the same
day, therefore, that I sent for Kosmos I began acquire
that language, and in the fortnight before Kosmos came had
got far enough forward for all practical purposes—that is
to say, with the help of a translation and a dictionary, I could
see whether or no a German passage was the same as what purported
to be its translation.

When Kosmos came I turned to the end of the article to
see how the sentence about mental anachronism and weakness of
thought looked in German.  I found nothing of the kind, the
original article ended with some innocent rhyming doggerel about
somebody going on and exploring something with eagle eye; but ten
lines from the end I found a sentence which corresponded with one
six pages from the end of the English translation.  After
this there could be little doubt that the whole of these last six
English pages were spurious matter.  What little doubt
remained was afterwards removed by my finding that they had no
place in any part of the genuine article.  I looked for the
passage about Coleridge’s using the word
“Darwinising”; it was not to be found in the
German.  I looked for the piece I had quoted from Buffon
about rudimentary organs; but there was nothing of it, nor indeed
any reference to Buffon.  It was plain, therefore, that the
article which Mr. Darwin had given was not the one he professed
to be giving.  I read Mr. Darwin’s preface over again
to see whether he left himself any loophole.  There was not
a chink or cranny through which escape was possible.  The
only inference that could be drawn was either that some one had
imposed upon Mr. Darwin, or that Mr. Darwin, although it was not
possible to suppose him ignorant of the interpolations that had
been made, nor of the obvious purpose of the concluding sentence,
had nevertheless palmed off an article which had been added to
and made to attack “Evolution, Old and New,” as
though it were the original article which appeared before that
book was written.  I could not and would not believe that
Mr. Darwin had condescended to this.  Nevertheless, I saw it
was necessary to sift the whole matter, and began to compare the
German and the English articles paragraph by paragraph.

On the first page I found a passage omitted from the English,
which with great labour I managed to get through, and can now
translate as follows:—

“Alexander Von Humboldt used to take
pleasure in recounting how powerfully Forster’s pictures of
the South Sea Islands and St. Pierre’s illustrations of
Nature had provoked his ardour for travel and influenced his
career as a scientific investigator.  How much more
impressively must the works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, with their
reiterated foreshadowing of a more lofty interpretation of
Nature, have affected his grandson, who in his youth assuredly
approached them with the devotion due to the works of a renowned
poet.” [43]

I then came upon a passage common to both German and English,
which in its turn was followed in the English by the
sub-apologetic paragraph which I had been struck with on first
reading, and which was not in the German, its place being taken
by a much longer passage which had no place in the English. 
A little farther on I was amused at coming upon the following,
and at finding it wholly transformed in the supposed accurate
translation:—

“How must this early and penetrating
explanation of rudimentary organs have affected the grandson when
he read the poem of his ancestor!  But indeed the biological
remarks of this accurate observer in regard to certain definite
natural objects must have produced a still deeper impression upon
him, pointing, as they do, to questions which hay attained so
great a prominence at the present day; such as, Why is any
creature anywhere such as we actually see it and nothing
else?  Why has such and such a plant poisonous juices? 
Why has such and such another thorns?  Why have birds and
fishes light-coloured breasts and dark backs, and, Why does every
creature resemble the one from which it sprung?” [44a]

I will not weary the reader with further details as to the
omissions from and additions to the German text.  Let it
suffice that the so-called translation begins on p. 131 and ends
on p. 216 of Mr. Darwin’s book.  There is new matter
on each one of the pp. 132–139, while almost the whole of
pp. 147–152 inclusive, and the whole of pp. 211–216
inclusive, are spurious—that is to say, not what the
purport to be, not translations from an article that was
published in February 1879, and before “Evolution, Old and
New,” but interpolations not published till six months
after that book.

Bearing in mind the contents of two of the added passages and
the tenor of the concluding sentence quoted above, [44b] I could no longer doubt that the
article had been altered by the light of and with a view to
“Evolution, Old and New.”

The steps are perfectly clear.  First Dr. Krause
published his article in Kosmos and my book was announced
(its purport being thus made obvious), both in the month of
February 1879.  Soon afterwards arrangements were made for a
translation of Dr. Krause’s essay, and were completed by
the end of April.  Then my book came out, and in some way or
other Dr. Krause happened to get hold of it.  He helped
himself—not to much, but to enough; made what other
additions to and omissions from his article he thought would best
meet “Evolution, Old and New,” and then fell to
condemning that book in a finale that was meant to be
crushing.  Nothing was said about the revision which Dr.
Krause’s work had undergone, but it was expressly and
particularly declared in the preface that the English translation
was an accurate version of what appeared in the February number
of Kosmos, and no less expressly and particularly stated
that my book was published subsequently to this.  Both these
statements are untrue; they are in Mr. Darwin’s favour and
prejudicial to myself.

All this was done with that well-known “happy
simplicity” of which the Pall Mall Gazette, December
12, 1879, declared that Mr. Darwin was “a
master.”  The final sentence, about the
“weakness of thought and mental anachronism which no one
can envy,” was especially successful.  The reviewer in
the Pall Mall Gazette just quoted from gave it in full,
and said that it was thoroughly justified.  He then mused
forth a general gnome that the “confidence of writers who
deal in semi-scientific paradoxes is commonly in inverse
proportion to their grasp of the subject.”  Again my
vanity suggested to me that I was the person for whose benefit
this gnome was intended.  My vanity, indeed, was well fed by
the whole transaction; for I saw that not only did Mr. Darwin,
who should be the best judge, think my work worth notice, but
that he did not venture to meet it openly.  As for Dr.
Krause’s concluding sentence, I thought that when a
sentence had been antedated the less it contained about
anachronism the better.

Only one of the reviews that I saw of Mr. Darwin’s
“Life of Erasmus Darwin” showed any knowledge of the
facts.  The Popular Science Review for January 1880,
in flat contradiction to Mr. Darwin’s preface, said that
only part of Dr. Krause’s article was being given by Mr.
Darwin.  This reviewer had plainly seen both Kosmos
and Mr. Darwin’s book.

In the same number of the Popular Science Review, and
immediately following the review of Mr. Darwin’s book,
there is a review of “Evolution, Old and New.” 
The writer of this review quotes the passage about mental
anachronism as quoted by the reviewer in the Pall Mall
Gazette, and adds immediately: “This anachronism has
been committed by Mr. Samuel Butler in a . . . little volume now
before us, and it is doubtless to this, which appeared while
his own work was in progress [italics mine] that Dr. Krause
alludes in the foregoing passage.”  Considering that
the editor of the Popular Science Review and the
translator of Dr. Krause’s article for Mr. Darwin are one
and the same person, it is likely the Popular Science
Review is well informed in saying that my book appeared
before Dr. Krause’s article had been transformed into its
present shape, and that my book was intended by the passage in
question.

Unable to see any way of escaping from a conclusion which I
could not willingly adopt, I thought it best to write to Mr.
Darwin, stating the facts as they appeared to myself, and asking
an explanation, which I would have gladly strained a good many
points to have accepted.  It is better, perhaps, that I
should give my letter and Darwin’s answer in full.  My
letter ran thus:—

January 2,
1880.

Charles Darwin, Esq., F.R.S., &c.

Dear Sir,—Will you kindly
refer me to the edition of Kosmos which contains the text
of Dr. Krause’s article on Dr. Erasmus Darwin, as
translated by Mr. W. S. Dallas?

I have before me the last February number of Kosmos,
which appears by your preface to be the one from which Mr. Dallas
has translated, but his translation contains long and important
passages which are not in the February number of Kosmos,
while many passages in the original article are omitted in the
translation.

Among the passages introduced are the last six pages of the
English article, which seem to condemn by anticipation the
position I have taken as regards Dr. Erasmus Darwin in my book,
“Evolution, Old and New,” and which I believe I was
the first to take.  The concluding, and therefore, perhaps,
most prominent sentence of the translation you have given to the
public stands thus:—

“Erasmus Darwin’s system was in itself a most
significant first step in the path of knowledge which his
grandson has opened up for us, but to wish to revive it at the
present day, as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a
weakness of thought and a mental anachronism which no man can
envy.”

The Kosmos which has been sent me from Germany contains
no such passage.

As you have stated in your preface that my book,
“Evolution, Old and New,” appeared subsequently to
Dr. Krause’s article, and as no intimation is given that
the article has been altered and added to since its original
appearance, while the accuracy of the translation as though from
the February number of Kosmos is, as you expressly say,
guaranteed by Mr. Dallas’s “scientific reputation
together with his knowledge of German,” your readers will
naturally suppose that all they read in the translation appeared
in February last, and therefore before “Evolution, Old and
New,” was written, and therefore independently of, and
necessarily without reference to, that book.

I do not doubt that this was actually the case, but have
failed to obtain the edition which contains the passage above
referred to, and several others which appear in the
translation.

I have a personal interest in this matter, and venture,
therefore, to ask for the explanation which I do not doubt you
will readily give me.—Yours faithfully, S. Butler.

The following is Mr. Darwin’s answer:—

January 3,
1880.

My Dear Sir,—Dr. Krause, soon
after the appearance of his article in Kosmos told me that
he intended to publish it separately and to alter it
considerably, and the altered MS. was sent to Mr. Dallas for
translation.  This is so common a practice that it never
occurred to me to state that the article had been modified; but
now I much regret that I did not do so.  The original will
soon appear in German, and I believe will be a much larger book
than the English one; for, with Dr. Krause’s consent, many
long extracts from Miss Seward were omitted (as well as much
other matter), from being in my opinion superfluous for the
English reader.  I believe that the omitted parts will
appear as notes in the German edition.  Should there be a
reprint of the English Life I will state that the original as it
appeared in Kosmos was modified by Dr. Krause before it
was translated.  I may add that I had obtained Dr.
Krause’s consent for a translation, and had arranged with
Mr. Dallas before your book was announced.  I remember this
because Mr. Dallas wrote to tell me of the advertisement.—I
remain, yours faithfully, C. Darwin.

This was not a letter I could accept.  If Mr. Darwin had
said that by some inadvertence, which he was unable to excuse or
account for, a blunder had been made which he would at once
correct so far as was in his power by a letter to the
Times or the Athenæum, and that a notice of
the erratum should be printed on a flyleaf and pasted into all
unsold copies of the “Life of Erasmus Darwin,” there
would have been no more heard about the matter from me; but when
Mr. Darwin maintained that it was a common practice to take
advantage of an opportunity of revising a work to interpolate a
covert attack upon an opponent, and at the same time to misdate
the interpolated matter by expressly stating that it appeared
months sooner than it actually did, and prior to the work which
it attacked; when he maintained that what was being done was
“so common a practice that it never occurred,” to
him—the writer of some twenty volumes—to do what all
literary men must know to be inexorably requisite, I thought this
was going far beyond what was permissible in honourable warfare,
and that it was time, in the interests of literary and scientific
morality, even more than in my own, to appeal to public
opinion.  I was particularly struck with the use of the
words “it never occurred to me,” and felt how
completely of a piece it was with the opening paragraph of the
“Origin of Species.”  It was not merely that it
did not occur to Mr. Darwin to state that the article had been
modified since it was written—this would have been bad
enough under the circumstances but that it did occur to him to go
out of his way to say what was not true.  There was no
necessity for him to have said anything about my book.  It
appeared, moreover, inadequate to tell me that if a reprint of
the English Life was wanted (which might or might not be the
case, and if it was not the case, why, a shrug of the shoulders,
and I must make the best of it), Mr. Darwin might perhaps
silently omit his note about my book, as he omitted his
misrepresentation of the author of the “Vestiges of
Creation,” and put the words “revised and corrected
by the author” on his title-page.

No matter how high a writer may stand, nor what services he
may have unquestionably rendered, it cannot be for the general
well-being that he should be allowed to set aside the fundamental
principles of straightforwardness and fair play.  When I
thought of Buffon, of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, of Lamarck and even of
the author of the “Vestiges of Creation,” to all of
whom Mr. Darwin had dealt the same measure which he was now
dealing to myself; when I thought of these great men, now dumb,
who had borne the burden and heat of the day, and whose laurels
had been filched from them; of the manner, too, in which Mr.
Darwin had been abetted by those who should have been the first
to detect the fallacy which had misled him; of the hotbed of
intrigue which science has now become; of the disrepute into
which we English must fall as a nation if such practices as Mr.
Darwin had attempted in this case were to be
tolerated;—when I thought of all this, I felt that though
prayers for the repose of dead men’s souls might be
unavailing, yet a defence of their work and memory, no matter
against what odds, might avail the living, and resolved that I
would do my utmost to make my countrymen aware of the spirit now
ruling among those whom they delight to honour.

At first I thought I ought to continue the correspondence
privately with Mr. Darwin, and explain to him that his letter was
insufficient, but on reflection I felt that little good was
likely to come of a second letter, if what I had already written
was not enough.  I therefore wrote to the
Athenæum and gave a condensed account of the facts
contained in the last ten or a dozen pages.  My letter
appeared January 31, 1880. [50]

The accusation was a very grave one; it was made in a very
public place.  I gave my name; I adduced the strongest
primâ facie grounds for the acceptance of my
statements; but there was no rejoinder, and for the best of all
reasons—that no rejoinder was possible.  Besides, what
is the good of having a reputation for candour if one may not
stand upon it at a pinch?  I never yet knew a person with an
especial reputation for candour without finding sooner or later
that he had developed it as animals develop their organs, through
“sense of need.”  Not only did Mr. Darwin remain
perfectly quiet, but all reviewers and littérateurs
remained perfectly quiet also.  It seemed—though I do
not for a moment believe that this is so—as if public
opinion rather approved of what Mr. Darwin had done, and of his
silence than otherwise.  I saw the “Life of Erasmus
Darwin” more frequently and more prominently advertised now
than I had seen it hitherto—perhaps in the hope of selling
off the adulterated copies, and being able to reprint the work
with a corrected title page.  Presently I saw Professor
Huxley hastening to the rescue with his lecture on the coming of
age of the “Origin of Species,” and by May it was
easy for Professor Ray Lankester to imply that Mr. Darwin was the
greatest of living men.  I have since noticed two or three
other controversies raging in the Athenæum and
Times; in each of these cases I saw it assumed that the
defeated party, when proved to have publicly misrepresented his
adversary, should do his best to correct in public the injury
which he had publicly inflicted, but I noticed that in none of
them had the beaten side any especial reputation for
candour.  This probably made all the difference.  But
however this may be, Mr. Darwin left me in possession of the
field, in the hope, doubtless, that the matter would blow
over—which it apparently soon did.  Whether it has
done so in reality or no, is a matter which remains to be
seen.  My own belief is that people paid no attention to
what I said, as believing it simply incredible, and that when
they come to know that it is true, they will think as I do
concerning it.

From ladies and gentlemen of science I admit that I have no
expectations.  There is no conduct so dishonourable that
people will not deny it or explain it away, if it has been
committed by one whom they recognise as of their own
persuasion.  It must be remembered that facts cannot be
respected by the scientist in the same way as by other
people.  It is his business to familiarise himself with
facts, and, as we all know, the path from familiarity to contempt
is an easy one.

Here, then, I take leave of this matter for the present. 
If it appears that I have used language such as is rarely seen in
controversy, let the reader remember that the occasion is, so far
as I know, unparalleled for the cynicism and audacity with which
the wrong complained of was committed and persisted in.  I
trust, however, that, though not indifferent to this, my
indignation has been mainly roused, as when I wrote
“Evolution, Old and New,” before Mr. Darwin had given
me personal ground of complaint against him, by the wrongs he has
inflicted on dead men, on whose behalf I now fight, as I trust
that some one—whom I thank by anticipation—may one
day fight on mine.

p.
52Chapter V

Introduction to Professor Hering’s
lecture.

After I had finished
“Evolution, Old and New,” I wrote some articles for
the Examiner, [52] in which I carried
out the idea put forward in “Life and Habit,” that we
are one person with our ancestors.  It follows from this,
that all living animals and vegetables, being—as appears
likely if the theory of evolution is accepted—descended
from a common ancestor, are in reality one person, and unite to
form a body corporate, of whose existence, however, they are
unconscious.  There is an obvious analogy between this and
the manner in which the component cells of our bodies unite to
form our single individuality, of which it is not likely they
have a conception, and with which they have probably only the
same partial and imperfect sympathy as we, the body corporate,
have with them.  In the articles above alluded to I
separated the organic from the inorganic, and when I came to
rewrite them, I found that this could not be done, and that I
must reconstruct what I had written.  I was at work on
this—to which I hope to return shortly—when Dr.
Krause’s’ “Erasmus Darwin,” with its
preliminary notice by Mr. Charles Darwin, came out, and having
been compelled, as I have shown above, by Dr. Krause’s work
to look a little into the German language, the opportunity seemed
favourable for going on with it and becoming acquainted with
Professor Hering’s lecture.  I therefore began to
translate his lecture at once, with the kind assistance of
friends whose patience seemed inexhaustible, and found myself
well rewarded for my trouble.

Professor Hering and I, to use a metaphor of his own, are as
men who have observed the action of living beings upon the stage
of the world, he from the point of view at once of a spectator
and of one who has free access to much of what goes on behind the
scenes, I from that of a spectator only, with none but the
vaguest notion of the actual manner in which the stage machinery
is worked.  If two men so placed, after years of reflection,
arrive independently of one another at an identical conclusion as
regards the manner in which this machinery must have been
invented and perfected, it is natural that each should take a
deep interest in the arguments of the other, and be anxious to
put them forward with the utmost possible prominence.  It
seems to me that the theory which Professor Hering and I are
supporting in common, is one the importance of which is hardly
inferior to that of the theory of evolution itself—for it
puts the backbone, as it were, into the theory of
evolution.  I shall therefore make no apology for laying my
translation of Professor Hering’s work before my
reader.

Concerning the identity of the main idea put forward in
“Life and Habit” with that of Professor
Hering’s lecture, there can hardly, I think, be two
opinions.  We both of us maintain that we grow our limbs as
we do, and possess the instincts we possess, because we remember
having grown our limbs in this way, and having had these
instincts in past generations when we were in the persons of our
forefathers—each individual life adding a small (but so
small, in any one lifetime, as to be hardly appreciable) amount
of new experience to the general store of memory; that we have
thus got into certain habits which we can now rarely break; and
that we do much of what we do unconsciously on the same principle
as that (whatever it is) on which we do all other habitual
actions, with the greater ease and unconsciousness the more often
we repeat them.  Not only is the main idea the same, but I
was surprised to find how often Professor Hering and I had taken
the same illustrations with which to point our meaning.

Nevertheless, we have each of us left undealt with some points
which the other has treated of.  Professor Hering, for
example, goes into the question of what memory is, and this I did
not venture to do.  I confined myself to saying that
whatever memory was, heredity was also.  Professor Hering
adds that memory is due to vibrations of the molecules of the
nerve fibres, which under certain circumstances recur, and bring
about a corresponding recurrence of visible action.

This approaches closely to the theory concerning the physics
of memory which has been most generally adopted since the time of
Bonnet, who wrote as follows:—

“The soul never has a new sensation but by
the inter position of the senses.  This sensation has been
originally attached to the motion of certain fibres.  Its
reproduction or recollection by the senses will then be likewise
connected with these same fibres.” . . . [54a]

And again:—

“It appeared to me that since this memory is
connected with the body, it must depend upon some change which
must happen to the primitive state of the sensible fibres by the
action of objects.  I have, therefore, admitted as probable
that the state of the fibres on which an object has acted is not
precisely the same after this action as it was before I have
conjectured that the sensible fibres experience more or less
durable modifications, which constitute the physics of memory and
recollection.” [54b]

Professor Hering comes near to endorsing this view, and uses
it for the purpose of explaining personal identity.  This,
at least, is what he does in fact, though perhaps hardly in
words.  I did not say more upon the essence of personality
than that it was inseparable from the idea that the various
phases of our existence should have flowed one out of the other,
“in what we see as a continuous, though it may be at times
a very troubled, stream” [55] but I maintained
that the identity between two successive generations was of
essentially the same kind as that existing between an infant and
an octogenarian.  I thus left personal identity unexplained,
though insisting that it was the key to two apparently distinct
sets of phenomena, the one of which had been hitherto considered
incompatible with our ideas concerning it.  Professor Hering
insists on this too, but he gives us farther insight into what
personal identity is, and explains how it is that the phenomena
of heredity are phenomena also of personal identity.

He implies, though in the short space at his command he has
hardly said so in express terms, that personal identity as we
commonly think of it—that is to say, as confined to the
single life of the individual—consists in the
uninterruptedness of a sufficient number of vibrations, which
have been communicated from molecule to molecule of the nerve
fibres, and which go on communicating each one of them its own
peculiar characteristic elements to the new matter which we
introduce into the body by way of nutrition.  These
vibrations may be so gentle as to be imperceptible for years
together; but they are there, and may become perceived if they
receive accession through the running into them of a wave going
the same way as themselves, which wave has been set up in the
ether by exterior objects and has been communicated to the organs
of sense.

As these pages are on the point of leaving my hands, I see the
following remarkable passage in Mind for the current
month, and introduce it parenthetically here:—

“I followed the sluggish current of hyaline
material issuing from globules of most primitive living
substance.  Persistently it followed its way into space,
conquering, at first, the manifold resistances opposed to it by
its watery medium.  Gradually, however, its energies became
exhausted, till at last, completely overwhelmed, it stopped, an
immovable projection stagnated to death-like rigidity.  Thus
for hours, perhaps, it remained stationary, one of many such rays
of some of the many kinds of protoplasmic stars.  By
degrees, then, or perhaps quite suddenly, help would come to
it from foreign but congruous sources.  It would seem
to combine with outside complemental matter drifted to it at
random.  Slowly it would regain thereby its vital
mobility.  Shrinking at first, but gradually completely
restored and reincorporated into the onward tide of life, it was
ready to take part again in the progressive flow of a new
ray.” [56]

To return to the end of the last paragraph but one.  If
this is so—but I should warn the reader that Professor
Hering is not responsible for this suggestion, though it seems to
follow so naturally from what he has said that I imagine he
intended the inference to be drawn,—if this is so,
assimilation is nothing else than the communication of its own
rhythms from the assimilating to the assimilated substance, to
the effacement of the vibrations or rhythms heretofore existing
in this last; and suitability for food will depend upon whether
the rhythms of the substance eaten are such as to flow
harmoniously into and chime in with those of the body which has
eaten it, or whether they will refuse to act in concert with the
new rhythms with which they have become associated, and will
persist obstinately in pursuing their own course.  In this
case they will either be turned out of the body at once, or will
disconcert its arrangements, with perhaps fatal
consequences.  This comes round to the conclusion I arrived
at in “Life and Habit,” that assimilation was nothing
but the imbuing of one thing with the memories of another. 
(See “Life and Habit,” pp. 136, 137, 140,
&c.)

It will be noted that, as I resolved the phenomena of heredity
into phenomena of personal identity, and left the matter there,
so Professor Hering resolves the phenomena of personal identity
into the phenomena of a living mechanism whose equilibrium is
disturbed by vibrations of a certain character—and leaves
it there.  We now want to understand more about the
vibrations.

But if, according to Professor Hering, the personal identity
of the single life consists in the uninterruptedness of
vibrations, so also do the phenomena of heredity.  For not
only may vibrations of a certain violence or character be
persistent unperceived for many years in a living body, and
communicate themselves to the matter it has assimilated, but they
may, and will, under certain circumstances, extend to the
particle which is about to leave the parent body as the germ of
its future offspring.  In this minute piece of matter there
must, if Professor Hering is right, be an infinity of rhythmic
undulations incessantly vibrating with more or less activity, and
ready to be set in more active agitation at a moment’s
warning, under due accession of vibration from exterior
objects.  On the occurrence of such stimulus, that is to
say, when a vibration of a suitable rhythm from without concurs
with one within the body so as to augment it, the agitation may
gather such strength that the touch, as it were, is given to a
house of cards, and the whole comes toppling over.  This
toppling over is what we call action; and when it is the result
of the disturbance of certain usual arrangements in certain usual
ways, we call it the habitual development and instinctive
characteristics of the race.  In either case, then, whether
we consider the continued identity of the individual in what we
call his single life, or those features in his offspring which we
refer to heredity, the same explanation of the phenomena is
applicable.  It follows from this as a matter of course,
that the continuation of life or personal identity in the
individual and the race are fundamentally of the same kind, or,
in other words, that there is a veritable prolongation of
identity or oneness of personality between parents and
offspring.  Professor Hering reaches his conclusion by
physical methods, while I reached mine, as I am told, by
metaphysical.  I never yet could understand what
“metaphysics” and “metaphysical” mean;
but I should have said I reached it by the exercise of a little
common sense while regarding certain facts which are open to
every one.  There is, however, so far as I can see, no
difference in the conclusion come to.

The view which connects memory with vibrations may tend to
throw light upon that difficult question, the manner in which
neuter bees acquire structures and instincts, not one of which
was possessed by any of their direct ancestors.  Those who
have read “Life and Habit” may remember, I suggested
that the food prepared in the stomachs of the nurse-bees, with
which the neuter working bees are fed, might thus acquire a
quasi-seminal character, and be made a means of communicating the
instincts and structures in question. [58]  If
assimilation be regarded as the receiving by one substance of the
rhythms or undulations from another, the explanation just
referred to receives an accession of probability.

If it is objected that Professor Hering’s theory as to
continuity of vibrations being the key to memory and heredity
involves the action of more wheels within wheels than our
imagination can come near to comprehending, and also that it
supposes this complexity of action as going on within a compass
which no unaided eye can detect by reason of its littleness, so
that we are carried into a fairy land with which sober people
should have nothing to do, it may be answered that the case of
light affords us an example of our being truly aware of a
multitude of minute actions, the hundred million millionth part
of which we should have declared to be beyond our ken, could we
not incontestably prove that we notice and count them all with a
very sufficient and creditable accuracy.

“Who would not,” [59a] says Sir John
Herschel, “ask for demonstration when told that a
gnat’s wing, in its ordinary flight, beats many hundred
times in a second? or that there exist animated and regularly
organised beings many thousands of whose bodies laid close
together would not extend to an inch?  But what are these to
the astonishing truths which modern optical inquiries have
disclosed, which teach us that every point of a medium through
which a ray of light passes is affected with a succession of
periodical movements, recurring regularly at equal intervals, no
less than five hundred millions of millions of times in a second;
that it is by such movements communicated to the nerves of our
eyes that we see; nay, more, that it is the difference in
the frequency of their recurrence which affects us with the sense
of the diversity of colour; that, for instance, in acquiring the
sensation of redness, our eyes are affected four hundred and
eighty-two millions of millions of times; of yellowness, five
hundred and forty-two millions of millions of times; and of
violet, seven hundred and seven millions of millions of times per
second? [59b]  Do not such things sound more
like the ravings of madmen than the sober conclusions of people
in their waking senses?  They are, nevertheless, conclusions
to which any one may most certainly arrive who will only be at
the pains of examining the chain of reasoning by which they have
been obtained.”

A man counting as hard as he can repeat numbers one after
another, and never counting more than a hundred, so that he shall
have no long words to repeat, may perhaps count ten thousand, or
a hundred a hundred times over, in an hour.  At this rate,
counting night and day, and allowing no time for rest or
refreshment, he would count one million in four days and four
hours, or say four days only.  To count a million a million
times over, he would require four million days, or roughly ten
thousand years; for five hundred millions of millions, he must
have the utterly unrealisable period of five million years. 
Yet he actually goes through this stupendous piece of reckoning
unconsciously hour after hour, day after day, it may be for
eighty years, often in each second of daylight; and how
much more by artificial or subdued light I do not know.  He
knows whether his eye is being struck five hundred millions of
millions of times, or only four hundred and eighty-two millions
of millions of times.  He thus shows that he estimates or
counts each set of vibrations, and registers them according to
his results.  If a man writes upon the back of a British
Museum blotting-pad of the common nonpareil pattern, on
which there are some thousands of small spaces each differing in
colour from that which is immediately next to it, his eye will,
nevertheless, without an effort assign its true colour to each
one of these spaces.  This implies that he is all the time
counting and taking tally of the difference in the numbers of the
vibrations from each one of the small spaces in question. 
Yet the mind that is capable of such stupendous computations as
these so long as it knows nothing about them, makes no little
fuss about the conscious adding together of such almost
inconceivably minute numbers as, we will say, 2730169 and
5790135—or, if these be considered too large, as 27 and
19.  Let the reader remember that he cannot by any effort
bring before his mind the units, not in ones, but in millions
of millions of the processes which his visual organs are
undergoing second after second from dawn till dark, and then let
him demur if he will to the possibility of the existence in a
germ, of currents and undercurrents, and rhythms and counter
rhythms, also by the million of millions—each one of which,
on being overtaken by the rhythm from without that chimes in with
and stimulates it, may be the beginning of that unsettlement of
equilibrium which results in the crash of action, unless it is
timely counteracted.

If another objector maintains that the vibrations within the
germ as above supposed must be continually crossing and
interfering with one another in such a manner as to destroy the
continuity of any one series, it may be replied that the
vibrations of the light proceeding from the objects that surround
us traverse one another by the millions of millions every second
yet in no way interfere with one another.  Nevertheless, it
must be admitted that the difficulties of the theory towards
which I suppose Professor Hering to incline are like those of all
other theories on the same subject—almost inconceivably
great.

In “Life and Habit” I did not touch upon these
vibrations, knowing nothing about them.  Here, then, is one
important point of difference, not between the conclusions
arrived at, but between the aim and scope of the work that
Professor Hering and I severally attempted.  Another
difference consists in the points at which we have left
off.  Professor Hering, having established his main thesis,
is content.  I, on the other hand, went on to maintain that
if vigour was due to memory, want of vigour was due to want of
memory.  Thus I was led to connect memory with the phenomena
of hybridism and of old age; to show that the sterility of
certain animals under domestication is only a phase of, and of a
piece with, the very common sterility of hybrids—phenomena
which at first sight have no connection either with each other or
with memory, but the connection between which will never be lost
sight of by those who have once laid hold of it.  I also
pointed out how exactly the phenomena of development agreed with
those of the abeyance and recurrence of memory, and the rationale
of the fact that puberty in so many animals and plants comes
about the end of development.  The principle underlying
longevity follows as a matter of course.  I have no idea how
far Professor Hering would agree with me in the position I have
taken in respect of these phenomena, but there is nothing in the
above at variance with his lecture.

Another matter on which Professor Hering has not touched is
the bearing of his theory on that view of evolution which is now
commonly accepted.  It is plain he accepts evolution, but it
does not appear that he sees how fatal his theory is to any view
of evolution except a teleological one—the purpose residing
within the animal and not without it.  There is, however,
nothing in his lecture to indicate that he does not see this.

It should be remembered that the question whether memory is
due to the persistence within the body of certain vibrations,
which have been already set up within the bodies of its
ancestors, is true or no, will not affect the position I took up
in “Life and Habit.”  In that book I have
maintained nothing more than that whatever memory is heredity is
also.  I am not committed to the vibration theory of memory,
though inclined to accept it on a primâ facie
view.  All I am committed to is, that if memory is due to
persistence of vibrations, so is heredity; and if memory is not
so due, then no more is heredity.

Finally, I may say that Professor Hering’s lecture, the
passage quoted from Dr. Erasmus Darwin on p. 26 of this volume,
and a few hints in the extracts from Mr. Patrick Mathew which I
have quoted in “Evolution, Old and New,” are all that
I yet know of in other writers as pointing to the conclusion that
the phenomena of heredity are phenomena also of memory.

p.
63Chapter VI

Professor Ewald Hering “On
Memory.”

I will now lay before the reader a
translation of Professor Hering’s own words.  I have
had it carefully revised throughout by a gentleman whose native
language is German, but who has resided in England for many years
past.  The original lecture is entitled “On Memory as
a Universal Function of Organised Matter,” and was
delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Imperial Academy of
Sciences at Vienna, May 30, 1870. [63] It is as
follows:—

“When the student of Nature quits the narrow workshop of
his own particular inquiry, and sets out upon an excursion into
the vast kingdom of philosophical investigation, he does so,
doubtless, in the hope of finding the answer to that great
riddle, to the solution of a small part of which he devotes his
life.  Those, however, whom he leaves behind him still
working at their own special branch of inquiry, regard his
departure with secret misgivings on his behalf, while the born
citizens of the kingdom of speculation among whom he would
naturalise himself, receive him with well-authorised
distrust.  He is likely, therefore, to lose ground with the
first, while not gaining it with the second.

The subject to the consideration of which I would now solicit
your attention does certainly appear likely to lure us on towards
the flattering land of speculation, but bearing in mind what I
have just said, I will beware of quitting the department of
natural science to which I have devoted myself hitherto.  I
shall, however, endeavour to attain its highest point, so as to
take a freer view of the surrounding territory.

It will soon appear that I should fail in this purpose if my
remarks were to confine themselves solely to physiology.  I
hope to show how far psychological investigations also afford not
only permissible, but indispensable, aid to physiological
inquiries.

Consciousness is an accompaniment of that animal and human
organisation and of that material mechanism which it is the
province of physiology to explore; and as long as the atoms of
the brain follow their due course according to certain definite
laws, there arises an inner life which springs from sensation and
idea, from feeling and will.

We feel this in our own cases; it strikes us in our converse
with other people; we can see it plainly in the more highly
organised animals; even the lowest forms of life bear traces of
it; and who can draw a line in the kingdom of organic life, and
say that it is here the soul ceases?

With what eyes, then, is physiology to regard this two-fold
life of the organised world?  Shall she close them entirely
to one whole side of it, that she may fix them more intently on
the other?

So long as the physiologist is content to be a physicist, and
nothing more—using the word “physicist” in its
widest signification—his position in regard to the organic
world is one of extreme but legitimate one-sidedness.  As
the crystal to the mineralogist or the vibrating string to the
acoustician, so from this point of view both man and the lower
animals are to the physiologist neither more nor less than the
matter of which they consist.  That animals feel desire and
repugnance, that the material mechanism of the human frame is in
chose connection with emotions of pleasure or pain, and with the
active idea-life of consciousness—this cannot, in the eyes
of the physicist, make the animal or human body into anything
more than what it actually is.  To him it is a combination
of matter, subjected to the same inflexible laws as stones and
plants—a material combination, the outward and inward
movements of which interact as cause and effect, and are in as
close connection with each other and with their surroundings as
the working of a machine with the revolutions of the wheels that
compose it.

Neither sensation, nor idea, nor yet conscious will, can form
a link in this chain of material occurrences which make up the
physical life of an organism.  If I am asked a question and
reply to it, the material process which the nerve fibre conveys
from the organ of hearing to the brain must travel through my
brain as an actual and material process before it can reach the
nerves which will act upon my organs of speech.  It cannot,
on reaching a given place in the brain, change then and there
into an immaterial something, and turn up again some time
afterwards in another part of the brain as a material
process.  The traveller in the desert might as well hope,
before he again goes forth into the wilderness of reality, to
take rest and refreshment in the oasis with which the Fata
Morgana illudes him; or as well might a prisoner hope to escape
from his prison through a door reflected in a mirror.

So much for the physiologist in his capacity of pure
physicist.  As long as he remains behind the scenes in
painful exploration of the details of the machinery—as long
as he only observes the action of the players from behind the
stage—so long will he miss the spirit of the performance,
which is, nevertheless, caught easily by one who sees it from the
front.  May he not, then, for once in a way, be allowed to
change his standpoint?  True, he came not to see the
representation of an imaginary world; he is in search of the
actual; but surely it must help him to a comprehension of the
dramatic apparatus itself, and of the manner in which it is
worked, if he were to view its action from in front as well as
from behind, or at least allow himself to hear what sober-minded
spectators can tell him upon the subject.

There can be no question as to the answer; and hence it comes
that psychology is such an indispensable help to physiology,
whose fault it only in small part is that she has hitherto made
such little use of this assistance; for psychology has been late
in beginning to till her fertile field with the plough of the
inductive method, and it is only from ground so tilled that
fruits can spring which can be of service to physiology.

If, then, the student of nervous physiology takes his stand
between the physicist and the psychologist, and if the first of
these rightly makes the unbroken causative continuity of all
material processes an axiom of his system of investigation, the
prudent psychologist, on the other hand, will investigate the
laws of conscious life according to the inductive method, and
will hence, as much as the physicist, make the existence of fixed
laws his initial assumption.  If, again, the most
superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his
conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of
his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain
limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one
assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence
between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent
on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science
of matter and the science of consciousness are united into a
single whole.

Thus regarded, the phenomena of consciousness become functions
of the material changes of organised substance, and
inversely—though this is involved in the use of the word
“function”—the material processes of brain
substance become functions of the phenomena of
consciousness.  For when two variables are so dependent upon
one another in the changes they undergo in accordance with fixed
laws that a change in either involves simultaneous and
corresponding change in the other, the one is called a function
of the other.

This, then, by no means implies that the two variables
above-named—matter and consciousness—stand in the
relation of cause and effect, antecedent and consequence, to one
another.  For on this subject we know nothing.

The materialist regards consciousness as a product or result
of matter, while the idealist holds matter to be a result of
consciousness, and a third maintains that matter and spirit are
identical; with all this the physiologist, as such, has nothing
whatever to do; his sole concern is with the fact that matter and
consciousness are functions one of the other.

By the help of this hypothesis of the functional
interdependence of matter and spirit, modern physiology is
enabled to bring the phenomena of consciousness within the domain
of her investigations without leaving the terra firma of
scientific methods.  The physiologist, as physicist, can
follow the ray of light and the wave of sound or heat till they
reach the organ of sense.  He can watch them entering upon
the ends of the nerves, and finding their way to the cells of the
brain by means of the series of undulations or vibrations which
they establish in the nerve filaments.  Here, however, he
loses all trace of them.  On the other hand, still looking
with the eyes of a pure physicist, he sees sound waves of speech
issue from the mouth of a speaker; he observes the motion of his
own limbs, and finds how this is conditional upon muscular
contractions occasioned by the motor nerves, and how these nerves
are in their turn excited by the cells of the central
organ.  But here again his knowledge comes to an end. 
True, he sees indications of the bridge which is to carry him
from excitation of the sensory to that of the motor nerves in the
labyrinth of intricately interwoven nerve cells, but he knows
nothing of the inconceivably complex process which is introduced
at this stage.  Here the physiologist will change his
standpoint; what matter will not reveal to his inquiry, he will
find in the mirror, as it were, of consciousness; by way of a
reflection, indeed, only, but a reflection, nevertheless, which
stands in intimate relation to the object of his inquiry. 
When at this point he observes how one idea gives rise to
another, how closely idea is connected with sensation and
sensation with will, and how thought, again, and feeling are
inseparable from one another, he will be compelled to suppose
corresponding successions of material processes, which generate
and are closely connected with one another, and which attend the
whole machinery of conscious life, according to the law of the
functional interdependence of matter and consciousness.

After this explanation I shall venture to regard under a
single aspect a great series of phenomena which apparently have
nothing to do with one another, and which belong partly to the
conscious and partly to the unconscious life of organised
beings.  I shall regard them as the outcome of one and the
same primary force of organised matter—namely, its memory
or power of reproduction.

The word “memory” is often understood as though it
meant nothing more than our faculty of intentionally reproducing
ideas or series of ideas.  But when the figures and events
of bygone days rise up again unbidden in our minds, is not this
also an act of recollection or memory?  We have a perfect
right to extend our conception of memory so as to make it embrace
involuntary reproductions, of sensations, ideas, perceptions, and
efforts; but we find, on having done so, that we have so far
enlarged her boundaries that she proves to be an ultimate and
original power, the source, and at the same time the unifying
bond, of our whole conscious life.

We know that when an impression, or a series of impressions,
has been made upon our senses for a long time, and always in the
same way, it may come to impress itself in such a manner upon the
so-called sense-memory that hours afterwards, and though a
hundred other things have occupied our attention meanwhile, it
will yet return suddenly to our consciousness with all the force
and freshness of the original sensation.  A whole group of
sensations is sometimes reproduced in its due sequence as regards
time and space, with so much reality that it illudes us, as
though things were actually present which have long ceased to be
so.  We have here a striking proof of the fact that after
both conscious sensation and perception have been extinguished,
their material vestiges yet remain in our nervous system by way
of a change in its molecular or atomic disposition, [69] that enables the nerve substance to
reproduce all the physical processes of the original sensation,
and with these the corresponding psychical processes of sensation
and perception.

Every hour the phenomena of sense-memory are present with each
one of us, but in a less degree than this.  We are all at
times aware of a host of more or less faded recollections of
earlier impressions, which we either summon intentionally or
which come upon us involuntarily.  Visions of absent people
come and go before us as faint and fleeting shadows, and the
notes of long-forgotten melodies float around us, not actually
heard, but yet perceptible.

Some things and occurrences, especially if they have happened
to us only once and hurriedly, will be reproducible by the memory
in respect only of a few conspicuous qualities; in other cases
those details alone will recur to us which we have met with
elsewhere, and for the reception of which the brain is, so to
speak, attuned.  These last recollections find themselves in
fuller accord with our consciousness, and enter upon it more
easily and energetically; hence also their aptitude for
reproduction is enhanced; so that what is common to many things,
and is therefore felt and perceived with exceptional frequency,
becomes reproduced so easily that eventually the actual presence
of the corresponding external stimuli is no longer
necessary, and it will recur on the vibrations set up by faint
stimuli from within. [70]  Sensations
arising in this way from within, as, for example, an idea of
whiteness, are not, indeed, perceived with the full freshness of
those raised by the actual presence of white light without us,
but they are of the same kind; they are feeble repetitions of one
and the same material brain process—of one and the same
conscious sensation.  Thus the idea of whiteness arises in
our mind as a faint, almost extinct, sensation.

In this way those qualities which are common to many things
become separated, as it were, in our memory from the objects with
which they were originally associated, and attain an independent
existence in our consciousness as ideas and
conceptions, and thus the whole rich superstructure of our
ideas and conceptions is built up from materials supplied by
memory.

On examining more closely, we see plainly that memory is a
faculty not only of our conscious states, but also, and much more
so, of our unconscious ones.  I was conscious of this or
that yesterday, and am again conscious of it to-day.  Where
has it been meanwhile?  It does not remain continuously
within my consciousness, nevertheless it returns after having
quitted it.  Our ideas tread but for a moment upon the stage
of consciousness, and then go back again behind the scenes, to
make way for others in their place.  As the player is only a
king when he is on the stage, so they too exist as ideas so long
only as they are recognised.  How do they live when they are
off the stage?  For we know that they are living somewhere;
give them their cue and they reappear immediately.  They do
not exist continuously as ideas; what is continuous is the
special disposition of nerve substance in virtue of which this
substance gives out to-day the same sound which it gave yesterday
if it is rightly struck. [71]  Countless
reproductions of organic processes of our brain connect
themselves orderly together, so that one acts as a stimulus to
the next, but a phenomenon of consciousness is not necessarily
attached to every link in the chain.  From this it arises
that a series of ideas may appear to disregard the order that
would be observed in purely material processes of brain substance
unaccompanied by consciousness; but on the other hand it becomes
possible for a long chain of recollections to have its due
development without each link in the chain being necessarily
perceived by ourselves.  One may emerge from the bosom of
our unconscious thoughts without fully entering upon the stage of
conscious perception; another dies away in unconsciousness,
leaving no successor to take its place.  Between the
“me” of to-day and the “me” of yesterday
lie night and sleep, abysses of unconsciousness; nor is there any
bridge but memory with which to span them.  Who can hope
after this to disentangle the infinite intricacy of our inner
life?  For we can only follow its threads so far as they
have strayed over within the bounds of consciousness.  We
might as well hope to familiarise ourselves with the world of
forms that teem within the bosom of the sea by observing the few
that now and again come to the surface and soon return into the
deep.

The bond of union, therefore, which connects the individual
phenomena of our consciousness lies in our unconscious world; and
as we know nothing of this but what investigation into the laws
of matter teach us—as, in fact, for purely experimental
purposes, “matter” and the “unconscious”
must be one and the same thing—so the physiologist has a
full right to denote memory as, in the wider sense of the word, a
function of brain substance, whose results, it is true, fall, as
regards one part of them, into the domain of consciousness, while
another and not less essential part escapes unperceived as purely
material processes.

The perception of a body in space is a very complicated
process.  I see suddenly before me, for example, a white
ball.  This has the effect of conveying to me more than a
mere sensation of whiteness.  I deduce the spherical
character of the ball from the gradations of light and shade upon
its surface.  I form a correct appreciation of its distance
from my eye, and hence again I deduce an inference as to the size
of the ball.  What an expenditure of sensations, ideas, and
inferences is found to be necessary before all this can be
brought about; yet the production of a correct perception of the
ball was the work only of a few seconds, and I was unconscious of
the individual processes by means of which it was effected, the
result as a whole being alone present in my consciousness.

The nerve substance preserves faithfully the memory of
habitual actions. [72]  Perceptions which were once long
and difficult, requiring constant and conscious attention, come
to reproduce themselves in transient and abridged guise, without
such duration and intensity that each link has to pass over the
threshold of our consciousness.

We have chains of material nerve processes to which eventually
a link becomes attached that is attended with conscious
perception.  This is sufficiently established from the
standpoint of the physiologist, and is also proved by our
unconsciousness of many whole series of ideas and of the
inferences we draw from them.  If the soul is not to ship
through the fingers of physiology, she must hold fast to the
considerations suggested by our unconscious states.  As far,
however, as the investigations of the pure physicist are
concerned, the unconscious and matter are one and the same thing,
and the physiology of the unconscious is no “philosophy of
the unconscious.”

By far the greater number of our movements are the result of
long and arduous practice.  The harmonious cooperation of
the separate muscles, the finely adjusted measure of
participation which each contributes to the working of the whole,
must, as a rule, have been laboriously acquired, in respect of
most of the movements that are necessary in order to effect
it.  How long does it not take each note to find its way
from the eyes to the fingers of one who is beginning to learn the
pianoforte; and, on the other hand, what an astonishing
performance is the playing of the professional pianist.  The
sight of each note occasions the corresponding movement of the
fingers with the speed of thought—a hurried glance at the
page of music before him suffices to give rise to a whole series
of harmonies; nay, when a melody has been long practised, it can
be played even while the player’s attention is being given
to something of a perfectly different character over and above
his music.

The will need now no longer wend its way to each individual
finger before the desired movements can be extorted from it; no
longer now does a sustained attention keep watch over the
movements of each limb; the will need exercise a supervising
control only.  At the word of command the muscles become
active, with a due regard to time and proportion, and go on
working, so long as they are bidden to keep in their accustomed
groove, while a slight hint on the part of the will, will
indicate to them their further journey.  How could all this
be if every part of the central nerve system, by means of which
movement is effected, were not able [74a] to reproduce whole
series of vibrations, which at an earlier date required the
constant and continuous participation of consciousness, but which
are now set in motion automatically on a mere touch, as it were,
from consciousness—if it were not able to reproduce them
the more quickly and easily in proportion to the frequency of the
repetitions—if, in fact, there was no power of recollecting
earlier performances?  Our perceptive faculties must have
remained always at their lowest stage if we had been compelled to
build up consciously every process from the details of the
sensation-causing materials tendered to us by our senses; nor
could our voluntary movements have got beyond the helplessness of
the child, if the necessary impulses could only be imparted to
every movement through effort of the will and conscious
reproduction of all the corresponding ideas—if, in a word,
the motor nerve system had not also its memory, [74b] though that memory is unperceived by
ourselves.  The power of this memory is what is called
“the force of habit.”

It seems, then, that we owe to memory almost all that we
either have or are; that our ideas and conceptions are its work,
and that our every perception, thought, and movement is derived
from this source.  Memory collects the countless phenomena
of our existence into a single whole; and as our bodies would be
scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not
held together by the attraction of matter, so our consciousness
would be broken up into as many fragments as we had lived seconds
but for the binding and unifying force of memory.

We have already repeatedly seen that the reproductions of
organic processes, brought about by means of the memory of the
nervous system, enter but partly within the domain of
consciousness, remaining unperceived in other and not less
important respects.  This is also confirmed by numerous
facts in the life of that part of the nervous system which
ministers almost exclusively to our unconscious life
processes.  For the memory of the so-called sympathetic
ganglionic system is no less rich than that of the brain and
spinal marrow, and a great part of the medical art consists in
making wise use of the assistance thus afforded us.

To bring, however, this part of my observations to a close, I
will take leave of the nervous system, and glance hurriedly at
other phases of organised matter, where we meet with the same
powers of reproduction, but in simpler guise.

Daily experience teaches us that a muscle becomes the stronger
the more we use it.  The muscular fibre, which in the first
instance may have answered but feebly to the stimulus conducted
to it by the motor nerve, does so with the greater energy the
more often it is stimulated, provided, of course, that reasonable
times are allowed for repose.  After each individual action
it becomes more capable, more disposed towards the same kind of
work, and has a greater aptitude for repetition of the same
organic processes.  It gains also in weight, for it
assimilates more matter than when constantly at rest.  We
have here, in its simplest form, and in a phase which comes home
most closely to the comprehension of the physicist, the same
power of reproduction which we encountered when we were dealing
with nerve substance, but under such far more complicated
conditions.  And what is known thus certainly from muscle
substance holds good with greater or less plainness for all our
organs.  More especially may we note the fact, that after
increased use, alternated with times of repose, there accrues to
the organ in all animal economy an increased power of execution
with an increased power of assimilation and a gain in size.

This gain in size consists not only in the enlargement of the
individual cells or fibres of which the organ is composed, but in
the multiplication of their number; for when cells have grown to
a certain size they give rise to others, which inherit more or
less completely the qualities of those from which they came, and
therefore appear to be repetitions of the same cell.  This
growth, and multiplication of cells is only a special phase of
those manifold functions which characterise organised matter, and
which consist not only in what goes on within the cell substance
as alterations or undulatory movement of the molecular
disposition, but also in that which becomes visible outside the
cells as change of shape, enlargement, or subdivision. 
Reproduction of performance, therefore, manifests itself to us as
reproduction of the cells themselves, as may be seen most plainly
in the case of plants, whose chief work consists in growth,
whereas with animal organism other faculties greatly
preponderate.

Let us now take a brief survey of a class of facts in the case
of which we may most abundantly observe the power of memory in
organised matter.  We have ample evidence of the fact that
characteristics of an organism may descend to offspring which the
organism did not inherit, but which it acquired owing to the
special circumstances under which it lived; and that, in
consequence, every organism imparts to the germ that issues from
it a small heritage of acquisitions which it has added during its
own lifetime to the gross inheritance of its race.

When we reflect that we are dealing with the heredity of
acquired qualities which came to development in the most diverse
parts of the parent organism, it must seem in a high degree
mysterious how those parts can have any kind of influence upon a
germ which develops itself in an entirely different place. 
Many mystical theories have been propounded for the elucidation
of this question, but the following reflections may serve to
bring the cause nearer to the comprehension of the
physiologist.

The nerve substance, in spite of its thousandfold subdivision
as cells and fibres, forms, nevertheless, a united whole, which
is present directly in all organs—nay, as more recent
histology conjectures, in each cell of the more important
organs—or is at least in ready communication with them by
means of the living, irritable, and therefore highly conductive
substance of other cells.  Through the connection thus
established all organs find themselves in such a condition of
more or less mutual interdependence upon one another, that events
which happen to one are repeated in others, and a notification,
however slight, of a vibration set up [77] in one quarter is at
once conveyed even to the farthest parts of the body.  With
this easy and rapid intercourse between all parts is associated
the more difficult communication that goes on by way of the
circulation of sap or blood.

We see, further, that the process of the development of all
germs that are marked out for independent existence causes a
powerful reaction, even from the very beginning of that
existence, on both the conscious and unconscious life of the
whole organism.  We may see this from the fact that the
organ of reproduction stands in closer and more important
relation to the remaining parts, and especially to the nervous
system, than do the other organs; and, inversely, that both the
perceived and unperceived events affecting the whole organism
find a more marked response in the reproductive system than
elsewhere.

We can now see with sufficient plainness in what the material
connection is established between the acquired peculiarities of
an organism, and the proclivity on the part of the germ in virtue
of which it develops the special characteristics of its
parent.

The microscope teaches us that no difference can be perceived
between one germ and another; it cannot, however, be objected on
this account that the determining cause of its ulterior
development must be something immaterial, rather than the
specific kind of its material constitution.

The curves and surfaces which the mathematician conceives, or
finds conceivable, are more varied and infinite than the forms of
animal life.  Let us suppose an infinitely small segment to
be taken from every possible curve; each one of these will appear
as like every other as one germ is to another, yet the whole of
every curve lies dormant, as it were, in each of them, and if the
mathematician chooses to develop it, it will take the path
indicated by the elements of each segment.

It is an error, therefore, to suppose that such fine
distinctions as physiology must assume lie beyond the limits of
what is conceivable by the human mind.  An infinitely small
change of position on the part of a point, or in the relations of
the parts of a segment of a curve to one another, suffices to
alter the law of its whole path, and so in like manner an
infinitely small influence exercised by the parent organism on
the molecular disposition of the germ [78] may suffice to
produce a determining effect upon its whole farther
development.

What is the descent of special peculiarities but a
reproduction on the part of organised matter of processes in
which it once took part as a germ in the germ-containing organs
of its parent, and of which it seems still to retain a
recollection that reappears when time and the occasion serve,
inasmuch as it responds to the same or like stimuli in a like way
to that in which the parent organism responded, of which it was
once part, and in the events of whose history it was itself also
an accomplice? [79]  When an action through long habit
or continual practice has become so much a second nature to any
organisation that its effects will penetrate, though ever so
faintly, into the germ that lies within it, and when this last
comes to find itself in a new sphere, to extend itself, and
develop into a new creature—(the individual parts of which
are still always the creature itself and flesh of its flesh, so
that what is reproduced is the same being as that in company with
which the germ once lived, and of which it was once actually a
part)—all this is as wonderful as when a grey-haired man
remembers the events of his own childhood; but it is not more
so.  Whether we say that the same organised substance is
again reproducing its past experience, or whether we prefer to
hold that an offshoot or part of the original substance has waxed
and developed itself since separation from the parent stock, it
is plain that this will constitute a difference of degree, not
kind.

When we reflect upon the fact that unimportant acquired
characteristics can be reproduced in offspring, we are apt to
forget that offspring is only a full-sized reproduction of the
parent—a reproduction, moreover, that goes as far as
possible into detail.  We are so accustomed to consider
family resemblance a matter of course, that we are sometimes
surprised when a child is in some respect unlike its parent;
surely, however, the infinite number of points in respect of
which parents and children resemble one another is a more
reasonable ground for our surprise.

But if the substance of the germ can reproduce characteristics
acquired by the parent during its single life, how much more will
it not be able to reproduce those that were congenital to the
parent, and which have happened through countless generations to
the organised matter of which the germ of to-day is a
fragment?  We cannot wonder that action already taken on
innumerable past occasions by organised matter is more deeply
impressed upon the recollection of the germ to which it gives
rise than action taken once only during a single lifetime. [80a]

We must bear in mind that every organised being now in
existence represents the last link of an inconceivably long
series of organisms, which come down in a direct line of descent,
and of which each has inherited a part of the acquired
characteristics of its predecessor.  Everything,
furthermore, points in the direction of our believing that at the
beginning of this chain there existed an organism of the very
simplest kind, something, in fact, like those which we call
organised germs.  The chain of living beings thus appears to
be the magnificent achievement of the reproductive power of the
original organic structure from which they have all
descended.  As this subdivided itself and transmitted its
characteristics [80b] to its descendants, these acquired new
ones, and in their turn transmitted them—all new germs
transmitting the chief part of what had happened to their
predecessors, while the remaining part lapsed out of their
memory, circumstances not stimulating it to reproduce itself.

An organised being, therefore, stands before us a product of
the unconscious memory of organised matter, which, ever
increasing and ever dividing itself, ever assimilating new matter
and returning it in changed shape to the inorganic world, ever
receiving some new thing into its memory, and transmitting its
acquisitions by the way of reproduction, grows continually richer
and richer the longer it lives.

Thus regarded, the development of one of the more highly
organised animals represents a continuous series of organised
recollections concerning the past development of the great chain
of living forms, the last link of which stands before us in the
particular animal we may be considering.  As a complicated
perception may arise by means of a rapid and superficial
reproduction of long and laboriously practised brain processes,
so a germ in the course of its development hurries through a
series of phases, hinting at them only.  Often and long
foreshadowed in theories of varied characters, this conception
has only now found correct exposition from a naturalist of our
own time. [81]  For Truth hides herself under
many disguises from those who seek her, but in the end stands
unveiled before the eyes of him whom she has chosen.

Not only is there a reproduction of form, outward and inner
conformation of body, organs, and cells, but the habitual actions
of the parent are also reproduced.  The chicken on emerging
from the eggshell runs off as its mother ran off before it; yet
what an extraordinary complication of emotions and sensations is
necessary in order to preserve equilibrium in running. 
Surely the supposition of an inborn capacity for the reproduction
of these intricate actions can alone explain the facts.  As
habitual practice becomes a second nature to the individual
during his single lifetime, so the often-repeated action of each
generation becomes a second nature to the race.

The chicken not only displays great dexterity in the
performance of movements for the effecting of which it has an
innate capacity, but it exhibits also a tolerably high perceptive
power.  It immediately picks up any grain that may be thrown
to it.  Yet, in order to do this, more is wanted than a mere
visual perception of the grains; there must be an accurate
apprehension of the direction and distance of the precise spot in
which each grain is lying, and there must be no less accuracy in
the adjustment of the movements of the head and of the whole
body.  The chicken cannot have gained experience in these
respects while it was still in the egg.  It gained it rather
from the thousands of thousands of beings that have lived before
it, and from which it is directly descended.

The memory of organised substance displays itself here in the
most surprising fashion.  The gentle stimulus of the light
proceeding from the grain that affects the retina of the chicken,
[82] gives occasion for the reproduction of
a many-linked chain of sensations, perceptions, and emotions,
which were never yet brought together in the case of the
individual before us.  We are accustomed to regard these
surprising performances of animals as manifestations of what we
call instinct, and the mysticism of natural philosophy has ever
shown a predilection for this theme; but if we regard instinct as
the outcome of the memory or reproductive power of organised
substance, and if we ascribe a memory to the race as we already
ascribe it to the individual, then instinct becomes at once
intelligible, and the physiologist at the same time finds a point
of contact which will bring it into connection with the great
series of facts indicated above as phenomena of the reproductive
faculty.  Here, then, we have a physical explanation which
has not, indeed, been given yet, but the time for which appears
to be rapidly approaching.

When, in accordance with its instinct, the caterpillar becomes
a chrysalis, or the bird builds its nest, or the bee its cell,
these creatures act consciously and not as blind machines. 
They know how to vary their proceedings within certain limits in
conformity with altered circumstances, and they are thus liable
to make mistakes.  They feel pleasure when their work
advances and pain if it is hindered; they learn by the experience
thus acquired, and build on a second occasion better than on the
first; but that even in the outset they hit so readily upon the
most judicious way of achieving their purpose, and that their
movements adapt themselves so admirably and automatically to the
end they have in view—surely this is owing to the inherited
acquisitions of the memory of their nerve substance, which
requires but a touch and it will fall at once to the most
appropriate kind of activity, thinking always, and directly, of
whatever it is that may be wanted.

Man can readily acquire surprising kinds of dexterity if he
confines his attention to their acquisition.  Specialisation
is the mother of proficiency.  He who marvels at the skill
with which the spider weaves her web should bear in mind that she
did not learn her art all on a sudden, but that innumerable
generations of spiders acquired it toilsomely and step by
step—this being about all that, as a general rule, they did
acquire.  Man took to bows and arrows if his nets failed
him—the spider starved.  Thus we see the body
and—what most concerns us—the whole nervous system of
the new-born animal constructed beforehand, and, as it were,
ready attuned for intercourse with the outside world in which it
is about to play its part, by means of its tendency to respond to
external stimuli in the same manner as it has often heretofore
responded in the persons of its ancestors.

We naturally ask whether the brain and nervous system of the
human infant are subjected to the principles we have laid down
above?  Man certainly finds it difficult to acquire arts of
which the lower animals are born masters; but the brain of man at
birth is much farther from its highest development than is the
brain of an animal.  It not only grows for a longer time,
but it becomes stronger than that of other living beings. 
The brain of man may be said to be exceptionally young at
birth.  The lower animal is born precocious, and acts
precociously; it resembles those infant prodigies whose brain, as
it were, is born old into the world, but who, in spite of, or
rather in addition to, their rich endowment at birth, in after
life develop as much mental power as others who were less
splendidly furnished to start with, but born with greater
freshness of youth.  Man’s brain, and indeed his whole
body, affords greater scope for individuality, inasmuch as a
relatively greater part of it is of post-natal growth.  It
develops under the influence of impressions made by the
environment upon its senses, and thus makes its acquisitions in a
more special and individual manner, whereas the animal receives
them ready made, and of a more final, stereotyped character.

Nevertheless, it is plain we must ascribe both to the brain
and body of the new-born infant a far-reaching power of
remembering or reproducing things which have already come to
their development thousands of times over in the persons of its
ancestors.  It is in virtue of this that it acquires
proficiency in the actions necessary for its existence—so
far as it was not already at birth proficient in them—much
more quickly and easily than would be otherwise possible; but
what we call instinct in the case of animals takes in man the
looser form of aptitude, talent, and genius. [84]  Granted that certain ideas are
not innate, yet the fact of their taking form so easily and
certainly from out of the chaos of his sensations, is due not to
his own labour, but to that of the brain substance of the
thousands of thousands of generations from whom he is
descended.  Theories concerning the development of
individual consciousness which deny heredity or the power of
transmission, and insist upon an entirely fresh start for every
human soul, as though the infinite number of generations that
have gone before us might as well have never lived for all the
effect they have had upon ourselves,—such theories will
contradict the facts of our daily experience at every touch and
turn.

The brain processes and phenomena of consciousness which
ennoble man in the eyes of his fellows have had a less ancient
history than those connected with his physical needs. 
Hunger and the reproductive instinct affected the oldest and
simplest forms of the organic world.  It is in respect of
these instincts, therefore, and of the means to gratify them,
that the memory of organised substance is strongest—the
impulses and instincts that arise hence having still paramount
power over the minds of men.  The spiritual life has been
superadded slowly; its most splendid outcome belongs to the
latest epoch in the history of organised matter, nor has any very
great length of time elapsed since the nervous system was first
crowned with the glory of a large and well-developed brain.

Oral tradition and written history have been called the memory
of man, and this is not without its truth.  But there is
another and a living memory in the innate reproductive power of
brain substance, and without this both writings and oral
tradition would be without significance to posterity.  The
most sublime ideas, though never so immortalised in speech or
letters, are yet nothing for heads that are out of harmony with
them; they must be not only heard, but reproduced; and both
speech and writing would be in vain were there not an inheritance
of inward and outward brain development, growing in
correspondence with the inheritance of ideas that are handed down
from age to age, and did not an enhanced capacity for their
reproduction on the part of each succeeding generation accompany
the thoughts that have been preserved in writing. 
Man’s conscious memory comes to an end at death, but the
unconscious memory of Nature is true and ineradicable: whoever
succeeds in stamping upon her the impress of his work, she will
remember him to the end of time.

p.
87Chapter VII

Introduction to a translation of the chapter
upon instinct in Von Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the
Unconscious.”

I am afraid my readers will find
the chapter on instinct from Von Hartmann’s
“Philosophy of the Unconscious,” which will now
follow, as distasteful to read as I did to translate, and would
gladly have spared it them if I could.  At present, the
works of Mr. Sully, who has treated of the “Philosophy of
the Unconscious” both in the Westminster Review
(vol. xlix. N.S.) and in his work
“Pessimism,” are the best source to which English
readers can have recourse for information concerning Von
Hartmann.  Giving him all credit for the pains he has taken
with an ungrateful, if not impossible subject, I think that a
sufficient sample of Von Hartmann’s own words will be a
useful adjunct to Mr. Sully’s work, and may perhaps save
some readers trouble by resolving them to look no farther into
the “Philosophy of the Unconscious.”  Over and
above this, I have been so often told that the views concerning
unconscious action contained in the foregoing lecture and in
“Life and Habit” are only the very fallacy of Von
Hartmann over again, that I should like to give the public an
opportunity of seeing whether this is so or no, by placing the
two contending theories of unconscious action side by side. 
I hope that it will thus be seen that neither Professor Hering
nor I have fallen into the fallacy of Von Hartmann, but that
rather Von Hartmann has fallen into his fallacy through failure
to grasp the principle which Professor Hering has insisted upon,
and to connect heredity with memory.

Professor Hering’s philosophy of the unconscious is of
extreme simplicity.  He rests upon a fact of daily and
hourly experience, namely, that practice makes things easy that
were once difficult, and often results in their being done
without any consciousness of effort.  But if the repetition
of an act tends ultimately, under certain circumstances, to its
being done unconsciously, so also is the fact of an intricate and
difficult action being done unconsciously an argument that it
must have been done repeatedly already.  As I said in
“Life and Habit,” it is more easy to suppose that
occasions on which such an action has been performed have not
been wanting, even though we do not see when and where they were,
than that the facility which we observe should have been attained
without practice and memory (p. 56).

There can be nothing better established or more easy, whether
to understand or verify, than the unconsciousness with which
habitual actions come to be performed.  If, however, it is
once conceded that it is the manner of habitual action generally,
then all à priori objection to Professor
Hering’s philosophy of the unconscious is at an end. 
The question becomes one of fact in individual cases, and of
degree.

How far, then, does the principle of the convertibility, as it
were, of practice and unconsciousness extend?  Can any line
be drawn beyond which it shall cease to operate?  If not,
may it not have operated and be operating to a vast and hitherto
unsuspected extent?  This is all, and certainly it is
sufficiently simple.  I sometimes think it has found its
greatest stumbling-block in its total want of mystery, as though
we must be like those conjurers whose stock in trade is a small
deal table and a kitchen-chair with bare legs, and who, with
their parade of “no deception” and “examine
everything for yourselves,” deceive worse than others who
make use of all manner of elaborate paraphernalia.  It is
true we require no paraphernalia, and we produce unexpected
results, but we are not conjuring.

To turn now to Von Hartmann.  When I read Mr.
Sully’s article in the Westminster Review, I did not
know whether the sense of mystification which it produced in me
was wholly due to Von Hartmann or no; but on making acquaintance
with Von Hartmann himself, I found that Mr. Sully has erred, if
at all, in making him more intelligible than he actually
is.  Von Hartmann has not got a meaning.  Give him
Professor Hering’s key and he might get one, but it would
be at the expense of seeing what approach he had made to a system
fallen to pieces.  Granted that in his details and
subordinate passages he often both has and conveys a meaning,
there is, nevertheless, no coherence between these details, and
the nearest approach to a broad conception covering the work
which the reader can carry away with him is at once so
incomprehensible and repulsive, that it is difficult to write
about it without saying more perhaps than those who have not seen
the original will accept as likely to be true.  The idea to
which I refer is that of an unconscious clairvoyance, which, from
the language continually used concerning it, must be of the
nature of a person, and which is supposed to take possession of
living beings so fully as to be the very essence of their nature,
the promoter of their embryonic development, and the instigator
of their instinctive actions.  This approaches closely to
the personal God of Mosaic and Christian theology, with the
exception that the word “clairvoyance” [89] is substituted for God, and that the
God is supposed to be unconscious.

Mr. Sully says:—

“When we grasp it [the philosophy of Von
Hartmann] as a whole, it amounts to nothing more than this, that
all or nearly all the phenomena of the material and spiritual
world rest upon and result from a mysterious, unconscious being,
though to call it being is really to add on an idea not
immediately contained within the all-sufficient principle. 
But what difference is there between this and saying that the
phenomena of the world at large come we know not whence? . . .
The unconscious, therefore, tends to be simple phrase and nothing
more . . . No doubt there are a number of mental processes . . .
of which we are unconscious . . . but to infer from this that
they are due to an unconscious power, and to proceed to
demonstrate them in the presence of the unconscious through all
nature, is to make an unwarrantable saltus in
reasoning.  What, in fact, is this ‘unconscious’
but a high-sounding name to veil our ignorance?  Is the
unconscious any better explanation of phenomena we do not
understand than the ‘devil-devil’ by which Australian
tribes explain the Leyden jar and its phenomena?  Does it
increase our knowledge to know that we do not know the origin of
language or the cause of instinct? . . . Alike in organic
creation and the evolution of history ‘performances and
actions’—the words are those of Strauss—are
ascribed to an unconscious, which can only belong to a conscious
being. [90a]

. . . . .

“The difficulties of the system advance as we proceed.
[90b]  Subtract this questionable
factor—the unconscious from Hartmann’s ‘Biology
and Psychology,’ and the chapters remain pleasant and
instructive reading.  But with the third part of his
work—the Metaphysic of the Unconscious—our feet are
clogged at every step.  We are encircled by the merest play
of words, the most unsatisfactory demonstrations, and most
inconsistent inferences.  The theory of final causes has
been hitherto employed to show the wisdom of the world; with our
Pessimist philosopher it shows nothing but its irrationality and
misery.  Consciousness has been generally supposed to be the
condition of all happiness and interest in life; here it simply
awakens us to misery, and the lower an animal lies in the scale
of conscious life, the better and the pleasanter its lot.

. . . . .

“Thus, then, the universe, as an emanation of the
unconscious, has been constructed. [90c]  Throughout
it has been marked by design, by purpose, by finality; throughout
a wonderful adaptation of means to ends, a wonderful adjustment
and relativity in different portions has been noticed—and
all this for what conclusion?  Not, as in the hands of the
natural theologians of the eighteenth century, to show that the
world is the result of design, of an intelligent, beneficent
Creator, but the manifestation of a Being whose only predicates
are negatives, whose very essence is to be unconscious.  It
is not only like ancient Athens, to an unknown, but to an
unknowing God, that modern Pessimism rears its altar.  Yet
surely the fact that the motive principle of existence moves in a
mysterious way outside our consciousness no way requires that the
All-one Being should be himself unconscious.”

I believe the foregoing to convey as correct an idea of Von
Hartmann’s system as it is possible to convey, and will
leave it to the reader to say how much in common there is between
this and the lecture given in the preceding chapter, beyond the
fact that both touch upon unconscious actions.  The extract
which will form my next chapter is only about a thirtieth part of
the entire “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” but it
will, I believe, suffice to substantiate the justice of what Mr.
Sully has said in the passages above quoted.

As regards the accuracy of the translation, I have submitted
all passages about which I was in the least doubtful to the same
gentleman who revised my translation of Professor Hering’s
lecture; I have also given the German wherever I thought the
reader might be glad to see it.

p.
92Chapter VIII

Translation of the chapter on “The
Unconscious in Instinct,” from Von Hartmann’s
“Philosophy of the Unconscious.”

Von Hartmann’s chapter on
instinct is as follows:—

Instinct is action taken in pursuance of a purpose but without
conscious perception of what the purpose is. [92a]

A purposive action, with consciousness of the purpose and
where the course taken is the result of deliberation is not said
to be instinctive; nor yet, again, is blind aimless action, such
as outbreaks of fury on the part of offended or otherwise enraged
animals.  I see no occasion for disturbing the commonly
received definition of instinct as given above; for those who
think they can refer all the so-called ordinary instincts of
animals to conscious deliberation ipso facto deny that
there is such a thing as instinct at all, and should strike the
word out of their vocabulary.  But of this more
hereafter.

Assuming, then, the existence of instinctive action as above
defined, it can be explained as—

I.  A mere necessary consequence of bodily organisation.
[92b]

II.  A mechanism of brain or mind contrived by
nature.

III.  The outcome of an unconscious activity of mind.

In neither of the two first cases is there any scope for the
idea of purpose; in the third, purpose must be present
immediately before the action.  In the two first cases,
action is supposed to be brought about by means of an initial
arrangement, either of bodily or mental mechanism, purpose being
conceived of as existing on a single occasion only—that is
to say, in the determination of the initial arrangement.  In
the third, purpose is conceived as present in every individual
instance.  Let us proceed to the consideration of these
three cases.

Instinct is not a mere consequence of bodily organisation;
for—

(a.)  Bodies may be alike, yet they may be endowed
with different instincts.

All spiders have the same spinning apparatus, but one kind
weaves radiating webs, another irregular ones, while a third
makes none at all, but lives in holes, whose walls it overspins,
and whose entrance it closes with a door.  Almost all birds
have a like organisation for the construction of their nests (a
beak and feet), but how infinitely do their nests vary in
appearance, mode of construction, attachment to surrounding
objects (they stand, are glued on, hang, &c.), selection of
site (caves, holes, corners, forks of trees, shrubs, the ground),
and excellence of workmanship; how often, too, are they not
varied in the species of a single genus, as of
parus.  Many birds, moreover, build no nest at
all.  The difference in the songs of birds are in like
manner independent of the special construction of their voice
apparatus, nor do the modes of nest construction that obtain
among ants and bees depend upon their bodily organisation. 
Organisation, as a general rule, only renders the bird capable of
singing, as giving it an apparatus with which to sing at all, but
it has nothing to do with the specific character of the execution
. . . The nursing, defence, and education of offspring cannot be
considered as in any way more dependent upon bodily organisation;
nor yet the sites which insects choose for the laying of their
eggs; nor, again, the selection of deposits of spawn, of their
own species, by male fish for impregnation.  The rabbit
burrows, the hare does not, though both have the same burrowing
apparatus.  The hare, however, has less need of a
subterranean place of refuge by reason of its greater
swiftness.  Some birds, with excellent powers of flight, are
nevertheless stationary in their habits, as the secretary falcon
and certain other birds of prey; while even such moderate fliers
as quails are sometimes known to make very distant
migrations.

(b.)  Like instincts may be found associated with
unlike organs.

Birds with and without feet adapted for climbing live in
trees; so also do monkeys with and without flexible tails,
squirrels, sloths, pumas, &c.  Mole-crickets dig with a
well-pronounced spade upon their fore-feet, while the
burying-beetle does the same thing though it has no special
apparatus whatever.  The mole conveys its winter provender
in pockets, an inch wide, long and half an inch wide within its
cheeks; the field-mouse does so without the help of any such
contrivance.  The migratory instinct displays itself with
equal strength in animals of widely different form, by whatever
means they may pursue their journey, whether by water, land, or
air.

It is clear, therefore, that instinct is in great measure
independent of bodily organisation.  Granted, indeed, that a
certain amount of bodily apparatus is a sine quâ non
for any power of execution at all—as, for example, that
there would be no ingenious nest without organs more or less
adapted for its construction, no spinning of a web without
spinning glands—nevertheless, it is impossible to maintain
that instinct is a consequence of organisation.  The mere
existence of the organ does not constitute even the smallest
incentive to any corresponding habitual activity.  A
sensation of pleasure must at least accompany the use of the
organ before its existence can incite to its employment. 
And even so when a sensation of pleasure has given the impulse
which is to render it active, it is only the fact of there being
activity at all, and not the special characteristics of the
activity, that can be due to organisation.  The reason for
the special mode of the activity is the very problem that we have
to solve.  No one will call the action of the spider
instinctive in voiding the fluid from her spinning gland when it
is too full, and therefore painful to her; nor that of the male
fish when it does what amounts to much the same thing as
this.  The instinct and the marvel lie in the fact that the
spider spins threads, and proceeds to weave her web with them,
and that the male fish will only impregnate ova of his own
species.

Another proof that the pleasure felt in the employment of an
organ is wholly inadequate to account for this employment is to
be found in the fact that the moral greatness of instinct, the
point in respect of which it most commands our admiration,
consists in the obedience paid to its behests, to the
postponement of all personal well-being, and at the cost, it may
be, of life itself.  If the mere pleasure of relieving
certain glands from overfulness were the reason why caterpillars
generally spin webs, they would go on spinning until they had
relieved these glands, but they would not repair their work as
often as any one destroyed it, and do this again and again until
they die of exhaustion.  The same holds good with the other
instincts that at first sight appear to be inspired only by a
sensation of pleasure; for if we change the circumstances, so as
to put self-sacrifice in the place of self-interest, it becomes
at once apparent that they have a higher source than this. 
We think, for example, that birds pair for the sake of mere
sexual gratification; why, then, do they leave off pairing as
soon as they have laid the requisite number of eggs?  That
there is a reproductive instinct over and above the desire for
sexual gratification appears from the fact that if a man takes an
egg out of the nest, the birds will come together again and the
hen will lay another egg; or, if they belong to some of the more
wary species, they will desert their nest, and make preparation
for an entirely new brood.  A female wryneck, whose nest was
daily robbed of the egg she laid in it, continued to lay a new
one, which grew smaller and smaller, till, when she had laid her
twenty-ninth egg, she was found dead upon her nest.  If an
instinct cannot stand the test of self-sacrifice—if it is
the simple outcome of a desire for bodily
gratification—then it is no true instinct, and is only so
called erroneously.

Instinct is not a mechanism of brain or mind implanted in
living beings by nature; for, if it were, then instinctive action
without any, even unconscious, activity of mind, and with no
conception concerning the purpose of the action, would be
executed mechanically, the purpose having been once for all
thought out by Nature or Providence, which has so organised the
individual that it acts henceforth as a purely mechanical
medium.  We are now dealing with a psychical organisation as
the cause instinct, as we were above dealing with a
physical.  A psychical organisation would be a conceivable
explanation and we need look no farther if every instinct once
belonging to an animal discharged its functions in an unvarying
manner.  But this is never found to be the case, for
instincts vary when there arises a sufficient motive for varying
them.  This proves that special exterior circumstances enter
into the matter, and that these circumstances are the very things
that render the attainment of the purpose possible through means
selected by the instinct.  Here first do we find instinct
acting as though it were actually design with action following at
its heels, for until the arrival of the motive, the instinct
remains late and discharges no function whatever.  The
motive enters by way of an idea received into the mind through
the instrumentality of the senses, and there is a constant
connection between instinct in action and all sensual images
which give information that an opportunity has arisen for
attaining the ends proposed to itself by the instinct.

The psychical mechanism of this constant connection must also
be looked for.  It may help us here to turn to the piano for
an illustration.  The struck keys are the motives, the notes
that sound in consequence are the instincts in action.  This
illustration might perhaps be allowed to pass (if we also suppose
that entirely different keys can give out the same sound) if
instincts could only be compared with distinctly tuned
notes, so that one and the same instinct acted always in the same
manner on the rising of the motive which should set it in
action.  This, however, is not so; for it is the blind
unconscious purpose of the instinct that is alone constant, the
instinct itself—that is to say, the will to make use of
certain means—varying as the means that can be most
suitably employed vary under varying circumstances.

In this we condemn the theory which refuses to recognise
unconscious purpose as present in each individual case of
instinctive action.  For he who maintains instinct to be the
result of a mechanism of mind, must suppose a special and
constant mechanism for each variation and modification of the
instinct in accordance with exterior circumstances, [97] that is to say, a new string giving a
note with a new tone must be inserted, and this would involve the
mechanism in endless complication.  But the fact that the
purpose is constant notwithstanding all manner of variation in
the means chosen by the instinct, proves that there is no
necessity for the supposition of such an elaborate mental
mechanism—the presence of an unconscious purpose being
sufficient to explain the facts.  The purpose of the bird,
for example, that has laid her eggs is constant, and consists in
the desire to bring her young to maturity.  When the
temperature of the air is insufficient to effect this, she sits
upon her eggs, and only intermits her sittings in the warmest
countries; the mammal, on the other hand, attains the fulfilment
of its instinctive purpose without any co-operation on its own
part.  In warm climates many birds only sit by night, and
small exotic birds that have built in aviaries kept at a high
temperature sit little upon their eggs or not at all.  How
inconceivable is the supposition of a mechanism that impels the
bird to sit as soon as the temperature falls below a certain
height!  How clear and simple, on the other hand, is the
view that there is an unconscious purpose constraining the
volition of the bird to the use of the fitting means, of which
process, however, only the last link, that is to say, the will
immediately preceding the action falls within the consciousness
of the bird!

In South Africa the sparrow surrounds her nest with thorns as
a defence against apes and serpents.  The eggs of the
cuckoo, as regards size, colour, and marking, invariably resemble
those of the birds in whose nests she lays.  Sylvia
ruja, for example, lays a white egg with violet spots;
Sylvia hippolais, a red one with black spots; Regulus
ignicapellus, a cloudy red; but the cuckoo’s egg is in
each case so deceptive an imitation of its model, that it can
hardly be distinguished except by the structure of its shell.

Huber contrived that his bees should be unable to build in
their usual instinctive manner, beginning from above and working
downwards; on this they began building from below, and again
horizontally.  The outermost cells that spring from the top
of the hive or abut against its sides are not hexagonal, but
pentagonal, so as to gain in strength, being attached with one
base instead of two sides.  In autumn bees lengthen their
existing honey cells if these are insufficient, but in the
ensuing spring they again shorten them in order to get greater
roadway between the combs.  When the full combs have become
too heavy, they strengthen the walls of the uppermost or bearing
cells by thickening them with wax and propolis.  If
larvæ of working bees are introduced into the cells set
apart for drones, the working bees will cover these cells with
the flat lids usual for this kind of larvæ, and not with
the round ones that are proper for drones.  In autumn, as a
general rule, bees kill their drones, but they refrain from doing
this when they have lost their queen, and keep them to fertilise
the young queen, who will be developed from larvæ that
would otherwise have become working bees.  Huber observed
that they defend the entrance of their hive against the inroads
of the sphinx moth by means of skilful constructions made of wax
and propolis.  They only introduce propolis when they want
it for the execution of repairs, or for some other special
purpose.  Spiders and caterpillars also display marvellous
dexterity in the repair of their webs if they have been damaged,
and this requires powers perfectly distinct from those requisite
for the construction of a new one.

The above examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but they
are sufficient to establish the fact that instincts are not
capacities rolled, as it were, off a reel mechanically, according
to an invariable system, but that they adapt themselves most
closely to the circumstances of each case, and are capable of
such great modification and variation that at times they almost
appear to cease to be instinctive.

Many will, indeed, ascribe these modifications to conscious
deliberation on the part of the animals themselves, and it is
impossible to deny that in the case of the more intellectually
gifted animals there may be such a thing as a combination of
instinctive faculty and conscious reflection.  I think,
however, the examples already cited are enough to show that often
where the normal and the abnormal action springs from the same
source, without any complication with conscious deliberation,
they are either both instinctive or both deliberative. [99]  Or is that which prompts the bee
to build hexagonal prisms in the middle of her comb something of
an actually distinct character from that which impels her to
build pentagonal ones at the sides?  Are there two separate
kinds of thing, one of which induces birds under certain
circumstances to sit upon their eggs, while another leads them
under certain other circumstances to refrain from doing so? 
And does this hold good also with bees when they at one time kill
their brethren without mercy and at another grant them their
lives?  Or with birds when they construct the kind of nest
peculiar to their race, and, again, any special provision which
they may think fit under certain circumstances to take?  If
it is once granted that the normal and the abnormal
manifestations of instinct—and they are often incapable of
being distinguished—spring from a single source, then the
objection that the modification is due to conscious knowledge
will be found to be a suicidal one later on, so far as it is
directed against instinct generally.  It may be sufficient
here to point out, in anticipation of remarks that will be found
in later chapters, that instinct and the power of organic
development involve the same essential principle, though
operating under different circumstances—the two melting
into one another without any definite boundary between
them.  Here, then, we have conclusive proof that instinct
does not depend upon organisation of body or brain, but that,
more truly, the organisation is due to the nature and manner of
the instinct.

On the other hand, we must now return to a closer
consideration of the conception of a psychical mechanism. [100]  And here we find that this
mechanism, in spite of its explaining so much, is itself so
obscure that we can hardly form any idea concerning it.  The
motive enters the mind by way of a conscious sensual impression;
this is the first link of the process; the last link [101] appears as the conscious motive of an
action.  Both, however, are entirely unlike, and neither has
anything to do with ordinary motivation, which consists
exclusively in the desire that springs from a conception either
of pleasure or dislike—the former prompting to the
attainment of any object, the latter to its avoidance.  In
the case of instinct, pleasure is for the most part a concomitant
phenomenon; but it is not so always, as we have already seen,
inasmuch as the consummation and highest moral development of
instinct displays itself in self-sacrifice.

The true problem, however, lies far deeper than this. 
For every conception of a pleasure proves that we have
experienced this pleasure already.  But it follows from
this, that when the pleasure was first felt there must have been
will present, in the gratification of which will the pleasure
consisted; the question, therefore, arises, whence did the will
come before the pleasure that would follow on its gratification
was known, and before bodily pain, as, for example, of hunger,
rendered relief imperative?  Yet we may see that even though
an animal has grown up apart from any others of its kind, it will
yet none the less manifest the instinctive impulses of its race,
though experience can have taught it nothing whatever concerning
the pleasure that will ensue upon their gratification.  As
regards instinct, therefore, there must be a causal connection
between the motivating sensual conception and the will to perform
the instinctive action, and the pleasure of the subsequent
gratification has nothing to do with the matter.  We know by
the experience of our own instincts that this causal connection
does not lie within our consciousness; [102a] therefore, if it is to be a mechanism
of any kind, it can only be either an unconscious mechanical
induction and metamorphosis of the vibrations of the conceived
motive into the vibrations of the conscious action in the brain,
or an unconscious spiritual mechanism.

In the first case, it is surely strange that this process
should go on unconsciously, though it is so powerful in its
effects that the will resulting from it overpowers every other
consideration, every other kind of will, and that vibrations of
this kind, when set up in the brain, become always consciously
perceived; nor is it easy to conceive in what way this
metamorphosis can take place so that the constant purpose can be
attained under varying circumstances by the resulting will in
modes that vary with variation of the special features of each
individual case.

But if we take the other alternative, and suppose an
unconscious mental mechanism, we cannot legitimately conceive of
the process going on in this as other than what prevails in all
mental mechanism, namely, than as by way of idea and will. 
We are, therefore, compelled to imagine a causal connection
between the consciously recognised motive and the will to do the
instinctive action, through unconscious idea and will; nor do I
know how this connection can be conceived as being brought about
more simply than through a conceived and willed purpose. [102b]  Arrived at this point, however,
we have attained the logical mechanism peculiar to and
inseparable from all mind, and find unconscious purpose to be an
indispensable link in every instinctive action.  With this,
therefore, the conception of a mental mechanism, dead and
predestined from without, has disappeared, and has become
transformed into the spiritual life inseparable from logic, so
that we have reached the sole remaining requirement for the
conception of an actual instinct, which proves to be a conscious
willing of the means towards an unconsciously willed
purpose.  This conception explains clearly and without
violence all the problems which instinct presents to us; or more
truly, all that was problematical about instinct disappears when
its true nature has been thus declared.  If this work were
confined to the consideration of instinct alone, the conception
of an unconscious activity of mind might excite opposition,
inasmuch as it is one with which our educated public is not yet
familiar; but in a work like the present, every chapter of which
adduces fresh facts in support of the existence of such an
activity and of its remarkable consequences, the novelty of the
theory should be taken no farther into consideration.

Though I so confidently deny that instinct is the simple
action of a mechanism which has been contrived once for all, I by
no means exclude the supposition that in the constitution of the
brain, the ganglia, and the whole body, in respect of
morphological as well as molecular-physiological condition,
certain predispositions can be established which direct the
unconscious intermediaries more readily into one channel than
into another.  This predisposition is either the result of a
habit which keeps continually cutting for itself a deeper and
deeper channel, until in the end it leaves indelible traces
whether in the individual or in the race, or it is expressly
called into being by the unconscious formative principle in
generation, so as to facilitate action in a given
direction.  This last will be the case more frequently in
respect of exterior organisation—as, for example, with the
weapons or working organs of animals—while to the former
must be referred the molecular condition of brain and ganglia
which bring about the perpetually recurring elements of an
instinct such as the hexagonal shape of the cells of bees. 
We shall presently see that by individual character we mean the
sum of the individual methods of reaction against all possible
motives, and that this character depends essentially upon a
constitution of mind and body acquired in some measure through
habit by the individual, but for the most part inherited. 
But an instinct is also a mode of reaction against certain
motives; here, too, then, we are dealing with character, though
perhaps not so much with that of the individual as of the race;
for by character in regard to instinct we do not intend the
differences that distinguish individuals, but races from one
another.  If any one chooses to maintain that such a
predisposition for certain kinds of activity on the part of brain
and body constitutes a mechanism, this may in one sense be
admitted; but as against this view it must be remarked—

1.  That such deviations from the normal scheme of an
instinct as cannot be referred to conscious deliberation are not
provided for by any predisposition in this mechanism.

2.  That heredity is only possible under the
circumstances of a constant superintendence of the embryonic
development by a purposive unconscious activity of growth. 
It must be admitted, however, that this is influenced in return
by the predisposition existing in the germ.

3.  That the impressing of the predisposition upon the
individual from whom it is inherited can only be effected by long
practice, consequently the instinct without auxiliary mechanism
[105a] is the originating cause of the
auxiliary mechanism.

4.  That none of those instinctive actions that are
performed rarely, or perhaps once only, in the lifetime of any
individual—as, for example, those connected with the
propagation and metamorphoses of the lower forms of life, and
none of those instinctive omissions of action, neglect of which
necessarily entails death—can be conceived as having become
engrained into the character through habit; the ganglionic
constitution, therefore, that predisposes the animal towards them
must have been fashioned purposively.

5.  That even the presence of an auxiliary mechanism [105b] does not compel the unconscious to a
particular corresponding mode of instinctive action, but only
predisposes it.  This is shown by the possibility of
departure from the normal type of action, so that the unconscious
purpose is always stronger than the ganglionic constitution, and
takes any opportunity of choosing from several similar possible
courses the one that is handiest and most convenient to the
constitution of the individual.

We now approach the question that I have reserved for our
final one,—Is there, namely, actually such a thing as
instinct, [105c] or are all so-called instinctive
actions only the results of conscious deliberation?

In support of the second of these two views, it may be alleged
that the more limited is the range of the conscious mental
activity of any living being, the more fully developed in
proportion to its entire mental power is its performance commonly
found to be in respect of its own limited and special instinctive
department.  This holds as good with the lower animals as
with men, and is explained by the fact that perfection of
proficiency is only partly dependent upon natural capacity, but
is in great measure due to practice and cultivation of the
original faculty.  A philologist, for example, is unskilled
in questions of jurisprudence; a natural philosopher or
mathematician, in philology; an abstract philosopher, in poetical
criticism.  Nor has this anything to do with the natural
talents of the several persons, but follows as a consequence of
their special training.  The more special, therefore, is the
direction in which the mental activity of any living being is
exercised, the more will the whole developing and practising
power of the mind be brought to bear upon this one branch, so
that it is not surprising if the special power comes ultimately
to bear an increased proportion to the total power of the
individual, through the contraction of the range within which it
is exercised.

Those, however, who apply this to the elucidation of instinct
should not forget the words, “in proportion to the entire
mental power of the animal in question,” and should bear in
mind that the entire mental power becomes less and less
continually as we descend the scale of animal life, whereas
proficiency in the performance of an instinctive action seems to
be much of a muchness in all grades of the animal world. 
As, therefore, those performances which indisputably proceed from
conscious deliberation decrease proportionately with decrease of
mental power, while nothing of the kind is observable in the case
of instinct—it follows that instinct must involve some
other principle than that of conscious intelligence.  We
see, moreover, that actions which have their source in conscious
intelligence are of one and the same kind, whether among the
lower animals or with mankind—that is to say, that they are
acquired by apprenticeship or instruction and perfected by
practice; so that the saying, “Age brings wisdom,”
holds good with the brutes as much as with ourselves. 
Instinctive actions, on the contrary, have a special and distinct
character, in that they are performed with no less proficiency by
animals that have been reared in solitude than by those that have
been instructed by their parents, the first essays of a hitherto
unpractised animal being as successful as its later ones. 
There is a difference in principle here which cannot be
mistaken.  Again, we know by experience that the feebler and
more limited an intelligence is, the more slowly do ideas act
upon it, that is to say, the slower and more laborious is its
conscious thought.  So long as instinct does not come into
play, this holds good both in the case of men of different powers
of comprehension and with animals; but with instinct all is
changed, for it is the speciality of instinct never to hesitate
or loiter, but to take action instantly upon perceiving that the
stimulating motive has made its appearance.  This rapidity
in arriving at a resolution is common to the instinctive actions
both of the highest and the lowest animals, and indicates an
essential difference between instinct and conscious
deliberation.

Finally, as regards perfection of the power of execution, a
glance will suffice to show the disproportion that exists between
this and the grade of intellectual activity on which an animal
may be standing.  Take, for instance, the caterpillar of the
emperor moth (Saturnia pavonia minor).  It eats the
leaves of the bush upon which it was born; at the utmost has just
enough sense to get on to the lower sides of the leaves if it
begins to rain, and from time to time changes its skin. 
This is its whole existence, which certainly does not lead us to
expect a display of any, even the most limited, intellectual
power.  When, however, the time comes for the larva of this
moth to become a chrysalis, it spins for itself a double cocoon,
fortified with bristles that point outwards, so that it can be
opened easily from within, though it is sufficiently impenetrable
from without.  If this contrivance were the result of
conscious reflection, we should have to suppose some such
reasoning process as the following to take place in the mind of
the caterpillar:—“I am about to become a chrysalis,
and, motionless as I must be, shall be exposed to many different
kinds of attack.  I must therefore weave myself a web. 
But when I am a moth I shall not be able, as some moths are, to
find my way out of it by chemical or mechanical means; therefore
I must leave a way open for myself.  In order, however, that
my enemies may not take advantage of this, I will close it with
elastic bristles, which I can easily push asunder from within,
but which, upon the principle of the arch, will resist all
pressure from without.”  Surely this is asking rather
too much from a poor caterpillar; yet the whole of the foregoing
must be thought out if a correct result is to be arrived at.

This theoretical separation of instinct from conscious
intelligence can be easily misrepresented by opponents of my
theory, as though a separation in practice also would be
necessitated in consequence.  This is by no means my
intention.  On the contrary, I have already insisted at some
length that both the two kinds of mental activity may co-exist in
all manner of different proportions, so that there may be every
degree of combination, from pure instinct to pure
deliberation.  We shall see, however, in a later chapter,
that even in the highest and most abstract activity of human
consciousness there are forces at work that are of the highest
importance, and are essentially of the same kind as instinct.

On the other hand, the most marvellous displays of instinct
are to be found not only in plants, but also in those lowest
organisms of the simplest bodily form which are partly
unicellular, and in respect of conscious intelligence stand far
below the higher plants—to which, indeed, any kind of
deliberative faculty is commonly denied.  Even in the case
of those minute microscopic organisms that baffle our attempts to
classify them either as animals or vegetables, we are still
compelled to admire an instinctive, purposive behaviour, which
goes far beyond a mere reflex responsive to a stimulus from
without; all doubt, therefore, concerning the actual existence of
an instinct must be at an end, and the attempt to deduce it as a
consequence of conscious deliberation be given up as
hopeless.  I will here adduce an instance as extraordinary
as any we yet know of, showing, as it does, that many different
purposes, which in the case of the higher animals require a
complicated system of organs of motion, can be attained with
incredibly simple means.

Arcella vulgaris is a minute morsel of protoplasm,
which lives in a concave-convex, brown, finely reticulated shell,
through a circular opening in the concave side of which it can
project itself by throwing out pseudopodia.  If we
look through the microscope at a drop of water containing living
arcellæ, we may happen to see one of them lying on
its back at the bottom of the drop, and making fruitless efforts
for two or three minutes to lay hold of some fixed point by means
of a pseudopodium.  After this there will appear
suddenly from two to five, but sometimes more, dark points in the
protoplasm at a small distance from the circumference, and, as a
rule, at regular distances from one another.  These rapidly
develop themselves into well-defined spherical air vesicles, and
come presently to fill a considerable part of the hollow of the
shell, thereby driving part of the protoplasm outside it. 
After from five to twenty minutes, the specific gravity of the
arcella is so much lessened that it is lifted by the water
with its pseudopodia, and brought up against the upper
surface of the water-drop, on which it is able to travel. 
In from five to ten minutes the vesicles will now disappear, the
last small point vanishing with a jerk.  If, however, the
creature has been accidentally turned over during its journey,
and reaches the top of the water-drop with its back uppermost,
the vesicles will continue growing only on one side, while they
diminish on the other; by this means the shell is brought first
into an oblique and then into a vertical position, until one of
the pseudopodia obtains a footing and the whole turns
over.  From the moment the animal has obtained foothold, the
bladders become immediately smaller, and after they have
disappeared the experiment may be repeated at pleasure.

The positions of the protoplasm which the vesicles fashion
change continually; only the grainless protoplasm of the
pseudopodia develops no air.  After long and
fruitless efforts a manifest fatigue sets in; the animal gives up
the attempt for a time, and resumes it after an interval of
repose.

Engelmann, the discoverer of these phenomena, says
(Pflüger’s Archiv für Physologie, Bd. II.):
“The changes in volume in all the vesicles of the same
animal are for the most part synchronous, effected in the same
manner, and of like size.  There are, however, not a few
exceptions; it often happens that some of them increase or
diminish in volume much faster than others; sometimes one may
increase while another diminishes; all the changes, however, are
throughout unquestionably intentional.  The object of the
air-vesicles is to bring the animal into such a position that it
can take fast hold of something with its
pseudopodia.  When this has been obtained, the air
disappears without our being able to discover any other reason
for its disappearance than the fact that it is no longer needed.
. . .  If we bear these circumstances in mind, we can almost
always tell whether an arcella will develop air-vesicles
or no; and if it has already developed them, we can tell whether
they will increase or diminish . . . The arcellæ, in
fact, in this power of altering their specific gravity possess a
mechanism for raising themselves to the top of the water, or
lowering themselves to the bottom at will.  They use this
not only in the abnormal circumstances of their being under
microscopical observation, but at all times, as may be known by
our being always able to find some specimens with air-bladders at
the top of the water in which they live.”

If what has been already advanced has failed to convince the
reader of the hopelessness of attempting to explain instinct as a
mode of conscious deliberation, he must admit that the following
considerations are conclusive.  It is most certain that
deliberation and conscious reflection can only take account of
such data as are consciously perceived; if, then, it can be shown
that data absolutely indispensable for the arrival at a just
conclusion cannot by any possibility have been known consciously,
the result can no longer be held as having had its source in
conscious deliberation.  It is admitted that the only way in
which consciousness can arrive at a knowledge of exterior facts
is by way of an impression made upon the senses.  We must,
therefore, prove that a knowledge of the facts indispensable for
arrival at a just conclusion could not have been thus
acquired.  This may be done as follows: [111] for, Firstly, the facts in question
lie in the future, and the present gives no ground for
conjecturing the time and manner of their subsequent
development.

Secondly, they are manifestly debarred from the category of
perceptions perceived through the senses, inasmuch as no
information can be derived concerning them except through
experience of similar occurrences in time past, and such
experience is plainly out of the question.

It would not affect the argument if, as I think likely, it
were to turn out, with the advance of our physiological
knowledge, that all the examples of the first case that I am
about to adduce reduce themselves to examples of the second, as
must be admitted to have already happened in respect of many that
I have adduced hitherto.  For it is hardly more difficult to
conceive of à priori knowledge, disconnected from
any impression made upon the senses, than of knowledge which, it
is true, does at the present day manifest itself upon the
occasion of certain general perceptions, but which can only be
supposed to be connected with these by means of such a chain of
inferences and judiciously applied knowledge as cannot be
believed to exist when we have regard to the capacity and
organisation of the animal we may be considering.

An example of the first case is supplied by the larva of the
stag-beetle in its endeavour to make itself a convenient hole in
which to become a chrysalis.  The female larva digs a hole
exactly her own size, but the male makes one as long again as
himself, so as to allow for the growth of his horns, which will
be about the same length as his body.  A knowledge of this
circumstance is indispensable if the result achieved is to be
considered as due to reflection, yet the actual present of the
larva affords it no ground for conjecturing beforehand the
condition in which it will presently find itself.

As regards the second case, ferrets and buzzards fall
forthwith upon blind worms or other non-poisonous snakes, and
devour them then and there.  But they exhibit the greatest
caution in laying hold of adders, even though they have never
before seen one, and will endeavour first to bruise their heads,
so as to avoid being bitten.  As there is nothing in any
other respect alarming in the adder, a conscious knowledge of the
danger of its bite is indispensable, if the conduct above
described is to be referred to conscious deliberation.  But
this could only have been acquired through experience, and the
possibility of such experience may be controlled in the case of
animals that have been kept in captivity from their youth up, so
that the knowledge displayed can be ascertained to be independent
of experience.  On the other hand, both the above
illustrations afford evidence of an unconscious perception of the
facts, and prove the existence of a direct knowledge underivable
from any sensual impression or from consciousness.

This has always been recognised, [113] and has been
described under the words “presentiment” or
“foreboding.”  These words, however, refer, on
the one hand, only to an unknowable in the future, separated from
us by space, and not to one that is actually present; on the
other hand, they denote only the faint, dull, indefinite echo
returned by consciousness to an invariably distinct state of
unconscious knowledge.  Hence the word
“presentiment,” which carries with it an idea of
faintness and indistinctness, while, however, it may be easily
seen that sentiment destitute of all, even unconscious, ideas can
have no influence upon the result, for knowledge can only follow
upon an idea.  A presentiment that sounds in consonance with
our consciousness can indeed, under certain circumstances, become
tolerably definite, so that in the case of man it can be
expressed in thought and language; but experience teaches us that
even among ourselves this is not so when instincts special to the
human race come into play; we see rather that the echo of our
unconscious knowledge which finds its way into our consciousness
is so weak that it manifests itself only in the accompanying
feelings or frame of mind, and represents but an infinitely small
fraction of the sum of our sensations.  It is obvious that
such a faintly sympathetic consciousness cannot form a sufficient
foundation for a superstructure of conscious deliberation; on the
other hand, conscious deliberation would be unnecessary, inasmuch
as the process of thinking must have been already gone through
unconsciously, for every faint presentiment that obtrudes itself
upon our consciousness is in fact only the consequence of a
distinct unconscious knowledge, and the knowledge with which it
is concerned is almost always an idea of the purpose of some
instinctive action, or of one most intimately connected
therewith.  Thus, in the case of the stag-beetle, the
purpose consists in the leaving space for the growth of the
horns; the means, in the digging the hole of a sufficient size;
and the unconscious knowledge, in prescience concerning the
future development of the horns.

Lastly, all instinctive actions give us an impression of
absolute security and infallibility.  With instinct the will
is never hesitating or weak, as it is when inferences are being
drawn consciously.  We never find instinct making mistakes;
we cannot, therefore, ascribe a result which is so invariably
precise to such an obscure condition of mind as is implied when
the word presentiment is used; on the contrary, this absolute
certainty is so characteristic a feature of instinctive actions,
that it constitutes almost the only well-marked point of
distinction between these and actions that are done upon
reflection.  But from this it must again follow that some
principle lies at the root of instinct other than that which
underlies reflective action, and this can only be looked for in a
determination of the will through a process that lies in the
unconscious, [115a] to which this character of
unhesitating infallibility will attach itself in all our future
investigations.

Many will be surprised at my ascribing to instinct an
unconscious knowledge, arising out of no sensual impression, and
yet invariably accurate.  This, however, is not a
consequence of my theory concerning instinct; it is the
foundation on which that theory is based, and is forced upon us
by facts.  I must therefore adduce examples.  And to
give a name to the unconscious knowledge, which is not acquired
through impression made upon the senses, but which will be found
to be in our possession, though attained without the
instrumentality of means, [115b] I prefer the
word “clairvoyance” [115c] to
“presentiment,” which, for reasons already given,
will not serve me.  This word, therefore, will be here
employed throughout, as above defined.

Let us now consider examples of the instincts of
self-preservation, subsistence, migration, and the continuation
of the species.  Most animals know their natural enemies
prior to experience of any hostile designs upon themselves. 
A flight of young pigeons, even though they have no old birds
with them, will become shy, and will separate from one another on
the approach of a bird of prey.  Horses and cattle that come
from countries where there are no lions become unquiet and
display alarm as soon as they are aware that a lion is
approaching them in the night.  Horses going along a
bridle-path that used to leave the town at the back of the old
dens of the carnivora in the Berlin Zoological Gardens were often
terrified by the propinquity of enemies who were entirely unknown
to them.  Sticklebacks will swim composedly among a number
of voracious pike, knowing, as they do, that the pike will not
touch them.  For if a pike once by mistake swallows a
stickleback, the stickleback will stick in its throat by reason
of the spine it carries upon its back, and the pike must starve
to death without being able to transmit his painful experience to
his descendants.  In some countries there are people who by
choice eat dog’s flesh; dogs are invariably savage in the
presence of these persons, as recognising in them enemies at
whose hands they may one day come to harm.  This is the more
wonderful inasmuch as dog’s fat applied externally (as when
rubbed upon boots) attracts dogs by its smell.  Grant saw a
young chimpanzee throw itself into convulsions of terror at the
sight of a large snake; and even among ourselves a Gretchen can
often detect a Mephistopheles.  An insect of the genius
bombyx will seize another of the genus
parnopæa, and kill it wherever it finds it, without
making any subsequent use of the body; but we know that the
last-named insect lies in wait for the eggs of the first, and is
therefore the natural enemy of its race.  The phenomenon
known to stockdrivers and shepherds as “das Biesen des
Viehes” affords another example.  For when a
“dassel” or “bies” fly draws near the
herd, the cattle become unmanageable and run about among one
another as though they were mad, knowing, as they do, that the
larvæ from the eggs which the fly will lay upon them will
presently pierce their hides and occasion them painful
sores.  These “dassel” flies—which have no
sting—closely resemble another kind of gadfly which has a
sting.  Nevertheless, this last kind is little feared by
cattle, while the first is so to an inordinate extent.  The
laying of the eggs upon the skin is at the time quite painless,
and no ill consequences follow until long afterwards, so that we
cannot suppose the cattle to draw a conscious inference
concerning the connection that exists between the two.  I
have already spoken of the foresight shown by ferrets and
buzzards in respect of adders; in like manner a young
honey-buzzard, on being shown a wasp for the first time,
immediately devoured it after having squeezed the sting from its
body.  No animal, whose instinct has not been vitiated by
unnatural habits, will eat poisonous plants.  Even when apes
have contracted bad habits through their having been brought into
contact with mankind, they can still be trusted to show us
whether certain fruits found in their native forests are
poisonous or no; for if poisonous fruits are offered them they
will refuse them with loud cries.  Every animal will choose
for its sustenance exactly those animal or vegetable substances
which agree best with its digestive organs, without having
received any instruction on the matter, and without testing them
beforehand.  Even, indeed, though we assume that the power
of distinguishing the different kinds of food is due to sight and
not to smell, it remains none the less mysterious how the animal
can know what it is that will agree with it.  Thus the kid
which Galen took prematurely from its mother smelt at all the
different kinds of food that were set before it, but drank only
the milk without touching anything else.  The cherry-finch
opens a cherry-stone by turning it so that her beak can hit the
part where the two sides join, and does this as much with the
first stone she cracks as with the last.  Fitchets, martens,
and weasels make small holes on the opposite sides of an egg
which they are about to suck, so that the air may come in while
they are sucking.  Not only do animals know the food that
will suit them best, but they find out the most suitable remedies
when they are ill, and constantly form a correct diagnosis of
their malady with a therapeutical knowledge which they cannot
possibly have acquired.  Dogs will often eat a great
quantity of grass—particularly couch-grass—when they
are unwell, especially after spring, if they have worms, which
thus pass from them entangled in the grass, or if they want to
get fragments of bone from out of their stomachs.  As a
purgative they make use of plants that sting.  Hens and
pigeons pick lime from walls and pavements if their food does not
afford them lime enough to make their eggshells with. 
Little children eat chalk when suffering from acidity of the
stomach, and pieces of charcoal if they are troubled with
flatulence.  We may observe these same instincts for certain
kinds of food or drugs even among grown-up people, under
circumstances in which their unconscious nature has unusual
power; as, for example, among women when they are pregnant, whose
capricious appetites are probably due to some special condition
of the fœtus, which renders a certain state of the blood
desirable.  Field-mice bite off the germs of the corn which
they collect together, in order to prevent its growing during the
winter.  Some days before the beginning of cold weather the
squirrel is most assiduous in augmenting its store, and then
closes its dwelling.  Birds of passage betake themselves to
warmer countries at times when there is still no scarcity of food
for them here, and when the temperature is considerably warmer
than it will be when they return to us.  The same holds good
of the time when animals begin to prepare their winter quarters,
which beetles constantly do during the very hottest days of
autumn.  When swallows and storks find their way back to
their native places over distances of hundreds of miles, and
though the aspect of the country is reversed, we say that this is
due to the acuteness of their perception of locality; but the
same cannot be said of dogs, which, though they have been carried
in a bag from one place to another that they do not know, and
have been turned round and round twenty times over, have still
been known to find their way home.  Here we can say no more
than that their instinct has conducted them—that the
clairvoyance of the unconscious has allowed them to conjecture
their way. [119a]

Before an early winter, birds of passage collect themselves in
preparation for their flight sooner than usual; but when the
winter is going to be mild, they will either not migrate at all,
or travel only a small distance southward.  When a hard
winter is coming, tortoises will make their burrows deeper. 
If wild geese, cranes, etc., soon return from the countries to
which they had betaken themselves at the beginning of spring, it
is a sign that a hot and dry summer is about to ensue in those
countries, and that the drought will prevent their being able to
rear their young.  In years of flood, beavers construct
their dwellings at a higher level than usual, and shortly before
an inundation the field-mice in Kamtschatka come out of their
holes in large bands.  If the summer is going to be dry,
spiders may be seen in May and April, hanging from the ends of
threads several feet in length.  If in winter spiders are
seen running about much, fighting with one another and preparing
new webs, there will be cold weather within the next nine days,
or from that to twelve: when they again hide themselves there
will be a thaw.  I have no doubt that much of this power of
prophesying the weather is due to a perception of certain
atmospheric conditions which escape ourselves, but this
perception can only have relation to a certain actual and now
present condition of the weather; and what can the impression
made by this have to do with their idea of the weather that will
ensue?  No one will ascribe to animals a power of
prognosticating the weather months beforehand by means of
inferences drawn logically from a series of observations, [119b] to the extent of being able to
foretell floods.  It is far more probable that the power of
perceiving subtle differences of actual atmospheric condition is
nothing more than the sensual perception which acts as
motive—for a motive must assuredly be always
present—when an instinct comes into operation.  It
continues to hold good, therefore, that the power of foreseeing
the weather is a case of unconscious clairvoyance, of which the
stork which takes its departure for the south four weeks earlier
than usual knows no more than does the stag when before a cold
winter he grows himself a thicker pelt than is his wont.  On
the one hand, animals have present in their consciousness a
perception of the actual state of the weather; on the other,
their ensuing action is precisely such as it would be if the idea
present with them was that of the weather that is about to
come.  This they cannot consciously have; the only natural
intermediate link, therefore, between their conscious knowledge
and their action is supplied by unconscious idea, which, however,
is always accurately prescient, inasmuch as it contains something
which is neither given directly to the animal through sensual
perception, nor can be deduced inferentially through the
understanding.

Most wonderful of all are the instincts connected with the
continuation of the species.  The males always find out the
females of their own kind, but certainly not solely through their
resemblance to themselves.  With many animals, as, for
example, parasitic crabs, the sexes so little resemble one
another that the male would be more likely to seek a mate from
the females of a thousand other species than from his own. 
Certain butterflies are polymorphic, and not only do the males
and females of the same species differ, but the females present
two distinct forms, one of which as a general rule mimics the
outward appearance of a distant but highly valued species; yet
the males will pair only with the females of their own kind, and
not with the strangers, though these may be very likely much more
like the males themselves.  Among the insect species of the
strepsiptera, the female is a shapeless worm which lives
its whole life long in the hind body of a wasp; its head, which
is of the shape of a lentil, protrudes between two of the belly
rings of the wasp, the rest of the body being inside.  The
male, which only lives for a few hours, and resembles a moth,
nevertheless recognises his mate in spite of these adverse
circumstances, and fecundates her.

Before any experience of parturition, the knowledge that it is
approaching drives all mammals into solitude, and bids them
prepare a nest for their young in a hole or in some other place
of shelter.  The bird builds her nest as soon as she feels
the eggs coming to maturity within her.  Snails, land-crabs,
tree-frogs, and toads, all of them ordinarily dwellers upon land,
now betake themselves to the water; sea-tortoises go on shore,
and many saltwater fishes come up into the rivers in order to lay
their eggs where they can alone find the requisites for their
development.  Insects lay their eggs in the most varied
kinds of situations,—in sand, on leaves, under the hides
and horny substances of other animals; they often select the spot
where the larva will be able most readily to find its future
sustenance, as in autumn upon the trees that will open first in
the coming spring, or in spring upon the blossoms that will first
bear fruit in autumn, or in the insides of those caterpillars
which will soonest as chrysalides provide the parasitic larva at
once with food and with protection.  Other insects select
the sites from which they will first get forwarded to the
destination best adapted for their development.  Thus some
horseflies lay their eggs upon the lips of horses or upon parts
where they are accustomed to lick themselves.  The eggs get
conveyed hence into the entrails, the proper place for their
development,—and are excreted upon their arrival at
maturity.  The flies that infest cattle know so well how to
select the most vigorous and healthiest beasts, that
cattle-dealers and tanners place entire dependence upon them, and
prefer those beasts and hides that are most scarred by
maggots.  This selection of the best cattle by the help of
these flies is no evidence in support of the conclusion that the
flies possess the power of making experiments consciously and of
reflecting thereupon, even though the men whose trade it is to do
this recognise them as their masters.  The solitary wasp
makes a hole several inches deep in the sand, lays her egg, and
packs along with it a number of green maggots that have no legs,
and which, being on the point of becoming chrysalides, are well
nourished and able to go a long time without food; she packs
these maggots so closely together that they cannot move nor turn
into chrysalides, and just enough of them to support the larva
until it becomes a chrysalis.  A kind of bug (cerceris
bupresticida), which itself lives only upon pollen, lays her
eggs in an underground cell, and with each one of them she
deposits three beetles, which she has lain in wait for and
captured when they were still weak through having only just left
off being chrysalides.  She kills these beetles, and appears
to smear them with a fluid whereby she preserves them fresh and
suitable for food.  Many kinds of wasps open the cells in
which their larvæ are confined when these must have
consumed the provision that was left with them.  They supply
them with more food, and again close the cell.  Ants, again,
hit always upon exactly the right moment for opening the cocoons
in which their larvæ are confined and for setting them
free, the larva being unable to do this for itself.  Yet the
life of only a few kinds of insects lasts longer than a single
breeding season.  What then can they know about the contents
of their eggs and the fittest place for their development? 
What can they know about the kind of food the larva will want
when it leaves the egg—a food so different from their
own?  What, again, can they know about the quantity of food
that will be necessary?  How much of all this at least can
they know consciously?  Yet their actions, the pains they
take, and the importance they evidently attach to these matters,
prove that they have a foreknowledge of the future: this
knowledge therefore can only be an unconscious
clairvoyance.  For clairvoyance it must certainly be that
inspires the will of an animal to open cells and cocoons at the
very moment that the larva is either ready for more food or fit
for leaving the cocoon.  The eggs of the cuckoo do not take
only from two to three days to mature in her ovaries, as those of
most birds do, but require from eleven to twelve; the cuckoo,
therefore, cannot sit upon her own eggs, for her first egg would
be spoiled before the last was laid.  She therefore lays in
other birds’ nests—of course laying each egg in a
different nest.  But in order that the birds may not
perceive her egg to be a stranger and turn it out of the nest,
not only does she lay an egg much smaller than might be expected
from a bird of her size (for she only finds her opportunity among
small birds), but, as already said, she imitates the other eggs
in the nest she has selected with surprising accuracy in respect
both of colour and marking.  As the cuckoo chooses the nest
some days beforehand, it may be thought, if the nest is an open
one, that the cuckoo looks upon the colour of the eggs within it
while her own is in process of maturing inside her, and that it
is thus her egg comes to assume the colour of the others; but
this explanation will not hold good for nests that are made in
the holes of trees, as that of sylvia phænicurus, or
which are oven-shaped with a narrow entrance, as with sylvia
rufa.  In these cases the cuckoo can neither slip in nor
look in, and must therefore lay her egg outside the nest and push
it inside with her beak; she can therefore have no means of
perceiving through her senses what the eggs already in the nest
are like.  If, then, in spite of all this, her egg closely
resembles the others, this can only have come about through an
unconscious clairvoyance which directs the process that goes on
within the ovary in respect of colour and marking.

An important argument in support of the existence of a
clairvoyance in the instincts of animals is to be found in the
series of facts which testify to the existence of a like
clairvoyance, under certain circumstances, even among human
beings, while the self-curative instincts of children and of
pregnant women have been already mentioned.  Here, however,
[124] in correspondence with the higher
stage of development which human consciousness has attained, a
stronger echo of the unconscious clairvoyance commonly resounds
within consciousness itself, and this is represented by a more or
less definite presentiment of the consequences that will
ensue.  It is also in accord with the greater independence
of the human intellect that this kind of presentiment is not felt
exclusively immediately before the carrying out of an action, but
is occasionally disconnected from the condition that an action
has to be performed immediately, and displays itself simply as an
idea independently of conscious will, provided only that the
matter concerning which the presentiment is felt is one which in
a high degree concerns the will of the person who feels it. 
In the intervals of an intermittent fever or of other illness, it
not unfrequently happens that sick persons can accurately
foretell the day of an approaching attack and how long it will
last.  The same thing occurs almost invariably in the case
of spontaneous, and generally in that of artificial,
somnambulism; certainly the Pythia, as is well known, used to
announce the date of her next ecstatic state.  In like
manner the curative instinct displays itself in somnambulists,
and they have been known to select remedies that have been no
less remarkable for the success attending their employment than
for the completeness with which they have run counter to received
professional opinion.  The indication of medicinal remedies
is the only use which respectable electro-biologists will make of
the half-sleeping, half-waking condition of those whom they are
influencing.  “People in perfectly sound health have
been known, before childbirth or at the commencement of an
illness, to predict accurately their own approaching death. 
The accomplishment of their predictions can hardly be explained
as the result of mere chance, for if this were all, the prophecy
should fail at least as often as not, whereas the reverse is
actually the case.  Many of these persons neither desire
death nor fear it, so that the result cannot be ascribed to
imagination.”  So writes the celebrated physiologist,
Burdach, from whose chapter on presentiment in his work
“Bhicke in’s Leben” a great part of my most
striking examples is taken.  This presentiment of deaths,
which is the exception among men, is quite common with animals,
even though they do not know nor understand what death is. 
When they become aware that their end is approaching, they steal
away to outlying and solitary places.  This is why in cities
we so rarely see the dead body or skeleton of a cat.  We can
only suppose that the unconscious clairvoyance, which is of
essentially the same kind whether in man or beast, calls forth
presentiments of different degrees of definiteness, so that the
cat is driven to withdraw herself through a mere instinct without
knowing why she does so, while in man a definite perception is
awakened of the fact that he is about to die.  Not only do
people have presentiments concerning their own death, but there
are many instances on record in which they have become aware of
that of those near and dear to them, the dying person having
appeared in a dream to friend or wife or husband.  Stories
to this effect prevail among all nations, and unquestionably
contain much truth.  Closely connected with this is the
power of second sight, which existed formerly in Scotland, and
still does so in the Danish islands.  This power enables
certain people without any ecstasy, but simply through their
keener perception, to foresee coming events, or to tell what is
going on in foreign countries on matters in which they are deeply
interested, such as deaths, battles, conflagrations (Swedenborg
foretold the burning of Stockholm), the arrival or the doings of
friends who are at a distance.  With many persons this
clairvoyance is confined to a knowledge of the death of their
acquaintances or fellow-townspeople.  There have been a
great many instances of such death-prophetesses, and, what is
most important, some cases have been verified in courts of
law.  I may say, in passing, that this power of second sight
is found in persons who are in ecstatic states, in the
spontaneous or artificially induced somnambulism of the higher
kinds of waking dreams, as well as in lucid moments before
death.  These prophetic glimpses, by which the clairvoyance
of the unconscious reveals itself to consciousness, [126] are commonly obscure because in the
brain they must assume a form perceptible by the senses, whereas
the unconscious idea can have nothing to do with any form of
sensual impression: it is for this reason that humours, dreams,
and the hallucinations of sick persons can so easily have a false
signification attached to them.  The chances of error and
self-deception that arise from this source, the ease with which
people may be deceived intentionally, and the mischief which, as
a general rule, attends a knowledge of the future, these
considerations place beyond all doubt the practical unwisdom of
attempts to arrive at certainty concerning the future. 
This, however, cannot affect the weight which in theory should be
attached to phenomena of this kind, and must not prevent us from
recognising the positive existence of the clairvoyance whose
existence I am maintaining, though it is often hidden under a
chaos of madness and imposture.

The materialistic and rationalistic tendencies of the present
day lead most people either to deny facts of this kind in
toto, or to ignore them, inasmuch as they are inexplicable
from a materialistic standpoint, and cannot be established by the
inductive or experimental method—as though this last were
not equally impossible in the case of morals, social science, and
politics.  A mind of any candour will only be able to deny
the truths of this entire class of phenomena so long as it
remains in ignorance of the facts that have been related
concerning them; but, again, a continuance in this ignorance can
only arise from unwillingness to be convinced.  I am
satisfied that many of those who deny all human power of
divination would come to another, and, to say the least, more
cautious conclusion if they would be at the pains of further
investigation; and I hold that no one, even at the present day,
need be ashamed of joining in with an opinion which was
maintained by all the great spirits of antiquity except
Epicurus—an opinion whose possible truth hardly one of our
best modern philosophers has ventured to contravene, and which
the champions of German enlightenment were so little disposed to
relegate to the domain of old wives’ tales, that Goethe
furnishes us with an example of second sight that fell within his
own experience, and confirms it down to its minutest details.

Although I am far from believing that the kind of phenomena
above referred to form in themselves a proper foundation for a
superstructure of scientific demonstration, I nevertheless find
them valuable as a completion and further confirmation of the
series of phenomena presented to us by the clairvoyance which we
observe in human and animal instinct.  Even though they only
continue this series [128] through the echo
that is awakened within our consciousness, they as powerfully
support the account which instinctive actions give concerning
their own nature, as they are themselves supported by the analogy
they present to the clairvoyance observable in instinct. 
This, then, as well as my desire not to lose an opportunity of
protesting against a modern prejudice, must stand as my reason
for having allowed myself to refer, in a scientific work, to a
class of phenomena which has fallen at present into so much
discredit.

I will conclude with a few words upon a special kind of
instinct which has a very instructive bearing upon the subject
generally, and shows how impossible it is to evade the
supposition of an unconscious clairvoyance on the part of
instinct.  In the examples adduced hitherto, the action of
each individual has been done on the individual’s own
behalf, except in the case of instincts connected with the
continuation of the species, where the action benefits
others—that is to say, the offspring of the creature
performing it.

We must now examine the cases in which a solidarity of
instinct is found to exist between several individuals, so that,
on the one hand, the action of each redounds to the common
welfare, and, on the other, it becomes possible for a useful
purpose to be achieved through the harmonious association of
individual workers.  This community of instinct exists also
among the higher animals, but here it is harder to distinguish
from associations originating through conscious will, inasmuch as
speech supplies the means of a more perfect intercommunication of
aim and plan.  We shall, however, definitely recognise [129] this general effect of a universal
instinct in the origin of speech and in the great political and
social movements in the history of the world.  Here we are
concerned only with the simplest and most definite examples that
can be found anywhere, and therefore we will deal in preference
with the lower animals, among which, in the absence of voice, the
means of communicating thought, mimicry, and physiognomy, are so
imperfect that the harmony and interconnection of the individual
actions cannot in its main points be ascribed to an understanding
arrived at through speech.  Huber observed that when a new
comb was being constructed a number of the largest working-bees,
that were full of honey, took no part in the ordinary business of
the others, but remained perfectly aloof.  Twenty-four hours
afterwards small plates of wax had formed under their
bellies.  The bee drew these off with her hind-feet,
masticated them, and made them into a band.  The small
plates of wax thus prepared were then glued to the roof of the
hive one on the top of the other.  When one of the bees of
this kind had used up her plates of wax, another followed her and
carried the same work forward in the same way.  A thin rough
vertical wall, half a line in thickness and fastened to the sides
of the hive, was thus constructed.  On this, one of the
smaller working-bees whose belly was empty came, and after
surveying the wall, made a flat half-oval excavation in the
middle of one of its sides; she piled up the wax thus excavated
round the edge of the excavation.  After a short time she
was relieved by another like herself, till more than twenty
followed one another in this way.  Meanwhile another bee
began to make a similar hollow on the other side of the wall, but
corresponding only with the rim of the excavation on this
side.  Presently another bee began a second hollow upon the
same side, each bee being continually relieved by others. 
Other bees kept coming up and bringing under their bellies plates
of wax, with which they heightened the edge of the small wall of
wax.  In this, new bees were constantly excavating the
ground for more cells, while others proceeded by degrees to bring
those already begun into a perfectly symmetrical shape, and at
the same time continued building up the prismatic walls between
them.  Thus the bees worked on opposite sides of the wall of
wax, always on the same plan and in the closest correspondence
with those upon the other side, until eventually the cells on
both sides were completed in all their wonderful regularity and
harmony of arrangement, not merely as regards those standing side
by side, but also as regards those which were upon the other side
of their pyramidal base.

Let the reader consider how animals that are accustomed to
confer together, by speech or otherwise, concerning designs which
they may be pursuing in common, will wrangle with thousandfold
diversity of opinion; let him reflect how often something has to
be undone, destroyed, and done over again; how at one time too
many hands come forward, and at another too few; what running to
and fro there is before each has found his right place; how often
too many, and again too few, present themselves for a relief
gang; and how we find all this in the concerted works of men, who
stand so far higher than bees in the scale of organisation. 
We see nothing of the kind among bees.  A survey of their
operations leaves rather the impression upon us as though an
invisible master-builder had prearranged a scheme of action for
the entire community, and had impressed it upon each individual
member, as though each class of workers had learnt their
appointed work by heart, knew their places and the numbers in
which they should relieve each other, and were informed
instantaneously by a secret signal of the moment when their
action was wanted.  This, however, is exactly the manner in
which an instinct works; and as the intention of the entire
community is instinctively present in the unconscious
clairvoyance [131a] of each individual bee, so the
possession of this common instinct impels each one of them to the
discharge of her special duties when the right moment has
arrived.  It is only thus that the wonderful tranquillity
and order which we observe could be attained.  What we are
to think concerning this common instinct must be reserved for
explanation later on, but the possibility of its existence is
already evident, inasmuch [131b] as each
individual has an unconscious insight concerning the plan
proposed to itself by the community, and also concerning the
means immediately to be adopted through concerted action—of
which, however, only the part requiring his own co-operation is
present in the consciousness of each.  Thus, for example,
the larva of the bee itself spins the silky chamber in which it
is to become a chrysalis, but other bees must close it with its
lid of wax.  The purpose of there being a chamber in which
the larva can become a chrysalis must be present in the minds of
each of these two parties to the transaction, but neither of them
acts under the influence of conscious will, except in regard to
his own particular department.  I have already mentioned the
fact that the larva, after its metamorphosis, must be freed from
its cell by other bees, and have told how the working-bees in
autumn kill the drones, so that they may not have to feed a
number of useless mouths throughout the winter, and how they only
spare them when they are wanted in order to fecundate a new
queen.  Furthermore, the working-bees build cells in which
the eggs laid by the queen may come to maturity, and, as a
general rule, make just as many chambers as the queen lays eggs;
they make these, moreover, in the same order as that in which the
queen lays her eggs, namely, first for the working-bees, then for
the drones, and lastly for the queens.  In the polity of the
bees, the working and the sexual capacities, which were once
united, are now personified in three distinct kinds of
individual, and these combine with an inner, unconscious,
spiritual union, so as to form a single body politic, as the
organs of a living body combine to form the body itself.

In this chapter, therefore, we have arrived at the following
conclusions:—

Instinct is not the result of conscious deliberation; [132] it is not a consequence of bodily
organisation; it is not a mere result of a mechanism which lies
in the organisation of the brain; it is not the operation of dead
mechanism, glued on, as it were, to the soul, and foreign to its
inmost essence; but it is the spontaneous action of the
individual, springing from his most essential nature and
character.  The purpose to which any particular kind of
instinctive action is subservient is not the purpose of a soul
standing outside the individual and near akin to
Providence—a purpose once for all thought out, and now
become a matter of necessity to the individual, so that he can
act in no other way, though it is engrafted into his nature from
without, and not natural to it.  The purpose of the instinct
is in each individual case thought out and willed unconsciously
by the individual, and afterwards the choice of means adapted to
each particular case is arrived at unconsciously.  A
knowledge of the purpose is often absolutely unattainable [133] by conscious knowledge through sensual
perception.  Then does the peculiarity of the unconscious
display itself in the clairvoyance of which consciousness
perceives partly only a faint and dull, and partly, as in the
case of man, a more or less definite echo by way of sentiment,
whereas the instinctive action itself—the carrying out of
the means necessary for the achievement of the unconscious
purpose—falls always more clearly within consciousness,
inasmuch as due performance of what is necessary would be
otherwise impossible.  Finally, the clairvoyance makes
itself perceived in the concerted action of several individuals
combining to carry out a common but unconscious purpose.

Up to this point we have encountered clairvoyance as a fact
which we observe but cannot explain, and the reader may say that
he prefers to take his stand here, and be content with regarding
instinct simply as a matter of fact, the explanation of which is
at present beyond our reach.  Against this it must be urged,
firstly, that clairvoyance is not confined to instinct, but is
found also in man; secondly, that clairvoyance is by no means
present in all instincts, and that therefore our experience shows
us clairvoyance and instinct as two distinct
things—clairvoyance being of great use in explaining
instinct, but instinct serving nothing to explain clairvoyance;
thirdly and lastly, that the clairvoyance of the individual will
not continue to be so incomprehensible to us, but will be
perfectly well explained in the further course of our
investigation, while we must give up all hope of explaining
instinct in any other way.

The conception we have thus arrived at enables us to regard
instinct as the innermost kernel, so to speak, of every living
being.  That this is actually the case is shown by the
instincts of self-preservation and of the continuation of the
species which we observe throughout creation, and by the heroic
self-abandonment with which the individual will sacrifice
welfare, and even life, at the bidding of instinct.  We see
this when we think of the caterpillar, and how she repairs her
cocoon until she yields to exhaustion; of the bird, and how she
will lay herself to death; of the disquiet and grief displayed by
all migratory animals if they are prevented from migrating. 
A captive cuckoo will always die at the approach of winter
through despair at being unable to fly away; so will the vineyard
snail if it is hindered of its winter sleep.  The weakest
mother will encounter an enemy far surpassing her in strength,
and suffer death cheerfully for her offspring’s sake. 
Every year we see fresh cases of people who have been unfortunate
going mad or committing suicide.  Women who have survived
the Cæsarian operation allow themselves so little to be
deterred from further childbearing through fear of this frightful
and generally fatal operation, that they will undergo it no less
than three times.  Can we suppose that what so closely
resembles demoniacal possession can have come about through
something engrafted on to the soul as a mechanism foreign to its
inner nature, [135] or through conscious deliberation
which adheres always to a bare egoism, and is utterly incapable
of such self-sacrifice for the sake of offspring as is displayed
by the procreative and maternal instincts?

We have now, finally, to consider how it arises that the
instincts of any animal species are so similar within the limits
of that species—a circumstance which has not a little
contributed to the engrafted-mechanism theory.  But it is
plain that like causes will be followed by like effects; and this
should afford sufficient explanation.  The bodily mechanism,
for example, of all the individuals of a species is alike; so
again are their capabilities and the outcomes of their conscious
intelligence—though this, indeed, is not the case with man,
nor in some measure even with the highest animals; and it is
through this want of uniformity that there is such a thing as
individuality.  The external conditions of all the
individuals of a species are also tolerably similar, and when
they differ essentially, the instincts are likewise
different—a fact in support of which no examples are
necessary.  From like conditions of mind and body (and this
includes like predispositions of brain and ganglia) and like
exterior circumstances, like desires will follow as a necessary
logical consequence.  Again, from like desires and like
inward and outward circumstances, a like choice of
means—that is to say, like instincts—must
ensue.  These last two steps would not be conceded without
restriction if the question were one involving conscious
deliberation, but as these logical consequences are supposed to
follow from the unconscious, which takes the right step
unfailingly without vacillation or delay so long as the premises
are similar, the ensuing desires and the instincts to adopt the
means for their gratification will be similar also.

Thus the view which we have taken concerning instinct explains
the very last point which it may be thought worth while to bring
forward in support of the opinions of our opponents.

I will conclude this chapter with the words of Schelling:
“Thoughtful minds will hold the phenomena of animal
instinct to belong to the most important of all phenomena, and to
be the true touchstone of a durable philosophy.”

p.
137Chapter IX

Remarks upon Von Hartmann’s position in
regard to instinct.

Uncertain how far the foregoing
chapter is not better left without comment of any kind, I
nevertheless think that some of my readers may be helped by the
following extracts from the notes I took while translating. 
I will give them as they come, without throwing them into
connected form.

Von Hartmann defines instinct as action done with a purpose,
but without consciousness of purpose.

The building of her nest by a bird is an instinctive action;
it is done with a purpose, but it is arbitrary to say that the
bird has no knowledge of that purpose.  Some hold that birds
when they are building their nest know as well that they mean to
bring up a family in it as a young married couple do when they
build themselves a house.  This is the conclusion which
would be come to by a plain person on a primâ facie
view of the facts, and Von Hartmann shows no reason for modifying
it.

A better definition of instinct would be that it is inherited
knowledge in respect of certain facts, and of the most suitable
manner in which to deal with them.

Von Hartmann speaks of “a mechanism of brain or
mind” contrived by nature, and again of “a psychical
organisation,” as though it were something distinct from a
physical organisation.

We can conceive of such a thing as mechanism of brain, for we
have seen brain and handled it; but until we have seen a mind and
handled it, or at any rate been enabled to draw inferences which
will warrant us in conceiving of it as a material substance apart
from bodily substance, we cannot infer that it has an
organisation apart from bodily organisation.  Does Von
Hartmann mean that we have two bodies—a body-body, and a
soul-body?

He says that no one will call the action of the spider
instinctive in voiding the fluids from its glands when they are
too full.  Why not?

He is continually personifying instinct; thus he speaks of the
“ends proposed to itself by the instinct,” of
“the blind unconscious purpose of the instinct,” of
“an unconscious purpose constraining the volition of the
bird,” of “each variation and modification of the
instinct,” as though instinct, purpose, and, later on,
clairvoyance, were persons, and not words characterising a
certain class of actions.  The ends are proposed to itself
by the animal, not by the instinct.  Nothing but mischief
can come of a mode of expression which does not keep this clearly
in view.

It must not be supposed that the same cuckoo is in the habit
of laying in the nests of several different species, and of
changing the colour of her eggs according to that of the eggs of
the bird in whose nest she lays.  I have inquired from Mr.
R. Bowdler Sharpe of the ornithological department at the British
Museum, who kindly gives it me as his opinion that though cuckoos
do imitate the eggs of the species on whom they foist their young
ones, yet one cuckoo will probably lay in the nests of one
species also, and will stick to that species for life.  If
so, the same race of cuckoos may impose upon the same species for
generations together.  The instinct will even thus remain a
very wonderful one, but it is not at all inconsistent with the
theory put forward by Professor Hering and myself.

Returning to the idea of psychical mechanism, he admits that
“it is itself so obscure that we can hardly form any idea
concerning it,” [139a] and then goes on
to claim for it that it explains a great many other things. 
This must have been the passage which Mr. Sully had in view when
he very justly wrote that Von Hartmann “dogmatically closes
the field of physical inquiry, and takes refuge in a phantom
which explains everything, simply because it is itself incapable
of explanation.”

According to Von Hartmann [139b] the unpractised
animal manifests its instinct as perfectly as the
practised.  This is not the case.  The young animal
exhibits marvellous proficiency, but it gains by
experience.  I have watched sparrows, which I can hardly
doubt to be young ones, spend a whole month in trying to build
their nest, and give it up in the end as hopeless.  I have
watched three such cases this spring in a tree not twenty feet
from my own window and on a level with my eye, so that I have
been able to see what was going on at all hours of the day. 
In each case the nest was made well and rapidly up to a certain
point, and then got top-heavy and tumbled over, so that little
was left on the tree: it was reconstructed and reconstructed over
and over again, always with the same result, till at last in all
three cases the birds gave up in despair.  I believe the
older and stronger birds secure the fixed and best sites, driving
the younger birds to the trees, and that the art of building
nests in trees is dying out among house-sparrows.

He declares that instinct is not due to organisation so much
as organisation to instinct. [140]  The fact is,
that neither can claim precedence of or pre-eminence over the
other.  Instinct and organisation are only mind and body, or
mind and matter; and these are not two separable things, but one
and inseparable, with, as it were, two sides; the one of which is
a function of the other.  There was never yet either matter
without mind, however low, nor mind, however high, without a
material body of some sort; there can be no change in one without
a corresponding change in the other; neither came before the
other; neither can either cease to change or cease to be; for
“to be” is to continue changing, so that “to
be” and “to change” are one.

Whence, he asks, comes the desire to gratify an instinct
before experience of the pleasure that will ensue on
gratification?  This is a pertinent question, but it is met
by Professor Hering with the answer that this is due to
memory—to the continuation in the germ of vibrations that
were vibrating in the body of the parent, and which, when
stimulated by vibrations of a suitable rhythm, become more and
more powerful till they suffice to set the body in visible
action.  For my own part I only venture to maintain that it
is due to memory, that is to say, to an enduring sense on the
part of the germ of the action it took when in the persons of its
ancestors, and of the gratification which ensued thereon. 
This meets Von Hartmann’s whole difficulty.

The glacier is not snow.  It is snow packed tight into a
small compass, and has thus lost all trace of its original
form.  How incomplete, however, would be any theory of
glacial action which left out of sight the origin of the glacier
in snow!  Von Hartmann loses sight of the origin of
instinctive in deliberative actions because the two classes of
action are now in many respects different.  His philosophy
of the unconscious fails to consider what is the normal process
by means of which such common actions as we can watch, and whose
history we can follow, have come to be done unconsciously.

He says, [141] “How inconceivable is the
supposition of a mechanism, &c., &c.; how clear and
simple, on the other hand, is the view that there is an
unconscious purpose constraining the volition of the bird to the
use of the fitting means.”  Does he mean that there is
an actual thing—an unconscious purpose—something
outside the bird, as it were a man, which lays hold of the bird
and makes it do this or that, as a master makes a servant do his
bidding?  If so, he again personifies the purpose itself,
and must therefore embody it, or be talking in a manner which
plain people cannot understand.  If, on the other hand, he
means “how simple is the view that the bird acts
unconsciously,” this is not more simple than supposing it
to act consciously; and what ground has he for supposing that the
bird is unconscious?  It is as simple, and as much in
accordance with the facts, to suppose that the bird feels the air
to be colder, and knows that she must warm her eggs if she is to
hatch them, as consciously as a mother knows that she must not
expose her new-born infant to the cold.

On page 99 of this book we find Von Hartmann saying that if it
is once granted that the normal and abnormal manifestations of
instinct spring from a single source, then the objection that the
modification is due to conscious knowledge will be found to be a
suicidal one later on, in so far as it is directed against
instinct generally.  I understand him to mean that if we
admit instinctive action, and the modifications of that action
which more nearly resemble results of reason, to be actions of
the same ultimate kind differing in degree only, and if we thus
attempt to reduce instinctive action to the prophetic strain
arising from old experience, we shall be obliged to admit that
the formation of the embryo is ultimately due to
reflection—which he seems to think is a reductio ad
absurdum of the argument.

Therefore, he concludes, if there is to be only one source,
the source must be unconscious, and not conscious.  We
reply, that we do not see the absurdity of the position which we
grant we have been driven to.  We hold that the formation of
the embryo is ultimately due to reflection and design.

The writer of an article in the Times, April 1, 1880,
says that servants must be taught their calling before they can
practise it; but, in fact, they can only be taught their calling
by practising it.  So Von Hartmann says animals must feel
the pleasure consequent on gratification of an instinct before
they can be stimulated to act upon the instinct by a knowledge of
the pleasure that will ensue.  This sounds logical, but in
practice a little performance and a little teaching—a
little sense of pleasure and a little connection of that pleasure
with this or that practice,—come up simultaneously from
something that we cannot see, the two being so small and so much
abreast, that we do not know which is first, performance or
teaching; and, again, action, or pleasure supposed as coming from
the action.

“Geistes-mechanismus” comes as near to
“disposition of mind,” or, more shortly,
“disposition,” as so unsatisfactory a word can come
to anything.  Yet, if we translate it throughout by
“disposition,” we shall see how little we are being
told.

We find on page 114 that “all instinctive actions give
us an impression of absolute security and infallibility”;
that “the will is never weak or hesitating, as it is when
inferences are being drawn consciously.”  “We
never,” Von Hartmann continues, “find instinct making
mistakes.”  Passing over the fact that instinct is
again personified, the statement is still incorrect. 
Instinctive actions are certainly, as a general rule, performed
with less uncertainty than deliberative ones; this is explicable
by the fact that they have been more often practised, and thus
reduced more completely to a matter of routine; but nothing is
more certain than that animals acting under the guidance of
inherited experience or instinct frequently make mistakes which
with further practice they correct.  Von Hartmann has
abundantly admitted that the manner of an instinctive action is
often varied in correspondence with variation in external
circumstances.  It is impossible to see how this does not
involve both possibility of error and the connection of instinct
with deliberation at one and the same time.  The fact is
simply this—when an animal finds itself in a like position
with that in which it has already often done a certain thing in
the persons of its forefathers, it will do this thing well and
easily: when it finds the position somewhat, but not
unrecognisably, altered through change either in its own person
or in the circumstances exterior to it, it will vary its action
with greater or less ease according to the nature of the change
in the position: when the position is gravely altered the animal
either bungles or is completely thwarted.

Not only does Von Hartmann suppose that instinct may, and
does, involve knowledge antecedent to, and independent of,
experience—an idea as contrary to the tendency of modern
thought as that of spontaneous generation, with which indeed it
is identical though presented in another shape—but he
implies by his frequent use of the word “unmittelbar”
that a result can come about without any cause whatever.  So
he says, “Um für die unbewusster Erkenntniss, welche
nicht durch sinnliche Wahrnehmung erworben, sondern als
unmittelbar Besitz,” &c. [144a]  Because he does not see where
the experience can have been gained, he cuts the knot, and denies
that there has been experience.  We say, Look more
attentively and you will discover the time and manner in which
the experience was gained.

Again, he continually assumes that animals low down in the
scale of life cannot know their own business because they show no
sign of knowing ours.  See his remarks on Saturnia
pavonia minor (page 107), and elsewhere on cattle and
gadflies.  The question is not what can they know, but what
does their action prove to us that they do know.  With each
species of animal or plant there is one profession only, and it
is hereditary.  With us there are many professions, and they
are not hereditary; so that they cannot become instinctive, as
they would otherwise tend to do.

He attempts [144b] to draw a distinction between the
causes that have produced the weapons and working instruments of
animals, on the one hand, and those that lead to the formation of
hexagonal cells by bees, &c., on the other.  No such
distinction can be justly drawn.

The ghost-stories which Von Hartmann accepts will hardly be
accepted by people of sound judgment.  There is one
well-marked distinctive feature between the knowledge manifested
by animals when acting instinctively and the supposed knowledge
of seers and clairvoyants.  In the first case, the animal
never exhibits knowledge except upon matters concerning which its
race has been conversant for generations; in the second, the seer
is supposed to do so.  In the first case, a new feature is
invariably attended with disturbance of the performance and the
awakening of consciousness and deliberation, unless the new
matter is too small in proportion to the remaining features of
the case to attract attention, or unless, though really new, it
appears so similar to an old feature as to be at first mistaken
for it; with the second, it is not even professed that the
seer’s ancestors have had long experience upon the matter
concerning which the seer is supposed to have special insight,
and I can imagine no more powerful à priori
argument against a belief in such stories.

Close upon the end of his chapter Von Hartmann touches upon
the one matter which requires consideration.  He refers the
similarity of instinct that is observable among all species to
the fact that like causes produce like effects; and I gather,
though he does not expressly say so, that he considers similarity
of instinct in successive generations to be referable to the same
cause as similarity of instinct between all the contemporary
members of a species.  He thus raises the one objection
against referring the phenomena of heredity to memory which I
think need be gone into with any fulness.  I will, however,
reserve this matter for my concluding chapters.

Von Hartmann concludes his chapter with a quotation from
Schelling, to the effect that the phenomena of animal instinct
are the true touchstone of a durable philosophy; by which I
suppose it is intended to say that if a system or theory deals
satisfactorily with animal instinct, it will stand, but not
otherwise.  I can wish nothing better than that the
philosophy of the unconscious advanced by Von Hartmann be tested
by this standard.

p.
146Chapter X

Recapitulation and statement of an
objection.

The true theory of unconscious
action, then, is that of Professor Hering, from whose lecture it
is no strained conclusion to gather that he holds the action of
all living beings, from the moment of their conception to that of
their fullest development, to be founded in volition and design,
though these have been so long lost sight of that the work is now
carried on, as it were, departmentally and in due course
according to an official routine which can hardly now be departed
from.

This involves the older “Darwinism” and the theory
of Lamarck, according to which the modification of living forms
has been effected mainly through the needs of the living forms
themselves, which vary with varying conditions, the survival of
the fittest (which, as I see Mr. H. B. Baildon has just said,
“sometimes comes to mean merely the survival of the
survivors” [146]) being taken almost as a matter of
course.  According to this view of evolution, there is a
remarkable analogy between the development of living organs or
tools and that of those organs or tools external to the body
which has been so rapid during the last few thousand years.

Animals and plants, according to Professor Hering, are guided
throughout their development, and preserve the due order in each
step which they take, through memory of the course they took on
past occasions when in the persons of their ancestors.  I am
afraid I have already too often said that if this memory remains
for long periods together latent and without effect, it is
because the undulations of the molecular substance of the body
which are its supposed explanation are during these periods too
feeble to generate action, until they are augmented in force
through an accession of suitable undulations issuing from
exterior objects; or, in other words, until recollection is
stimulated by a return of the associated ideas.  On this the
eternal agitation becomes so much enhanced, that equilibrium is
visibly disturbed, and the action ensues which is proper to the
vibration of the particular substance under the particular
conditions.  This, at least, is what I suppose Professor
Hering to intend.

Leaving the explanation of memory on one side, and confining
ourselves to the fact of memory only, a caterpillar on being just
hatched is supposed, according to this theory, to lose its memory
of the time it was in the egg, and to be stimulated by an intense
but unconscious recollection of the action taken by its ancestors
when they were first hatched.  It is guided in the course it
takes by the experience it can thus command.  Each step it
takes recalls a new recollection, and thus it goes through its
development as a performer performs a piece of music, each bar
leading his recollection to the bar that should next follow.

In “Life and Habit” will be found examples of the
manner in which this view solves a number of difficulties for the
explanation of which the leading men of science express
themselves at a loss.  The following from Professor
Huxley’s recent work upon the crayfish may serve for an
example.  Professor Huxley writes:—

“It is a widely received notion that the
energies of living matter have a tendency to decline and finally
disappear, and that the death of the body as a whole is a
necessary correlate of its life.  That all living beings
sooner or later perish needs no demonstration, but it would be
difficult to find satisfactory grounds for the belief that they
needs must do so.  The analogy of a machine, that sooner or
later must be brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its
parts, does not hold, inasmuch as the animal mechanism is
continually renewed and repaired; and though it is true that
individual components of the body are constantly dying, yet their
places are taken by vigorous successors.  A city remains
notwithstanding the constant death-rate of its inhabitants; and
such an organism as a crayfish is only a corporate unity, made up
of innumerable partially independent
individualities.”—The Crayfish, p. 127.

Surely the theory which I have indicated above makes the
reason plain why no organism can permanently outlive its
experience of past lives.  The death of such a body
corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming
more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal
with.  Hence social disruption, insubordination, and
decay.  The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states
that we have heard of die sooner or later.  There are some
savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is
the necessary end of all living beings, and who consider even the
gentlest death from old age as violent and abnormal; so Professor
Huxley seems to find a difficulty in seeing that though a city
commonly outlives many generations of its citizens, yet cities
and states are in the end no less mortal than individuals. 
“The city,” he says, “remains.” 
Yes, but not for ever.  When Professor Huxley can find a
city that will last for ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does
not last for ever.

I have already here and elsewhere said all that I can yet
bring forward in support of Professor Hering’s theory; it
now remains for me to meet the most troublesome objection to it
that I have been able to think of—an objection which I had
before me when I wrote “Life and Habit,” but which
then as now I believe to be unsound.  Seeing, however, as I
have pointed out at the end of the preceding chapter, that Von
Hartmann has touched upon it, and being aware that a plausible
case can be made out for it, I will state it and refute it
here.  When I say refute it, I do not mean that I shall have
done with it—for it is plain that it opens up a vaster
question in the relations between the so-called organic and
inorganic worlds—but that I will refute the supposition
that it any way militates against Professor Hering’s
theory.

Why, it may be asked, should we go out of our way to invent
unconscious memory—the existence of which must at the best
remain an inference [149]—when the
observed fact that like antecedents are invariably followed by
like consequents should be sufficient for our purpose?  Why
should the fact that a given kind of chrysalis in a given
condition will always become a butterfly within a certain time be
connected with memory, when it is not pretended that memory has
anything to do with the invariableness with which oxygen and
hydrogen when mixed in certain proportions make water?

We assume confidently that if a drop of water were decomposed
into its component parts, and if these were brought together
again, and again decomposed and again brought together any number
of times over, the results would be invariably the same, whether
decomposition or combination, yet no one will refer the
invariableness of the action during each repetition, to
recollection by the gaseous molecules of the course taken when
the process was last repeated.  On the contrary, we are
assured that molecules in some distant part of the world, which
had never entered into such and such a known combination
themselves, nor held concert with other molecules that had been
so combined, and which, therefore, could have had no experience
and no memory, would none the less act upon one another in that
one way in which other like combinations of atoms have acted
under like circumstances, as readily as though they had been
combined and separated and recombined again a hundred or a
hundred thousand times.  It is this assumption, tacitly made
by every man, beast, and plant in the universe, throughout all
time and in every action of their lives, that has made any action
possible, lying, as it does, at the root of all experience.

As we admit of no doubt concerning the main result, so we do
not suppose an alternative to lie before any atom of any molecule
at any moment during the process of their combination.  This
process is, in all probability, an exceedingly complicated one,
involving a multitude of actions and subordinate processes, which
follow one upon the other, and each one of which has a beginning,
a middle, and an end, though they all come to pass in what
appears to be an instant of time.  Yet at no point do we
conceive of any atom as swerving ever such a little to right or
left of a determined course, but invest each one of them with so
much of the divine attributes as that with it there shall be no
variableness, neither shadow of turning.

We attribute this regularity of action to what we call the
necessity of things, as determined by the nature of the atoms and
the circumstances in which they are placed.  We say that
only one proximate result can ever arise from any given
combination.  If, then, so great uniformity of action as
nothing can exceed is manifested by atoms to which no one will
impute memory, why this desire for memory, as though it were the
only way of accounting for regularity of action in living
beings?  Sameness of action may be seen abundantly where
there is no room for anything that we can consistently call
memory.  In these cases we say that it is due to sameness of
substance in same circumstances.

The most cursory reflection upon our actions will show us that
it is no more possible for living action to have more than one
set of proximate consequents at any given time than for oxygen
and hydrogen when mixed in the proportions proper for the
formation of water.  Why, then, not recognise this fact, and
ascribe repeated similarity of living action to the reproduction
of the necessary antecedents, with no more sense of connection
between the steps in the action, or memory of similar action
taken before, than we suppose on the part of oxygen and hydrogen
molecules between the several occasions on which they may have
been disunited and reunited?

A boy catches the measles not because he remembers having
caught them in the persons of his father and mother, but because
he is a fit soil for a certain kind of seed to grow upon. 
In like manner he should be said to grow his nose because he is a
fit combination for a nose to spring from.  Dr.
X—’s father died of angina pectoris at the age
of forty-nine; so did Dr. X—.  Can it be pretended
that Dr. X— remembered having died of angina
pectoris at the age of forty-nine when in the person of his
father, and accordingly, when he came to be forty-nine years old
himself, died also?  For this to hold, Dr. X—’s
father must have begotten him after he was dead; for the son
could not remember the father’s death before it
happened.

As for the diseases of old age, so very commonly inherited,
they are developed for the most part not only long after the
average age of reproduction, but at a time when no appreciable
amount of memory of any previous existence can remain; for a man
will not have many male ancestors who become parents at over
sixty years old, nor female ancestors who did so at over
forty.  By our own showing, therefore, recollection can have
nothing to do with the matter.  Yet who can doubt that gout
is due to inheritance as much as eyes and noses?  In what
respects do the two things differ so that we should refer the
inheritance of eyes and noses to memory, while denying any
connection between memory and gout?  We may have a ghost of
a pretence for saying that a man grew a nose by rote, or even
that he catches the measles or whooping-cough by rote during his
boyhood; but do we mean to say that he develops the gout by rote
in his old age if he comes of a gouty family?  If, then,
rote and red-tape have nothing to do with the one, why should
they with the other?

Remember also the cases in which aged females develop male
characteristics.  Here are growths, often of not
inconsiderable extent, which make their appearance during the
decay of the body, and grow with greater and greater vigour in
the extreme of old age, and even for days after death
itself.  It can hardly be doubted that an especial tendency
to develop these characteristics runs as an inheritance in
certain families; here then is perhaps the best case that can be
found of a development strictly inherited, but having clearly
nothing whatever to do with memory.  Why should not all
development stand upon the same footing?

A friend who had been arguing with me for some time as above,
concluded with the following words:—

“If you cannot be content with the similar
action of similar substances (living or non-living) under similar
circumstances—if you cannot accept this as an ultimate
fact, but consider it necessary to connect repetition of similar
action with memory before you can rest in it and be
thankful—be consistent, and introduce this memory which you
find so necessary into the inorganic world also.  Either say
that a chrysalis becomes a butterfly because it is the thing that
it is, and, being that kind of thing, must act in such and such a
manner and in such a manner only, so that the act of one
generation has no more to do with the act of the next than the
fact of cream being churned into butter in a dairy one day has to
do with other cream being churnable into butter in the following
week—either say this, or else develop some mental
condition—which I have no doubt you will be very well able
to do if you feel the want of it—in which you can make out
a case for saying that oxygen and hydrogen on being brought
together, and cream on being churned, are in some way acquainted
with, and mindful of, action taken by other cream and other
oxygen and hydrogen on past occasions.”

I felt inclined to reply that my friend need not twit me with
being able to develop a mental organism if I felt the need of it,
for his own ingenious attack on my position, and indeed every
action of his life was but an example of this omnipresent
principle.

When he was gone, however, I thought over what he had been
saying.  I endeavoured to see how far I could get on without
volition and memory, and reasoned as follows:—A repetition
of like antecedents will be certainly followed by a repetition of
like consequents, whether the agents be men and women or chemical
substances.  “If there be two cowards perfectly
similar in every respect, and if they be subjected in a perfectly
similar way to two terrifying agents, which are themselves
perfectly similar, there are few who will not expect a perfect
similarity in the running away, even though ten thousand years
intervene between the original combination and its
repetition.” [153]  Here
certainly there is no coming into play of memory, more than in
the pan of cream on two successive churning days, yet the action
is similar.

A clerk in an office has an hour in the middle of the day for
dinner.  About half-past twelve he begins to feel hungry; at
once he takes down his hat and leaves the office.  He does
not yet know the neighbourhood, and on getting down into the
street asks a policeman at the corner which is the best
eating-house within easy distance.  The policeman tells him
of three houses, one of which is a little farther off than the
other two, but is cheaper.  Money being a greater object to
him than time, the clerk decides on going to the cheaper
house.  He goes, is satisfied, and returns.

Next day he wants his dinner at the same hour, and—it
will be said—remembering his satisfaction of yesterday,
will go to the same place as before.  But what has his
memory to do with it?  Suppose him to have entirely
forgotten all the circumstances of the preceding day from the
moment of his beginning to feel hungry onward, though in other
respects sound in mind and body, and unchanged generally. 
At half-past twelve he would begin to be hungry; but his
beginning to be hungry cannot be connected with his remembering
having begun to be hungry yesterday.  He would begin to be
hungry just as much whether he remembered or no.  At one
o’clock he again takes down his hat and leaves the office,
not because he remembers having done so yesterday, but because he
wants his hat to go out with.  Being again in the street,
and again ignorant of the neighbourhood (for he remembers nothing
of yesterday), he sees the same policeman at the corner of the
street, and asks him the same question as before; the policeman
gives him the same answer, and money being still an object to
him, the cheapest eating-house is again selected; he goes there,
finds the same menu, makes the same choice for the same
reasons, eats, is satisfied, and returns.

What similarity of action can be greater than this, and at the
same time more incontrovertible?  But it has nothing to do
with memory; on the contrary, it is just because the clerk has no
memory that his action of the second day so exactly resembles
that of the first.  As long as he has no power of
recollecting, he will day after day repeat the same actions in
exactly the same way, until some external circumstances, such as
his being sent away, modify the situation.  Till this or
some other modification occurs, he will day after day go down
into the street without knowing where to go; day after day he
will see the same policeman at the corner of the same street, and
(for we may as well suppose that the policeman has no memory too)
he will ask and be answered, and ask and be answered, till he and
the policeman die of old age.  This similarity of action is
plainly due to that—whatever it is—which ensures that
like persons or things when placed in like circumstances shall
behave in like manner.

Allow the clerk ever such a little memory, and the similarity
of action will disappear; for the fact of remembering what
happened to him on the first day he went out in search of dinner
will be a modification in him in regard to his then condition
when he next goes out to get his dinner.  He had no such
memory on the first day, and he has upon the second.  Some
modification of action must ensue upon this modification of the
actor, and this is immediately observable.  He wants his
dinner, indeed, goes down into the street, and sees the policeman
as yesterday, but he does not ask the policeman; he remembers
what the policeman told him and what he did, and therefore goes
straight to the eating-house without wasting time: nor does he
dine off the same dish two days running, for he remembers what he
had yesterday and likes variety.  If, then, similarity of
action is rather hindered than promoted by memory, why introduce
it into such cases as the repetition of the embryonic processes
by successive generations?  The embryos of a well-fixed
breed, such as the goose, are almost as much alike as water is to
water, and by consequence one goose comes to be almost as like
another as water to water.  Why should it not be supposed to
become so upon the same grounds—namely, that it is made of
the same stuffs, and put together in like proportions in the same
manner?

p.
156Chapter XI

On Cycles.

The one faith on which all normal
living beings consciously or unconsciously act, is that like
antecedents will be followed by like consequents.  This is
the one true and catholic faith, undemonstrable, but except a
living being believe which, without doubt it shall perish
everlastingly.  In the assurance of this all action is
taken.

But if this fundamental article is admitted, and it cannot be
gainsaid, it follows that if ever a complete cycle were formed,
so that the whole universe of one instant were to repeat itself
absolutely in a subsequent one, no matter after what interval of
time, then the course of the events between these two moments
would go on repeating itself for ever and ever afterwards in due
order, down to the minutest detail, in an endless series of
cycles like a circulating decimal.  For the universe
comprises everything; there could therefore be no disturbance
from without.  Once a cycle, always a cycle.

Let us suppose the earth, of given weight, moving with given
momentum in a given path, and under given conditions in every
respect, to find itself at any one time conditioned in all these
respects as it was conditioned at some past moment; then it must
move exactly in the same path as the one it took when at the
beginning of the cycle it has just completed, and must therefore
in the course of time fulfil a second cycle, and therefore a
third, and so on for ever and ever, with no more chance of escape
than a circulating decimal has, if the circumstances have been
reproduced with perfect accuracy.

We see something very like this actually happen in the yearly
revolutions of the planets round the sun.  But the relations
between, we will say, the earth and the sun are not reproduced
absolutely.  These relations deal only with a small part of
the universe, and even in this small part the relation of the
parts inter se has never yet been reproduced with the
perfection of accuracy necessary for our argument.  They are
liable, moreover, to disturbance from events which may or may not
actually occur (as, for example, our being struck by a comet, or
the sun’s coming within a certain distance of another sun),
but of which, if they do occur, no one can foresee the
effects.  Nevertheless the conditions have been so nearly
repeated that there is no appreciable difference in the relations
between the earth and sun on one New Year’s Day and on
another, nor is there reason for expecting such change within any
reasonable time.

If there is to be an eternal series of cycles involving the
whole universe, it is plain that not one single atom must be
excluded.  Exclude a single molecule of hydrogen from the
ring, or vary the relative positions of two molecules only, and
the charm is broken; an element of disturbance has been
introduced, of which the utmost that can be said is that it may
not prevent the ensuing of a long series of very nearly perfect
cycles before similarity in recurrence is destroyed, but which
must inevitably prevent absolute identity of repetition. 
The movement of the series becomes no longer a cycle, but spiral,
and convergent or divergent at a greater or less rate according
to circumstances.  We cannot conceive of all the atoms in
the universe standing twice over in absolutely the same relation
each one of them to every other.  There are too many of them
and they are too much mixed; but, as has been just said, in the
planets and their satellites we do see large groups of atoms
whose movements recur with some approach to precision.  The
same holds good also with certain comets and with the sun
himself.  The result is that our days and nights and seasons
follow one another with nearly perfect regularity from year to
year, and have done so for as long time as we know anything for
certain.  A vast preponderance of all the action that takes
place around us is cycular action.

Within the great cycle of the planetary revolution of our own
earth, and as a consequence thereof, we have the minor cycle of
the phenomena of the seasons; these generate atmospheric
cycles.  Water is evaporated from the ocean and conveyed to
mountain ranges, where it is cooled, and whence it returns again
to the sea.  This cycle of events is being repeated again
and again with little appreciable variation.  The tides and
winds in certain latitudes go round and round the world with what
amounts to continuous regularity.—There are storms of wind
and rain called cyclones.  In the case of these, the cycle
is not very complete, the movement, therefore, is spiral, and the
tendency to recur is comparatively soon lost.  It is a
common saying that history repeats itself, so that anarchy will
lead to despotism and despotism to anarchy; every nation can
point to instances of men’s minds having gone round and
round so nearly in a perfect cycle that many revolutions have
occurred before the cessation of a tendency to recur. 
Lastly, in the generation of plants and animals we have, perhaps,
the most striking and common example of the inevitable tendency
of all action to repeat itself when it has once proximately done
so.  Let only one living being have once succeeded in
producing a being like itself, and thus have returned, so to
speak, upon itself, and a series of generations must follow of
necessity, unless some matter interfere which had no part in the
original combination, and, as it may happen, kill the first
reproductive creature or all its descendants within a few
generations.  If no such mishap occurs as this, and if the
recurrence of the conditions is sufficiently perfect, a series of
generations follows with as much certainty as a series of seasons
follows upon the cycle of the relations between the earth and
sun.  Let the first periodically recurring
substance—we will say A—be able to recur or reproduce
itself, not once only, but many times over, as A¹,
A², &c.; let A also have consciousness and a sense
of self-interest, which qualities must, ex hypothesi, be
reproduced in each one of its offspring; let these get placed in
circumstances which differ sufficiently to destroy the cycle in
theory without doing so practically—that is to say, to
reduce the rotation to a spiral, but to a spiral with so little
deviation from perfect cycularity as for each revolution to
appear practically a cycle, though after many revolutions the
deviation becomes perceptible; then some such differentiations of
animal and vegetable life as we actually see follow as matters of
course.  A¹ and A² have a sense of
self-interest as A had, but they are not precisely in
circumstances similar to A’s, nor, it may be, to each
other’s; they will therefore act somewhat differently, and
every living being is modified by a change of action. 
Having become modified, they follow the spirit of A’s
action more essentially in begetting a creature like themselves
than in begetting one like A; for the essence of A’s act
was not the reproduction of A, but the reproduction of a creature
like the one from which it sprung—that is to say, a
creature bearing traces in its body of the main influences that
have worked upon its parent.

Within the cycle of reproduction there are cycles upon cycles
in the life of each individual, whether animal or plant. 
Observe the action of our lungs and heart, how regular it is, and
how a cycle having been once established, it is repeated many
millions of times in an individual of average health and
longevity.  Remember also that it is this
periodicity—this inevitable tendency of all atoms in
combination to repeat any combination which they have once
repeated, unless forcibly prevented from doing so—which
alone renders nine-tenths of our mechanical inventions of
practical use to us.  There is no internal periodicity about
a hammer or a saw, but there is in the steam-engine or watermill
when once set in motion.  The actions of these machines
recur in a regular series, at regular intervals, with the
unerringness of circulating decimals.

When we bear in mind, then, the omnipresence of this tendency
in the world around us, the absolute freedom from exception which
attends its action, the manner in which it holds equally good
upon the vastest and the smallest scale, and the completeness of
its accord with our ideas of what must inevitably happen when a
like combination is placed in circumstances like those in which
it was placed before—when we bear in mind all this, is it
possible not to connect the facts together, and to refer cycles
of living generations to the same unalterableness in the action
of like matter under like circumstances which makes Jupiter and
Saturn revolve round the sun, or the piston of a steam-engine
move up and down as long as the steam acts upon it?

But who will attribute memory to the hands of a clock, to a
piston-rod, to air or water in a storm or in course of
evaporation, to the earth and planets in their circuits round the
sun, or to the atoms of the universe, if they too be moving in a
cycle vaster than we can take account of? [160]  And if not, why introduce it
into the embryonic development of living beings, when there is
not a particle of evidence in support of its actual presence,
when regularity of action can be ensured just as well without it
as with it, and when at the best it is considered as existing
under circumstances which it baffles us to conceive, inasmuch as
it is supposed to be exercised without any conscious
recollection?  Surely a memory which is exercised without
any consciousness of recollecting is only a periphrasis for the
absence of any memory at all.

p.
161Chapter XII

Refutation—Memory at once a promoter and
a disturber of uniformity of action and structure.

To meet the objections in the two
foregoing chapters, I need do little more than show that the fact
of certain often inherited diseases and developments, whether of
youth or old age, being obviously not due to a memory on the part
of offspring of like diseases and developments in the parents,
does not militate against supposing that embryonic and youthful
development generally is due to memory.

This is the main part of the objection; the rest resolves
itself into an assertion that there is no evidence in support of
instinct and embryonic development being due to memory, and a
contention that the necessity of each particular moment in each
particular case is sufficient to account for the facts without
the introduction of memory.

I will deal with these two last points briefly first.  As
regards the evidence in support of the theory that instinct and
growth are due to a rapid unconscious memory of past experiences
and developments in the persons of the ancestors of the living
form in which they appear, I must refer my readers to “Life
and Habit,” and to the translation of Professor
Hering’s lecture given in this volume.  I will only
repeat here that a chrysalis, we will say, is as much one and the
same person with the chrysalis of its preceding generation, as
this last is one and the same person with the egg or caterpillar
from which it sprang.  You cannot deny personal identity
between two successive generations without sooner or later
denying it during the successive stages in the single life of
what we call one individual; nor can you admit personal identity
through the stages of a long and varied life (embryonic and
postnatal) without admitting it to endure through an endless
series of generations.

The personal identity of successive generations being
admitted, the possibility of the second of two generations
remembering what happened to it in the first is obvious. 
The à priori objection, therefore, is removed, and
the question becomes one of fact—does the offspring act as
if it remembered?

The answer to this question is not only that it does so act,
but that it is not possible to account for either its development
or its early instinctive actions upon any other hypothesis than
that of its remembering, and remembering exceedingly well.

The only alternative is to declare with Von Hartmann that a
living being may display a vast and varied information concerning
all manner of details, and be able to perform most intricate
operations, independently of experience and practice.  Once
admit knowledge independent of experience, and farewell to sober
sense and reason from that moment.

Firstly, then, we show that offspring has had every facility
for remembering; secondly, that it shows every appearance of
having remembered; thirdly, that no other hypothesis except
memory can be brought forward, so as to account for the phenomena
of instinct and heredity generally, which is not easily reducible
to an absurdity.  Beyond this we do not care to go, and must
allow those to differ from us who require further evidence.

As regards the argument that the necessity of each moment will
account for likeness of result, without there being any need for
introducing memory, I admit that likeness of consequents is due
to likeness of antecedents, and I grant this will hold as good
with embryos as with oxygen and hydrogen gas; what will cover the
one will cover the other, for time writs of the laws common to
all matter run within the womb as freely as elsewhere; but
admitting that there are combinations into which living beings
enter with a faculty called memory which has its effect upon
their conduct, and admitting that such combinations are from time
to time repeated (as we observe in the case of a practised
performer playing a piece of music which he has committed to
memory), then I maintain that though, indeed, the likeness of one
performance to its immediate predecessor is due to likeness of
the combinations immediately preceding the two performances, yet
memory plays so important a part in both these combinations as to
make it a distinguishing feature in them, and therefore proper to
be insisted upon.  We do not, for example, say that Herr
Joachim played such and such a sonata without the music, because
he was such and such an arrangement of matter in such and such
circumstances, resembling those under which he played without
music on some past occasion.  This goes without saying; we
say only that he played the music by heart or by memory, as he
had often played it before.

To the objector that a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis not
because it remembers and takes the action taken by its fathers
and mothers in due course before it, but because when matter is
in such a physical and mental state as to be called caterpillar,
it must perforce assume presently such another physical and
mental state as to be called chrysalis, and that therefore there
is no memory in the case—to this objector I rejoin that the
offspring caterpillar would not have become so like the parent as
to make the next or chrysalis stage a matter of necessity, unless
both parent and offspring had been influenced by something that
we usually call memory.  For it is this very possession of a
common memory which has guided the offspring into the path taken
by, and hence to a virtually same condition with, the parent, and
which guided the parent in its turn to a state virtually
identical with a corresponding state in the existence of its own
parent.  To memory, therefore, the most prominent place in
the transaction is assigned rightly.

To deny that will guided by memory has anything to do with the
development of embryos seems like denying that a desire to
obstruct has anything to do with the recent conduct of certain
members in the House of Commons.  What should we think of
one who said that the action of these gentlemen had nothing to do
with a desire to embarrass the Government, but was simply the
necessary outcome of the chemical and mechanical forces at work,
which being such and such, the action which we see is inevitable,
and has therefore nothing to do with wilful obstruction?  We
should answer that there was doubtless a great deal of chemical
and mechanical action in the matter; perhaps, for aught we knew
or cared, it was all chemical and mechanical; but if so, then a
desire to obstruct parliamentary business is involved in certain
kinds of chemical and mechanical action, and that the kinds
involving this had preceded the recent proceedings of the members
in question.  If asked to prove this, we can get no further
than that such action as has been taken has never yet been seen
except as following after and in consequence of a desire to
obstruct; that this is our nomenclature, and that we can no more
be expected to change it than to change our mother tongue at the
bidding of a foreigner.

A little reflection will convince the reader that he will be
unable to deny will and memory to the embryo without at the same
time denying their existence everywhere, and maintaining that
they have no place in the acquisition of a habit, nor indeed in
any human action.  He will feel that the actions, and the
relation of one action to another which he observes in embryos is
such as is never seen except in association with and as a
consequence of will and memory.  He will therefore say that
it is due to will and memory.  To say that these are the
necessary outcome of certain antecedents is not to destroy them:
granted that they are—a man does not cease to be a man when
we reflect that he has had a father and mother, nor do will and
memory cease to be will and memory on the ground that they cannot
come causeless.  They are manifest minute by minute to the
perception of all sane people, and this tribunal, though not
infallible, is nevertheless our ultimate court of
appeal—the final arbitrator in all disputed cases.

We must remember that there is no action, however original or
peculiar, which is not in respect of far the greater number of
its details founded upon memory.  If a desperate man blows
his brains out—an action which he can do once in a lifetime
only, and which none of his ancestors can have done before
leaving offspring—still nine hundred and ninety-nine
thousandths of the movements necessary to achieve his end consist
of habitual movements—movements, that is to say, which were
once difficult, but which have been practised and practised by
the help of memory until they are now performed
automatically.  We can no more have an action than a
creative effort of the imagination cut off from memory. 
Ideas and actions seem almost to resemble matter and force in
respect of the impossibility of originating or destroying them;
nearly all that are, are memories of other ideas and actions,
transmitted but not created, disappearing but not perishing.

It appears, then, that when in Chapter X. we supposed the
clerk who wanted his dinner to forget on a second day the action
he had taken the day before, we still, without perhaps perceiving
it, supposed him to be guided by memory in all the details of his
action, such as his taking down his hat and going out into the
street.  We could not, indeed, deprive him of all memory
without absolutely paralysing his action.

Nevertheless new ideas, new faiths, and new actions do in the
course of time come about, the living expressions of which we may
see in the new forms of life which from time to time have arisen
and are still arising, and in the increase of our own knowledge
and mechanical inventions.  But it is only a very little new
that is added at a time, and that little is generally due to the
desire to attain an end which cannot be attained by any of the
means for which there exists a perceived precedent in the
memory.  When this is the case, either the memory is further
ransacked for any forgotten shreds of details, a combination of
which may serve the desired purpose; or action is taken in the
dark, which sometimes succeeds and becomes a fertile source of
further combinations; or we are brought to a dead stop.  All
action is random in respect of any of the minute actions which
compose it that are not done in consequence of memory, real or
supposed.  So that random, or action taken in the dark, or
illusion, lies at the very root of progress.

I will now consider the objection that the phenomena of
instinct and embryonic development ought not to be ascribed to
memory, inasmuch as certain other phenomena of heredity, such as
gout, cannot be ascribed to it.

Those who object in this way forget that our actions fall into
two main classes: those which we have often repeated before by
means of a regular series of subordinate actions beginning and
ending at a certain tolerably well-defined point—as when
Herr Joachim plays a sonata in public, or when we dress or
undress ourselves; and actions the details of which are indeed
guided by memory, but which in their general scope and purpose
are new—as when we are being married or presented at
court.

At each point in any action of the first of the two kinds
above referred to there is a memory (conscious or unconscious
according to the less or greater number of times the action has
been repeated), not only of the steps in the present and previous
performances which have led up to the particular point that may
be selected, but also of the particular point itself; there is,
therefore, at each point in a habitual performance a memory at
once of like antecedents and of a like present.

If the memory, whether of the antecedent or the present, were
absolutely perfect; if the vibration (according to Professor
Hering) on each repetition existed in its full original strength
and without having been interfered with by any other vibration;
and if, again, the new wave running into it from exterior objects
on each repetition of the action were absolutely identical in
character with the wave that ran in upon the last occasion, then
there would be no change in the action and no modification or
improvement could take place.  For though indeed the latest
performance would always have one memory more than the latest but
one to guide it, yet the memories being identical, it would not
matter how many or how few they were.

On any repetition, however, the circumstances, external or
internal, or both, never are absolutely identical: there is some
slight variation in each individual case, and some part of this
variation is remembered, with approbation or disapprobation as
the case may be.

The fact, therefore, that on each repetition of the action
there is one memory more than on the last but one, and that this
memory is slightly different from its predecessor, is seen to be
an inherent and, ex hypothesi, necessarily disturbing
factor in all habitual action—and the life of an organism
should be regarded as the habitual action of a single individual,
namely, of the organism itself, and of its ancestors.  This
is the key to accumulation of improvement, whether in the arts
which we assiduously practise during our single life, or in the
structures and instincts of successive generations.  The
memory does not complete a true circle, but is, as it were, a
spiral slightly divergent therefrom.  It is no longer a
perfectly circulating decimal.  Where, on the other hand,
there is no memory of a like present, where, in fact, the memory
is not, so to speak, spiral, there is no accumulation of
improvement.  The effect of any variation is not
transmitted, and is not thus pregnant of still further
change.

As regards the second of the two classes of actions above
referred to—those, namely, which are not recurrent or
habitual, and at no point of which is there a memory of a past
present like the one which is present now—there will
have been no accumulation of strong and well-knit memory as
regards the action as a whole, but action, if taken at all, will
be taken upon disjointed fragments of individual actions (our own
and those of other people) pieced together with a result more or
less satisfactory according to circumstances.

But it does not follow that the action of two people who have
had tolerably similar antecedents and are placed in tolerably
similar circumstances should be more unlike each other in this
second case than in the first.  On the contrary, nothing is
more common than to observe the same kind of people making the
same kind of mistake when placed for the first time in the same
kind of new circumstances.  I did not say that there would
be no sameness of action without memory of a like present. 
There may be sameness of action proceeding from a memory,
conscious or unconscious, of like antecedents, and a presence
only of like presents without recollection of the same.

The sameness of action of like persons placed under like
circumstances for the first time, resembles the sameness of
action of inorganic matter under the same combinations.  Let
us for the moment suppose what we call non-living substances to
be capable of remembering their antecedents, and that the changes
they undergo are the expressions of their recollections. 
Then I admit, of course, that there is not memory in any cream,
we will say, that is about to be churned of the cream of the
preceding week, but the common absence of such memory from each
week’s cream is an element of sameness between the
two.  And though no cream can remember having been churned
before, yet all cream in all time has had nearly identical
antecedents, and has therefore nearly the same memories, and
nearly the same proclivities.  Thus, in fact, the cream of
one week is as truly the same as the cream of another week from
the same cow, pasture, &c., as anything is ever the same with
anything; for the having been subjected to like antecedents
engenders the closest similarity that we can conceive of, if the
substances were like to start with.

The manifest absence of any connecting memory (or memory of
like presents) from certain of the phenomena of heredity, such
as, for example, the diseases of old age, is now seen to be no
valid reason for saying that such other and far more numerous and
important phenomena as those of embryonic development are not
phenomena of memory.  Growth and the diseases of old age do
indeed, at first sight, appear to stand on the same footing, but
reflection shows us that the question whether a certain result is
due to memory or no must be settled not by showing that
combinations into which memory does not certainly enter may yet
generate like results, and therefore considering the memory
theory disposed of, but by the evidence we may be able to adduce
in support of the fact that the second agent has actually
remembered the conduct of the first, inasmuch as he cannot be
supposed able to do what it is plain he can do, except under the
guidance of memory or experience, and can also be shown to have
had every opportunity of remembering.  When either of these
tests fails, similarity of action on the part of two agents need
not be connected with memory of a like present as well as of like
antecedents, but must, or at any rate may, be referred to memory
of like antecedents only.

Returning to a parenthesis a few pages back, in which I said
that consciousness of memory would be less or greater according
to the greater or fewer number of times that the act had been
repeated, it may be observed as a corollary to this, that the
less consciousness of memory the greater the uniformity of
action, and vice versa.  For the less consciousness
involves the memory’s being more perfect, through a larger
number (generally) of repetitions of the act that is remembered;
there is therefore a less proportionate difference in respect of
the number of recollections of this particular act between the
most recent actor and the most recent but one.  This is why
very old civilisations, as those of many insects, and the greater
number of now living organisms, appear to the eye not to change
at all.

For example, if an action has been performed only ten times,
we will say by A, B, C, &c., who are similar in all respects,
except that A acts without recollection, B with recollection of
A’s action, C with recollection of both B’s and
A’s, while J remembers the course taken by A, B, C, D, E,
F, G, H, and I—the possession of a memory by B will indeed
so change his action, as compared with A’s, that it may
well be hardly recognisable.  We saw this in our example of
the clerk who asked the policeman the way to the eating-house on
one day, but did not ask him the next, because he remembered; but
C’s action will not be so different from B’s as
B’s from A’s, for though C will act with a memory of
two occasions on which the action has been performed, while B
recollects only the original performance by A, yet B and C both
act with the guidance of a memory and experience of some kind,
while A acted without any.  Thus the clerk referred to in
Chapter X. will act on the third day much as he acted on the
second—that is to say, he will see the policeman at the
corner of the street, but will not question him.

When the action is repeated by J for the tenth time, the
difference between J’s repetition of it and I’s will
be due solely to the difference between a recollection of nine
past performances by J against only eight by I, and this is so
much proportionately less than the difference between a
recollection of two performances and of only one, that a less
modification of action should be expected.  At the same time
consciousness concerning an action repeated for the tenth time
should be less acute than on the first repetition.  Memory,
therefore, though tending to disturb similarity of action less
and less continually, must always cause some disturbance. 
At the same time the possession of a memory on the successive
repetitions of an action after the first, and, perhaps, the first
two or three, during which the recollection may be supposed still
imperfect, will tend to ensure uniformity, for it will be one of
the elements of sameness in the agents—they both acting by
the light of experience and memory.

During the embryonic stages and in childhood we are almost
entirely under the guidance of a practised and powerful memory of
circumstances which have been often repeated, not only in detail
and piecemeal, but as a whole, and under many slightly varying
conditions; thus the performance has become well averaged and
matured in its arrangements, so as to meet all ordinary
emergencies.  We therefore act with great unconsciousness
and vary our performances little.  Babies are much more
alike than persons of middle age.

Up to the average age at which our ancestors have had children
during many generations, we are still guided in great measure by
memory; but the variations in external circumstances begin to
make themselves perceptible in our characters.  In middle
life we live more and more continually upon the piecing together
of details of memory drawn from our personal experience, that is
to say, upon the memory of our own antecedents; and this
resembles the kind of memory we hypothetically attached to cream
a little time ago.  It is not surprising, then, that a son
who has inherited his father’s tastes and constitution, and
who lives much as his father had done, should make the same
mistakes as his father did when he reaches his father’s
age—we will say of seventy—though he cannot possibly
remember his father’s having made the mistakes.  It
were to be wished we could, for then we might know better how to
avoid gout, cancer, or what not.  And it is to be noticed
that the developments of old age are generally things we should
be glad enough to avoid if we knew how to do so.

p.
173Chapter XIII

Conclusion.

If we observed the resemblance
between successive generations to be as close as that between
distilled water and distilled water through all time, and if we
observed that perfect unchangeableness in the action of living
beings which we see in what we call chemical and mechanical
combinations, we might indeed suspect that memory had as little
place among the causes of their action as it can have in
anything, and that each repetition, whether of a habit or the
practice of art, or of an embryonic process in successive
generations, was an original performance, for all that memory had
to do with it.  I submit, however, that in the case of the
reproductive forms of life we see just so much variety, in spite
of uniformity, as is consistent with a repetition involving not
only a nearly perfect similarity in the agents and their
circumstances, but also the little departure therefrom that is
inevitably involved in the supposition that a memory of like
presents as well as of like antecedents (as distinguished from a
memory of like antecedents only) has played a part in their
development—a cyclonic memory, if the expression may be
pardoned.

There is life infinitely lower and more minute than any which
our most powerful microscopes reveal to us, but let us leave this
upon one side and begin with the amœba.  Let us
suppose that this structureless morsel of protoplasm is, for all
its structurelessness, composed of an infinite number of living
molecules, each one of them with hopes and fears of its own, and
all dwelling together like Tekke Turcomans, of whom we read that
they live for plunder only, and that each man of them is entirely
independent, acknowledging no constituted authority, but that
some among them exercise a tacit and undefined influence over the
others.  Let us suppose these molecules capable of memory,
both in their capacity as individuals, and as societies, and able
to transmit their memories to their descendants, from the
traditions of the dimmest past to the experiences of their own
lifetime.  Some of these societies will remain simple, as
having had no history, but to the greater number unfamiliar, and
therefore striking, incidents will from time to time occur,
which, when they do not disturb memory so greatly as to kill,
will leave their impression upon it.  The body or society
will remember these incidents, and be modified by them in its
conduct, and therefore more or less in its internal arrangements,
which will tend inevitably to specialisation.  This memory
of the most striking events of varied lifetimes I maintain, with
Professor Hering, to be the differentiating cause, which,
accumulated in countless generations, has led up from the
amœba to man.  If there had been no such memory, the
amœba of one generation would have exactly resembled time
amœba of the preceding, and a perfect cycle would have been
established; the modifying effects of an additional memory in
each generation have made the cycle into a spiral, and into a
spiral whose eccentricity, in the outset hardly perceptible, is
becoming greater and greater with increasing longevity and more
complex social and mechanical inventions.

We say that the chicken grows the horny tip to its beak with
which it ultimately pecks its way out of its shell, because it
remembers having grown it before, and the use it made of
it.  We say that it made it on the same principles as a man
makes a spade or a hammer, that is to say, as the joint result
both of desire and experience.  When I say experience, I
mean experience not only of what will be wanted, but also of the
details of all the means that must be taken in order to effect
this.  Memory, therefore, is supposed to guide the chicken
not only in respect of the main design, but in respect also of
every atomic action, so to speak, which goes to make up the
execution of this design.  It is not only the suggestion of
a plan which is due to memory, but, as Professor Hering has so
well said, it is the binding power of memory which alone renders
any consolidation or coherence of action possible, inasmuch as
without this no action could have parts subordinate one to
another, yet bearing upon a common end; no part of an action,
great or small, could have reference to any other part, much less
to a combination of all the parts; nothing, in fact, but ultimate
atoms of actions could ever happen—these bearing the same
relation to such an action, we will say, as a railway journey
from London to Edinburgh as a single molecule of hydrogen to a
gallon of water.  If asked how it is that the chicken shows
no sign of consciousness concerning this design, nor yet of the
steps it is taking to carry it out, we reply that such
unconsciousness is usual in all cases where an action, and the
design which prompts it, have been repeated exceedingly
often.  If, again, we are asked how we account for the
regularity with which each step is taken in its due order, we
answer that this too is characteristic of actions that are done
habitually—they being very rarely misplaced in respect of
any part.

When I wrote “Life and Habit,” I had arrived at
the conclusion that memory was the most essential characteristic
of life, and went so far as to say, “Life is that property
of matter whereby it can remember—matter which can remember
is living.”  I should perhaps have written,
“Life is the being possessed of a memory—the life of
a thing at any moment is the memories which at that moment it
retains”; and I would modify the words that immediately
follow, namely, “Matter which cannot remember is
dead”; for they imply that there is such a thing as matter
which cannot remember anything at all, and this on fuller
consideration I do not believe to be the case; I can conceive of
no matter which is not able to remember a little, and which is
not living in respect of what it can remember.  I do not see
how action of any kind is conceivable without the supposition
that every atom retains a memory of certain antecedents.  I
cannot, however, at this point, enter upon the reasons which have
compelled me to this conclusion.  Whether these would be
deemed sufficient or no, at any rate we cannot believe that a
system of self-reproducing associations should develop from the
simplicity of the amœba to the complexity of the human body
without the presence of that memory which can alone account at
once for the resemblances and the differences between successive
generations, for the arising and the accumulation of
divergences—for the tendency to differ and the tendency not
to differ.

At parting, therefore, I would recommend the reader to see
every atom in the universe as living and able to feel and to
remember, but in a humble way.  He must have life eternal,
as well as matter eternal; and the life and the matter must be
joined together inseparably as body and soul to one
another.  Thus he will see God everywhere, not as those who
repeat phrases conventionally, but as people who would have their
words taken according to their most natural and legitimate
meaning; and he will feel that the main difference between him
and many of those who oppose him lies in the fact that whereas
both he and they use the same language, his opponents only half
mean what they say, while he means it entirely.

The attempt to get a higher form of a life from a lower one is
in accordance with our observation and experience.  It is
therefore proper to be believed.  The attempt to get it from
that which has absolutely no life is like trying to get something
out of nothing.  The millionth part of a farthing put out to
interest at ten per cent, will in five hundred years become over
a million pounds, and so long as we have any millionth of a
millionth of the farthing to start with, our getting as many
million pounds as we have a fancy for is only a question of time,
but without the initial millionth of a millionth of a millionth
part, we shall get no increment whatever.  A little leaven
will leaven the whole lump, but there must be some
leaven.

I will here quote two passages from an article already quoted
from on page 55 of this book.  They run:—

“We are growing conscious that our earnest
and most determined efforts to make motion produce sensation and
volition have proved a failure, and now we want to rest a little
in the opposite, much less laborious conjecture, and allow any
kind of motion to start into existence, or at least to receive
its specific direction from psychical sources; sensation and
volition being for the purpose quietly insinuated into the
constitution of the ultimately moving particles.” [177a]

And:—

“In this light it can remain no longer
surprising that we actually find motility and sensibility so
intimately interblended in nature.” [177b]

We should endeavour to see the so-called inorganic as living,
in respect of the qualities it has in common with the organic,
rather than the organic as non-living in respect of the qualities
it has in common with the inorganic.  True, it would be hard
to place one’s self on the same moral platform as a stone,
but this is not necessary; it is enough that we should feel the
stone to have a moral platform of its own, though that platform
embraces little more than a profound respect for the laws of
gravitation, chemical affinity, &c.  As for the
difficulty of conceiving a body as living that has not got a
reproductive system—we should remember that neuter insects
are living but are believed to have no reproductive system. 
Again, we should bear in mind that mere assimilation involves all
the essentials of reproduction, and that both air and water
possess this power in a very high degree.  The essence of a
reproductive system, then, is found low down in the scheme of
nature.

At present our leading men of science are in this difficulty;
on the one hand their experiments and their theories alike teach
them that spontaneous generation ought not to be accepted; on the
other, they must have an origin for the life of the living forms,
which, by their own theory, have been evolved, and they can at
present get this origin in no other way than by the Deus ex
machinâ method, which they reject as unproved, or a
spontaneous generation of living from non-living matter, which is
no less foreign to their experience.  As a general rule,
they prefer the latter alternative.  So Professor Tyndall,
in his celebrated article (Nineteenth Century, November
1878), wrote:—

“It is generally conceded (and seems to be a
necessary inference from the lessons of science) that
spontaneous generation must at one time have taken
place” (italics mine).

No inference can well be more unnecessary or
unscientific.  I suppose spontaneous generation ceases to be
objectionable if it was “only a very little one,” and
came off a long time ago in a foreign country.  The proper
inference is, that there is a low kind of livingness in every
atom of matter.  Life eternal is as inevitable a conclusion
as matter eternal.

It should not be doubted that wherever there is vibration or
motion there is life and memory, and that there is vibration and
motion at all times in all things.

The reader who takes the above position will find that he can
explain the entry of what he calls death among what he calls the
living, whereas he could by no means introduce life into his
system if he started without it.  Death is deducible; life
is not deducible.  Death is a change of memories; it is not
the destruction of all memory.  It is as the liquidation of
one company, each member of which will presently join a new one,
and retain a trifle even of the old cancelled memory, by way of
greater aptitude for working in concert with other
molecules.  This is why animals feed on grass and on each
other, and cannot proselytise or convert the rude ground before
it has been tutored in the first principles of the higher kinds
of association.

Again, I would recommend the reader to beware of believing
anything in this book unless he either likes it, or feels angry
at being told it.  If required belief in this or that makes
a man angry, I suppose he should, as a general rule, swallow it
whole then and there upon the spot, otherwise he may take it or
leave it as he likes.  I have not gone far for my facts, nor
yet far from them; all on which I rest are as open to the reader
as to me.  If I have sometimes used hard terms, the
probability is that I have not understood them, but have done so
by a slip, as one who has caught a bad habit from the company he
has been lately keeping.  They should be skipped.

Do not let him be too much cast down by the bad language with
which professional scientists obscure the issue, nor by their
seeming to make it their business to fog us under the pretext of
removing our difficulties.  It is not the ratcatcher’s
interest to catch all the rats; and, as Handel observed so
sensibly, “Every professional gentleman must do his best
for to live.”  The art of some of our philosophers,
however, is sufficiently transparent, and consists too often in
saying “organism which must be classified among
fishes,” instead of “fish,” [179a] and then proclaiming that they have
“an ineradicable tendency to try to make things
clear.” [179b]

If another example is required, here is the following from an
article than which I have seen few with which I more completely
agree, or which have given me greater pleasure.  If our men
of science would take to writing in this way, we should be glad
enough to follow them.  The passage I refer to runs
thus:—

“Professor Huxley speaks of a ‘verbal
fog by which the question at issue may be hidden’; is there
no verbal fog in the statement that the ætiology of
crayfishes resolves itself into a gradual evolution in the course
of the mesosoic and subsequent epochs of the world’s
history of these animals from a primitive astacomorphous
form?  Would it be fog or light that would envelop the
history of man if we said that the existence of man was explained
by the hypothesis of his gradual evolution from a primitive
anthropomorphous form?  I should call this fog, not
light.” [180]

Especially let him mistrust those who are holding forth about
protoplasm, and maintaining that this is the only living
substance.  Protoplasm may be, and perhaps is, the
most living part of an organism, as the most capable of
retaining vibrations, but this is the utmost that can be claimed
for it.

Having mentioned protoplasm, I may ask the reader to note the
breakdown of that school of philosophy which divided the
ego from the non ego.  The protoplasmists, on
the one hand, are whittling away at the ego, till they
have reduced it to a little jelly in certain parts of the body,
and they will whittle away this too presently, if they go on as
they are doing now.

Others, again, are so unifying the ego and the non
ego, that with them there will soon be as little of the
non ego left as there is of the ego with their
opponents.  Both, however, are so far agreed as that we know
not where to draw the line between the two, and this renders
nugatory any system which is founded upon a distinction between
them.

The truth is, that all classification whatever, when we
examine its raison d’être closely, is found to
be arbitrary—to depend on our sense of our own convenience,
and not on any inherent distinction in the nature of the things
themselves.  Strictly speaking, there is only one thing and
one action.  The universe, or God, and the action of the
universe as a whole.

Lastly, I may predict with some certainty that before long we
shall find the original Darwinism of Dr. Erasmus Darwin (with an
infusion of Professor Hering into the bargain) generally accepted
instead of the neo-Darwinism of to-day, and that the variations
whose accumulation results in species will be recognised as due
to the wants and endeavours of the living forms in which they
appear, instead of being ascribed to chance, or, in other words,
to unknown causes, as by Mr. Charles Darwin’s system. 
We shall have some idyllic young naturalist bringing up Dr.
Erasmus Darwin’s note on Trapa natans, [181a] and Lamarck’s kindred passage
on the descent of Ranunculus hederaceus from Ranunculus
aquatilis [181b] as fresh discoveries, and be told,
with much happy simplicity, that those animals and plants which
have felt the need of such or such a structure have developed it,
while those which have not wanted it have gone without it. 
Thus, it will be declared, every leaf we see around us, every
structure of the minutest insect, will bear witness to the truth
of the “great guess” of the greatest of naturalists
concerning the memory of living matter.

I dare say the public will not object to this, and am very
sure that none of the admirers of Mr. Charles Darwin or Mr.
Wallace will protest against it; but it may be as well to point
out that this was not the view of the matter taken by Mr. Wallace
in 1858 when he and Mr. Darwin first came forward as preachers of
natural selection.  At that time Mr. Wallace saw clearly
enough the difference between the theory of “natural
selection” and that of Lamarck.  He wrote:—

“The hypothesis of Lamarck—that
progressive changes in species have been produced by the attempts
of animals to increase the development of their own organs, and
thus modify their structure and habits—has been repeatedly
and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and
species, . . . but the view here developed tenders such an
hypothesis quite unnecessary. . . .  The powerful retractile
talons of the falcon and the cat tribes have not been produced or
increased by the volition of those animals, neither did the
giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of
the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for
this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its
antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a
fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their
shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of
food were thereby enabled to outlive them” (italics in
original). [182a]

This is absolutely the neo-Darwinian doctrine, and a denial of
the mainly fortuitous character of the variations in animal and
vegetable forms cuts at its root.  That Mr. Wallace, after
years of reflection, still adhered to this view, is proved by his
heading a reprint of the paragraph just quoted from [182b] with the words “Lamarck’s
hypothesis very different from that now advanced”; nor do
any of his more recent works show that he has modified his
opinion.  It should be noted that Mr. Wallace does not call
his work “Contributions to the Theory of Evolution,”
but to that of “Natural Selection.”

Mr. Darwin, with characteristic caution, only commits himself
to saying that Mr. Wallace has arrived at almost (italics
mine) the same general conclusions as he, Mr. Darwin, has done;
[182c] but he still, as in 1859, declares
that it would be “a serious error to suppose that the
greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one
generation, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding
generations,” [183a] and he still
comprehensively condemns the “well-known doctrine of
inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck.” [183b]

As for the statement in the passage quoted from Mr. Wallace,
to the effect that Lamarck’s hypothesis “has been
repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of
varieties and species,” it is a very surprising one. 
I have searched Evolution literature in vain for any refutation
of the Erasmus Darwinian system (for this is what Lamarck’s
hypothesis really is) which need make the defenders of that
system at all uneasy.  The best attempt at an answer to
Erasmus Darwin that has yet been made is “Paley’s
Natural Theology,” which was throughout obviously written
to meet Buffon and the “Zoonomia.”  It is the
manner of theologians to say that such and such an objection
“has been refuted over and over again,” without at
the same time telling us when and where; it is to be regretted
that Mr. Wallace has here taken a leaf out of the
theologians’ book.  His statement is one which will
not pass muster with those whom public opinion is sure in the end
to follow.

Did Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, “repeatedly and
easily refute” Lamarck’s hypothesis in his brilliant
article in the Leader, March 20, 1852?  On the
contrary, that article is expressly directed against those
“who cavalierly reject the hypothesis of Lamarck and his
followers.”  This article was written six years before
the words last quoted from Mr. Wallace; how absolutely, however,
does the word “cavalierly” apply to them!

Does Isidore Geoffroy, again, bear Mr. Wallace’s
assertion out better?  In 1859—that is to say, but a
short time after Mr. Wallace had written—he wrote as
follows:—

“Such was the language which Lamarck heard
during his protracted old age, saddened alike by the weight of
years and blindness; this was what people did not hesitate to
utter over his grave yet barely closed, and what indeed they are
still saying—commonly too without any knowledge of what
Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at secondhand bad
caricatures of his teaching.

“When will the time come when we may see Lamarck’s
theory discussed—and, I may as well at once say, refuted in
some important points [184a]—with at
any rate the respect due to one of the most illustrious masters
of our science?  And when will this theory, the hardihood of
which has been greatly exaggerated, become freed from the
interpretations and commentaries by the false light of which so
many naturalists have formed their opinion concerning it? 
If its author is to be condemned, let it be, at any rate, not
before he has been heard.” [184b]

In 1873 M. Martin published his edition of Lamarck’s
“Philosophie Zoologique.”  He was still able to
say, with, I believe, perfect truth, that Lamarck’s theory
has “never yet had the honour of being discussed
seriously.” [184c]

Professor Huxley in his article on Evolution is no less
cavalier than Mr. Wallace.  He writes:—[184d]

“Lamarck introduced the conception of the
action of an animal on itself as a factor in producing
modification.”

[Lamarck did nothing of the kind.  It was Buffon and Dr.
Darwin who introduced this, but more especially Dr. Darwin.]

“But a little consideration
showed” (italics mine) “that though Lamarck had
seized what, as far as it goes, is a true cause of modification,
it is a cause the actual effects of which are wholly inadequate
to account for any considerable modification in animals, and
which can have no influence whatever in the vegetable world,
&c.”

I should be very glad to come across some of the “little
consideration” which will show this.  I have searched
for it far and wide, and have never been able to find it.

I think Professor Huxley has been exercising some of his
ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear in the article
on Evolution, already so often quoted from.  We find him (p.
750) pooh-poohing Lamarck, yet on the next page he says,
“How far ‘natural selection’ suffices for the
production of species remains to be seen.”  And this
when “natural selection” was already so nearly of
age!  Why, to those who know how to read between a
philosopher’s lines, the sentence comes to very nearly the
same as a declaration that the writer has no great opinion of
“natural selection.”  Professor Huxley
continues, “Few can doubt that, if not the whole cause, it
is a very important factor in that operation.”  A
philosopher’s words should be weighed carefully, and when
Professor Huxley says “few can doubt,” we must
remember that he may be including himself among the few whom he
considers to have the power of doubting on this matter.  He
does not say “few will,” but “few can”
doubt, as though it were only the enlightened who would have the
power of doing so.  Certainly
“nature,”—for this is what “natural
selection” comes to,—is rather an important factor in
the operation, but we do not gain much by being told so. 
If, however, Professor Huxley neither believes in the origin of
species, through sense of need on the part of animals themselves,
nor yet in “natural selection,” we should be glad to
know what he does believe in.

The battle is one of greater importance than appears at first
sight.  It is a battle between teleology and non-teleology,
between the purposiveness and the non-purposiveness of the organs
in animal and vegetable bodies.  According to Erasmus
Darwin, Lamarck, and Paley, organs are purposive; according to
Mr. Darwin and his followers, they are not purposive.  But
the main arguments against the system of Dr. Erasmus Darwin are
arguments which, so far as they have any weight, tell against
evolution generally.  Now that these have been disposed of,
and the prejudice against evolution has been overcome, it will be
seen that there is nothing to be said against the system of Dr.
Darwin and Lamarck which does not tell with far greater force
against that of Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Wallace.

THE END.

WILLIAM
BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

Footnotes

[0a]  This is the date on the
title-page.  The preface is dated October 15, 1886, and the
first copy was issued in November of the same year.  All the
dates are taken from the Bibliography by Mr. H. Festing Jones
prefixed to the “Extracts” in the New Quarterly
Review (1909).

[0b]  I.e. after p. 285: it bears no
number of its own!

[0c]  The distinction was merely
implicit in his published writings, but has been printed since
his death from his “Notebooks,”  New
Quarterly Review, April, 1908.  I had developed this
thesis, without knowing of Butler’s explicit anticipation
in an article then in the press: “Mechanism and
Life,” Contemporary Review, May, 1908.

[0d]  The term has recently been
revived by Prof. Hubrecht and by myself (Contemporary
Review, November 1908).

[0e]  See Fortnightly Review,
February 1908, and Contemporary Review, September and
November 1909.  Since these publications the hypnosis seems
to have somewhat weakened.

[0f]  A “hormone” is a
chemical substance which, formed in one part of the body, alters
the reactions of another part, normally for the good of the
organism.

[0g]  Mr. H. Festing Jones first
directed my attention to these passages and their bearing on the
Mutation Theory.

[0i]  He says in a note, “This
general type of reaction was described and illustrated in a
different connection by Pfluger in ‘Pfluger’s Archiv.
f.d. ges.  Physiologie,’ Bd.  XV.” 
The essay bears the significant title “Die teleologische
Mechanik der lebendigen Natur,” and is a very remarkable
one, as coming from an official physiologist in 1877, when the
chemico-physical school was nearly at its zenith.

[0j]  “Contributions to the Study
of the Lower Animals” (1904), “Modifiability in
Behaviour” and “Method of Regulability in Behaviour
and in other Fields,” in Journ. Experimental
Zoology, vol. ii. (1905).

[0h]  See “The Hereditary
Transmission of Acquired Characters” in Contemporary
Review, September and November 1908, in which references are
given to earlier statements.

[0k]  Semon’s technical terms are
exclusively taken from the Greek, but as experience tells that
plain men in England have a special dread of suchlike, I have
substituted “imprint” for “engram,”
“outcome” for “ecphoria”; for the latter
term I had thought of “efference,”
“manifestation,” etc., but decided on what looked
more homely, and at the same time was quite distinctive enough to
avoid that confusion which Semon has dodged with his
Græcisms.

[0l]  “Between the
‘me’ of to-day and the ‘me’ of yesterday
lie night and sleep, abysses of unconsciousness; nor is there any
bridge but memory with which to span
them.”—Unconscious Memory, p. 71.

[0m]  Preface by Mr. Charles Darwin to
“Erasmus Darwin.”  The Museum has copies of a
Kosmos that was published 1857–60 and then
discontinued; but this is clearly not the Kosmos referred
to by Mr. Darwin, which began to appear in 1878.

[0n]  Preface to “Erasmus
Darwin.”

[2]  May 1880.