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Title: Unconscious Memory

Author: Samuel Butler

Release Date: October, 2004  [EBook #6605]
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[This file was first posted on December 30, 2002]

Edition: 10

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Transcribed from the 1910 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY




"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:
   Note by R. A. Streatfeild
   Introduction by Marcus Hartog
   Author's Preface
   Unconscious Memory



NOTE



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.



INTRODUCTION 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 Worter."

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 reclame" 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 Gedachtniss 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 Jager,
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 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:-


"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 Rontgen'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 fur
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, Rivista di Scienza (now simply
called Scientia), published in French a volume entitled "Sur la
transmissibilite des Caracteres acquis--Hypothese d'un Centro-
epigenese."  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 Phenomene mnemonique et le Phenomene 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 'Gedachtniss, 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



AUTHOR'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.



CHAPTER 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 "Encyclopaedia 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.



CHAPTER 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.



CHAPTER 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 Athenaeum 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 etre elle a su
tirer avec le temps tous les autres etres organises).

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 "Palingenesie
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 "Considerations 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 Generale," 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
resume 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 Athenaeum, {37c} the Journal of
Science, {37d} the British Journal of Homaeopathy, {37e} the Daily
News, {37f} the Popular Science Review {37g}--which were all I could
expect or wish.



CHAPTER 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 a 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 alterons 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 prima 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 Athenaeum, 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 Athenaeum 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 prima 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 litterateurs 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 Athenaeum 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.



CHAPTER 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 prima 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.



CHAPTER 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.



CHAPTER 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 a 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.



CHAPTER 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 qua 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. 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 larvae 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 larvae, 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
larvae 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 arcellae, 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 (Pfluger's Archiv
fur 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 arcellae, 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 a 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 parnopaea, 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 larvae 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 foetus,
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 larvae 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 larvae 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 phaenicurus, 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 Caesarian 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."



CHAPTER 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 prima 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 fur 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 a 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.



CHAPTER 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?



CHAPTER 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.



CHAPTER 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 a 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.



CHAPTER 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 amoeba.  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
amoeba to man.  If there had been no such memory, the amoeba of one
generation would have exactly resembled time amoeba 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 amoeba 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 machina 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 AETIOLOGY 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'etre 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.



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 Graecisms.

{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.

{3}  Kosmos, February 1879, Leipsic.

{4}  Origin of Species, ed. i., p. 459.

{8a}  Origin of Species, ed. i., p. 1.

{8b}  Kosmos, February 1879, p. 397.

{8c}  Erasmus Darwin, by Ernest Krause, pp. 132, 133.

{9a}  Origin of Species, ed. i., p. 242.

{9b}  Ibid., p. 427.

{10a}  Nineteenth Century, November 1878; Evolution, Old and New, pp.
360. 361.

{10b}  Encyclopaedia Britannica, ed. ix., art.  "Evolution," p. 748.

{11}  Ibid.

{17}  Encycl. Brit., ed. ix., art.  "Evolution," p. 750.

{23a}  Origin of Species, 6th ed., 1876, p. 206.

{23b}  Ibid., p. 233.

{24a}  Origin of Species, 6th ed., p. 171, 1876.

{24b}  Pp. 258-260.

{26}  Zoonomia, vol. i. p. 484; Evolution, Old and New, p. 214.

{27}  "Erasmus Darwin," by Ernest Krause, p. 211, London, 1879.

{28a}  See "Evolution, Old and New," p. 91, and Buffon, tom. iv. p.
383, ed. 1753.

{28b}  Evolution, Old and New, p. 104.

{29a}  Encycl. Brit., 9th ed., art.  "Evolution," p. 748.

{29b}  Palingenesie Philosophique, part x. chap. ii. (quoted from
Professor Huxley's article on "Evolution," Encycl. Brit., 9th ed., p.
745).

{31}  The note began thus:  "I have taken the date of the first
publication of Lamarck from Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's (Hist.
Nat. Generale tom. ii. p. 405, 1859) excellent history of opinion
upon this subject.  In this work a full account is given of Buffon's
fluctuating conclusions upon the same subject."--Origin of Species,
3d ed., 1861, p. xiv.

{33a}  Life of Erasmus Darwin, pp. 84, 85.

{33b}  See Life and Habit, p. 264 and pp. 276, 277.

{33c}  See Evolution, Old and New, pp. 159-165.

{33d}  Ibid., p. 122.

{34}  See Evolution, Old and New, pp. 247, 248.

{35a}  Vestiges of Creation, ed. 1860, "Proofs, Illustrations, &c.,"
p. lxiv.

{35b}  The first announcement was in the Examiner, February 22, 1879.

{36}  Saturday Review, May 31, 1879.

{37a}  May 26, 1879.

{37b}  May 31, 1879.

{37c}  July 26, 1879.

{37d}  July 1879.

{37e}  July 1879.

{37f}  July 29, 1879.

{37g}  January 1880.

{39}  How far Kosmos was "a well-known" journal, I cannot determine.
It had just entered upon its second year.

{41}  Evolution, Old and New, p. 120, line 5.

{43}  Kosmos, February 1879, p. 397.

{44a}  Kosmos, February 1879, p. 404.

{44b}  Page 39 of this volume.

{50}  See Appendix A.

{52}  Since published as "God the Known and God the Unknown."
Fifield, 1s. 6d. net.  1909.

{54a}  "Contemplation of Nature," Engl. trans., Lond. 1776.  Preface,
p. xxxvi.

{54b}  Ibid., p. xxxviii.

{55}  Life and Habit, p. 97.

{56}  "The Unity of the Organic Individual," by Edward Montgomery,
Mind, October 1880, p. 466.

{58}  Life and Habit, p. 237.

{59a}  Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.  Lardner's Cab.
Cyclo., vol. xcix. p. 24.

{59b}  Young's Lectures on Natural Philosophy, ii. 627.  See also
Phil. Trans., 1801-2.

{63}  The lecture is published by Karl Gerold's Sohn, Vienna.

{69}  See quotation from Bonnet, p. 54 of this volume.

{70}  Professor Hering is not clear here.  Vibrations (if I
understand his theory rightly) should not be set up by faint stimuli
from within.  Whence and what are these stimuli?  The vibrations
within are already existing, and it is they which are the stimuli to
action.  On having been once set up, they either continue in
sufficient force to maintain action, or they die down, and become too
weak to cause further action, and perhaps even to be perceived within
the mind, until they receive an accession of vibration from without.
The only "stimulus from within" that should be able to generate
action is that which may follow when a vibration already established
in the body runs into another similar vibration already so
established.  On this consciousness, and even action, might be
supposed to follow without the presence of an external stimulus.

{71}  This expression seems hardly applicable to the overtaking of an
internal by an external vibration, but it is not inconsistent with
it.  Here, however, as frequently elsewhere, I doubt how far
Professor Hering has fully realised his conception, beyond being,
like myself, convinced that the phenomena of memory and of heredity
have a common source.

{72}  See quotation from Bonnet, p. 54 of this volume.  By
"preserving the memory of habitual actions" Professor Hering probably
means, retains for a long while and repeats motion of a certain
character when such motion has been once communicated to it.

{74a}  It should not be "if the central nerve system were not able to
reproduce whole series of vibrations," but "if whole series of
vibrations do not persist though unperceived," if Professor Hering
intends what I suppose him to intend.

{74b}  Memory was in full operation for so long a time before
anything like what we call a nervous system can be detected, that
Professor Hering must not be supposed to be intending to confine
memory to a motor nerve system.  His words do not even imply that he
does, but it is as well to be on one's guard.

{77}  It is from such passages as this, and those that follow on the
next few pages, that I collect the impression of Professor Hering's
meaning which I have endeavoured to convey in the preceding chapter.

{78}  That is to say, "an infinitely small change in the kind of
vibration communicated from the parent to the germ."

{79}  It may be asked what is meant by responding.  I may repeat that
I understand Professor Hering to mean that there exists in the
offspring certain vibrations, which are many of them too faint to
upset equilibrium and thus generate action, until they receive an
accession of force from without by the running into them of
vibrations of similar characteristics to their own, which last
vibrations have been set up by exterior objects.  On this they become
strong enough to generate that corporeal earthquake which we call
action.

This may be true or not, but it is at any rate intelligible; whereas
much that is written about "fraying channels" raises no definite
ideas in the mind.

{80a}  I interpret this, "We cannot wonder if often-repeated
vibrations gather strength, and become at once more lasting and
requiring less accession of vibration from without, in order to
become strong enough to generate action."

{80b}  "Characteristics" must, I imagine, according to Professor
Hering, resolve themselves ultimately into "vibrations," for the
characteristics depend upon the character of the vibrations.

{81}  Professor Hartog tells me that this probably refers to Fritz
Muller's formulation of the "recapitulation process" in "Facts for
Darwin," English edition (1869), p. 114.--R.A.S.

{82}  This is the passage which makes me suppose Professor Hering to
mean that vibrations from exterior objects run into vibrations
already existing within the living body, and that the accession to
power thus derived is his key to an explanation of the physical basis
of action.

{84}  I interpret this:  "There are fewer vibrations persistent
within the bodies of the lower animals; those that there are,
therefore, are stronger and more capable of generating action or
upsetting the status in quo.  Hence also they require less accession
of vibration from without.  Man is agitated by more and more varied
vibrations; these, interfering, as to some extent they must, with one
another, are weaker, and therefore require more accession from
without before they can set the mechanical adjustments of the body in
motion."

{89}  I am obliged to Mr. Sully for this excellent translation of
"Hellsehen."

{90a}  Westminster Review, New Series, vol. xlix. p. 143.

{90b}  Ibid., p. 145.

{90c}  Ibid., p. 151.

{92a}  "Instinct ist zweckmassiges Handeln ohne Bewusstsein des
Zwecks."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., Berlin, 1871, p. 70.

{92b}  "1.  Eine blosse Folge der korperlichen Organisation.

"2.  Ein von der Natur eingerichteter Gehirn-oder Geistesmechanismus.

"3.  Eine Folge unbewusster Geistesthiitigkeit."--Philosophy of the
Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 70.

{97}  "Hiermit ist der Annahme das Urtheil gesprochen, welche die
unbewusste Vorstellung des Zwecks in jedem einzelnen Falle vorwiegt;
denn wollte man nun noch die Vorstellung des Geistesmechanismus
festhalten so musste fur jede Variation und Modification des
Instincts, nach den ausseren Umstanden, eine besondere constante
Vorrichtung . . . eingefugt sein."--Philosophy of the Unconscious 3d
ed., p. 74.

{99}  "Indessen glaube ich, dass die angefuhrten Beispiele zur Genuge
beweisen, dass es auch viele Falle giebt, wo ohne jede Complication
mit der bewussten Ueberlegung die gewohnliche und aussergewohnliche
Handlung aus derselben Quelle stammen, dass sie entweder beide
wirklicher Instinct, oder beide Resultate bewusster Ueberlegung
sind."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 76.

{100}  "Dagegen haben wir nunmehr unseren Blick noch einmal scharfer
auf den Begriff eines psychischen Mechanismus zu richten, und da
zeigt sich, dass derselbe, abgesehen davon, wie viel er erklart, so
dunke list, dass man sich kaum etwas dabei denken kann."--Philosophy
of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 76.

{101}  "Das Endglied tritt als bewusster Wille zu irgend einer
Handlung auf; beide sind aber ganz ungleichartig und haben mit der
gewohnlichen Motivation nichts zu thun, welche ausschliesslich darin
besteht, dass die Vorstellung einer Lust oder einer Unlust das
Begehren erzeugr, erstere zu erlangen, letztere sich fern zu
halten."--Ibid., p. 76.

{102a}  "Diese causale Verbindung fallt erfahrungsmassig, wie wir von
unsern menschlichen Instincten wissen, nicht in's Bewussisein;
folglich kann dieselbe, wenn sie ein Mechanismus sein soll, nur
entweder ein nicht in's Bewusstsein fallende mechanische Leitung und
Umwandlung der Schwingungen des vorgestellten Motivs in die
Schwingungen der gewollten Handlung im Gehirn, oder ein unbewusster
geistiger Mechanismus sein."--Philosophy of the Unconscious 3d ed.,
p. 77.

{102b}  "Man hat sich also zwischen dem bewussten Motiv, und dem
Willen zur Insticthandlung eine causale Verbindung durch unbewusstes
Vorstellen und Wollen zu denken, und ich weiss nicht, wie diese
Verbindung einfacher gedacht werden konnte, als durch den
vorgestellten und gewollten Zweck.  Damit sind wir aber bei dem allen
Geistern eigenthumlichen und immanenten Mechanismus der Logik
angelangt, und haben die unbewusster Zweckvorstellung bei jeder
einzelnen Instincthandlung als unentbehrliches Glied gefunden;
hiermit hat also der Begrift des todten, ausserlich pradestinirten
Geistesmechanismus sich selbst aufgehoben und in das immanente
Geistesleben der Logik umgewandelt, und wir sind bei der letzten
Moglichkeit angekommen, welche fur die Auffassung eines wirklichen
Instincts ubrig bleibt:  der Instinct ist bewusstes Wollen des
Mittels zu einem unbewusst gewollten Zweck."--Philosophy of the
Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 78.

{105a}  "Also der Instinct ohne Hulfsmechanismus die Ursache der
Entstehung des Hulfsmechanismus ist."--Philosophy of the Unconscious,
3d ed., p. 79.

{105b}  "Dass auch der fertige Hulfsmechanismus das Unbewusste nicht
etwa zu dieser bestimmten Instincthandlung necessirt, sondern blosse
pradisponirt."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 79.

{105c}  "Giebt es einen wirklichen Instinct, oder sind die
sogenannten Instincthandlungen nur Resultate bewusster Ueberlegung?"-
-Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 79.

{111}  "Dieser Beweis ist dadurch zu fuhren; erstens dass die
betreffenden Thatsachen in; der Zukunft liegen, und dem Verstande die
Anhaltepunkte fehlen, um ihr zukunftiges Eintreten aus den
gegenwartigen Verhaltnissen zu erschliessen; zweitens, dass die
betreffenden Thatsachen augenscheinlich der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung
verschlossen liegen, weil nur die Erfahrung fruherer Falle uber sie
belehren kann, und diese laut der Beobachtung ausgeschlossen ist.  Es
wurde fur unsere Interessen keinen Unterschied machen, wenn, was ich
wahrscheinlich halte, bei fortschreitender physiologischer
Erkenntniss alle jetzt fur den ersten Fall anzufuhrenden Beispiele
sich als solche des zweiten Falls ausweisen sollten, wie dies
unleugbar bei vielen fruher gebrauchten Beispielen schon geschehen
ist; denn ein apriorisches Wissen ohne jeden sinnlichen Anstoss ist
wohl kaum wunderbarer zu nennen, als ein Wissen, welches zwar BEI
GELEGENHEIT gewisser sinnlicher Wahrnehmung zu Tage tritt, aber mit
diesen nur durch eine solche Kette von Schlussen und angewandten
Kenntnissen in Verbindung stehend gedacht werden konnte, dass deren
Moglichkeit bei dem Zustande der Fahigkeiten und Bildung der
betreffenden Thiere entschieden geleugnet werden muss."--Philosophy
of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 85.

{113}  "Man hat dieselbe jederzeit anerkannt und mit den Worten
Vorgefuhl oder Ahnung bezeichnet; indess beziehen sich diese Worte
einerseits nur auf zukunftiges, nicht auf gegenwartiges, raumlich
getrenntes Unwahmehrnbares, anderseits bezeichnen sie nur die leise,
dumpfe, unbestimmte Resonanz des Bewusstseins mit dem unfehlbar
bestimmten Zustande der unbewussten Erkenntniss.  Daher das Wort
Vorgefuhl in Rucksicht auf die Dumpfheit und Unbestimmtheit, wahrend
doch leicht zu sehen ist, dass das von allen, auch den unbewussten
Vorstellungen entblosste Gefuhl fur das Resultat gar keinen Einfluss
haben kann, sondern nur eine Vorstellung, weil diese allein
Erkenntniss enthalt.  Die in Bewusstsein mitklingende Ahnung kann
allerdings unter Umstanden ziemlich deutlich sein, so dass sie sich
beim Menschen in Gedanken und Wort fixiren lasst; doch ist dies auch
im Menschen erfahrungsmassig bei den eigenthumlichen Instincten nicht
der Fall, vielmehr ist bei diesen die Resonanz der unbewussten
Erkenntniss im Bewusstsein meistens so schwach, dass sie sich
wirklich nur in begleitenden Gefuhlen oder der Stimmung aussert, dass
sie einen unendlich kleinen Bruchtheil des Gemeingefuhls bildet."--
Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 86.

{115a}  "In der Bestimmung des Willens durch einen im Unbewussten
liegenden Process . . . fur welchen sich dieser Character der
zweifellosen Selbstgewissheit in allen folgenden Untersuchungen
bewahren wird."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, p. 87.

{115b}  "Sondern als unmittelbarer Besitz vorgefunden wird."--
Philosophy of the Unconscious, p. 87.

{115c}  "Hellsehen."

{119a}  "Das Hellsehon des Unbewussten hat sie den rechten Weg ahnen
lassen."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, p. 90, 3d ed., 1871.

{119b}  "Man wird doch wahrlich nicht den Thieren zumuthen wollen,
durch meteorologische Schlusse das Wetter auf Monate im Voraus zu
berechnen, ja sogar Ueberschwemmungen vorauszusehen.  Vielmehr ist
eine solche Gefuhlswahrnehmung gegenwartiger atmospharischer
Einflusse nichts weiter als die sinnliche Wahrnehmung, welche als
Motiv wirkt, und ein Motiv muss ja doch immer vorhanden sein, wenn
ein Instinct functioniren soll.  Es bleibt also trotzdem bestehen
dass das Voraussehen der Witterung ein unbewusstes Hellsehen ist, von
dem der Storch, der vier Wochen fruher nach Suden aufbricht, so wenig
etwas weiss, als der Hirsch, der sich vor einem kalten Winter einen
dickeren Pelz als gewohnlich wachsen lasst.  Die Thiere haben eben
einerseits das gegenwartige Witterungsgefuhl im Bewusstsein, daraus
folgt andererseits ihr Handeln gerade so, als ob sie die Vorstellung
der zukunftigen Witterung hatten; im Bewusstsein haben sie dieselbe
aber nicht, also bietet sich als einzig naturliches Mittelglied die
unbewusste Vorstellung, die nun aber immer ein Hellsehen ist, weil
sie etwas enthalt, was dem Thier weder dutch sinnliche Wahrnehmung
direct gegeben ist, noch durch seine Verstandesmittel aus der
Wahrnehmung geschlossen werden kann."--Philosophy of the Unconscious,
p. 91, 3d ed., 1871.

{124}  "Meistentheils tritt aber hier der hoheren Bewusstseinstufe
der Menschen entsprechend eine starkete Resonanz des Bewusstseins mit
dem bewussten Hellsehen hervor, die sich also mehr odor minder
deutliche Ahnung darstellt.  Ausserdem entspricht es der grosseren
Selbststandigkeit des menschlichen Intellects, dass diese Ahnung
nicht ausschliesslich Behufs der unmittelbaren Ausfuhrung einer
Handlung eintritt, sondern bisweilen auch unabangig von der Bedingung
einer momentan zu leistenden That als blosse Vorstellung ohne
bewussten Willen sich zeigte, wenn nur die Bedingung erfullt ist,
dass der Gegenstand dieses Ahnens den Willen des Ahnenden im
Allgemeinen in hohem Grade interessirt."--Philosophy of the
Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 94.

{126}  "Haufig sind die Ahnungen, in denen das Hellsehen des
Unbewussten sich dem Bewusstsein offenbart, dunkel, unverstandlich
und symbolisch, weil sie im Gehirn sinnliche Form annehmen mussen,
wahrend die unbewusste Vorstellung an der Form der Sinnlichkeit kein
Theil haben kann."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 96.

{128}  "Ebenso weil es diese Reihe nur in gesteigerter
Bewusstseinresonanz fortsetzt, stutzt es jene Aussagen der
Instincthandlungen uher ihr eigenes Wesen ebenso sehr," &c.--
Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 97.

{129}  "Wir werden trotzdem diese gomeinsame Wirkung eines
Masseninstincts in der Entstehung der Sprache und den grossen
politischen und socialen Bewegungen in der Woltgeschichte deutlich
wieder erkennen; hier handelt es sich um moglichst einfache und
deutliche Beispiele, und darum greifen wir zu niederen Thieren, wo
die Mittel der Gedankenmittheilung bei fehlender Stimme, Mimik und
Physiognomie so unvollkommen sind, dass die Uebereinstimmung und das
Ineinandergreifen der einzelnen Leistungen in den Hauptsachen
unmoglich der bewussten Verstandigung durch Sprache zugeschrieben
werden darf."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 98.

{131a}  "Und wie durch Instinct dot Plan des ganzen Stocks in
unbewusstem Hellsehen jeder einzelnen Biene einwohnt."--Philosophy of
the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 99.

{131b}  "Indem jedes Individuum den Plan des Ganzen und Sammtliche
gegenwartig zu ergreifende Mittel im unbewussten Hellsehen hat, wovon
aber nut das Eine, was ihm zu thun obliegt, in sein Bewusstsein
fallt."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 99.

{132}  "Der Instinct ist nicht Resultat bewusster Ueberlegung, nicht
Folge der korperlichen Organisation, nicht blosses Resultat eines in
der Organisation des Gehirns gelegenen Mechanismus, nicht Wirkung
eines dem Geiste von aussen angeklebten todten, seinem innersten
Wesen fremden Mechanismus, sondern selbsteigene Leistung des
Individuum aus seinem innersten Wesen und Character entspringend."--
Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 100.

{133}  "Haufig ist die Kenntniss des Zwecks der bewussten Erkenntniss
durch sinnliche Wahrnehmung gar nicht zuganglich; dann documentirt
sich die Eigenthumlichkeit des Unbewussten im Hellsehen, von welchem
das Bewusstsein theils nar eine verschwindend dumpfe, theils auch
namentlich beim Menschen mehr oder minder deutliche Resonanz als
Ahnung versputt."--Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 100.

{135}  "Und eine so damonische Gewalt sollte durch etwas ausgeubt
werden konnon, was als ein dem inneren Wesen fremder Mechanismus dem
Geiste aufgepfropft ist, oder gar durch eine bewusste Ueberlegung,
welche doch stets nur im kahlen Egoismus stecken bleibt," &c.--
Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 101.

{139a}  Page 100 of this vol.

{139b}  Pp. 106, 107 of this vol.

{140}  Page 100 of this vol.

{141}  Page 99 of this vol.

{144a}  See page 115 of this volume.

{144b}  Page 104 of this vol.

{146}  The Spirit of Nature.  J. A. Churchill & Co., 1880, p. 39.

{149}  I have put these words into the mouth of my supposed objector,
and shall put others like them, because they are characteristic; but
nothing can become so well known as to escape being an inference.

{153}  Erewhon, chap. xxiii.

{160}  It must be remembered that this passage is put as if in the
mouth of an objector.

{177a}  "The Unity of the Organic Individual," by Edward Montgomery.
Mind, October 1880, p. 477.

{177b}  Ibid., p. 483.

{179a}  Professor Huxley, Encycl. Brit., 9th ed., art.  Evolution, p.
750.

{179b}  "Hume," by Professor Huxley, p. 45.

{180}  "The Philosophy of Crayfishes," by the Right Rev. the Lord
Bishop of Carlisle.  Nineteenth Century for October 1880, p. 636.

{181a}  Les Amours des Plantes, p. 360.  Paris, 1800.

{181b}  Philosophie Zoologique, tom. i. p. 231.  Ed. M. Martin.
Paris, 1873.

{182a}  Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society.  Williams
& Norgate, 1858, p. 61.

{182b}  Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 2d ed.,
1871, p. 41.

{182c}  Origin of Species, p. 1, ed. 1872.

{183a}  Origin of Species, 6th ed., p. 206.  I ought in fairness to
Mr. Darwin to say that he does not hold the error to be quite as
serious as he once did.  It is now "a serious error" only; in 1859 it
was "the most serious error."--Origin of Species, 1st ed., p. 209.

{183b}  Origin of Species, 1st ed., p. 242; 6th ed., p. 233.

{184a}  I never could find what these particular points were.

{184b}  Isidore Geoffroy, Hist. Nat. Gen., tom. ii. p. 407, 1859.

{184c}  M. Martin's edition of the "Philosophie Zoologique" (Paris,
1873), Introduction, p. vi.

{184d}  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., p. 750.




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