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R. A. STREATFEILD.

IN reviewing Samuel Butler's works, "Unconscious Memory" gives us an invaluable lead; for it tells us how the author came to write the Book of the Machines in "Erewhon" , with its foreshadowing of the later theory, "Life and Habit," , "Evolution, Old and New" , as well as "Unconscious Memory" itself. His fourth book on biological theory was "Luck? or Cunning?" .

Of all these, "LIFE AND HABIT" 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: " the oneness of personality between parent and offspring; memory on the part of the 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; 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.

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 r?clame" 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" 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.

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" .--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 Ged?chtniss als allgemeine Funktion der organisirter Substanz" . 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" , Sir Ray Lankester, while including this Essay, inserts on the blank page --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.

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.

In "Unconscious Memory" the allurements of unitary or monistic views have gained the upper hand, and Butler writes :--

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 :--

"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."

"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" , 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 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 , 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 .

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" 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.

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 palaeontologists 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:--

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.

"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.

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" , being the Giffold Lectures for 1907-8. Herein he postulates a quality 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 Lesson of Evolution" 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" :--

This amounts to saying in the terminology of Jenning 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, 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 may well compare with many of the boldest flights in "Life and Habit":--

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, 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 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."

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" . We may translate it "MNEME, a Principle of Conservation in the Transformations of Organic Existence."

"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 'Ged?chtniss, 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: the optic stimulus of seeing the boy stoop for stones and throw them, and 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 pain."

They are termed "outcome" 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.

In the preface to his first edition 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" .

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."

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