BUTLER ON HABIT AND MEMORY 339 



to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely 

 human. 



" II. That we are less conscious of, and have less control over, 

 eating and drinking, swallowing, breathing, seeing and 

 hearing, which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, 

 and for which we had provided ourselves with all the 

 necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which are, 

 geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent. 



"III. That we are most unconscious of, and have least control 

 over, our digestion and circulation, which belonged even to 

 our invertebrate ancestry, and which are habits, geologically 

 speaking, of extreme antiquity. . . . Does it not seem as 

 though the older and more confirmed the habit, the more 

 unquestioning the act of volition, till, in the case of the 

 oldest habits, the practice of succeeding existences has so 

 formulated the procedure, that, on being once committed to 

 such and such a line beyond a certain point, the subsequent 

 course is so clear as to be open to no further doubt, to admit 

 of no alternative, till the very power of questioning is gone, 

 and even the consciousness of volition " (pp. 51-2). 



The hypothesis then, that heredity and development are 

 due to unconscious memory, finds much to support it "the 

 self-development of each new life in succeeding generations 

 the various stages through which it passes (as it would 

 appear, at first sight, without rhyme or reason), the manner 

 in which it prepares structures of the most surpassing 

 intricacy and delicacy, for which it has no use at the time 

 when it prepares them, and the many elaborate instincts 

 which it exhibits immediately on, and indeed before, birth 

 all point in the direction of habit and memory, as the only 

 causes which could produce them" (p. 125). The hypothesis 

 explains, for instance, the fact of recapitulation: "Why 

 should the embryo of any animal go through so many stages 

 embryological allusions to forefathers of a widely different 

 type? And why, again, should the germs of the same kind 

 of creature always go through the same stages? If the germ 

 of any animal now living is, in its simplest state, but part of 

 the personal identity of one of the original germs of all life 

 whatsoever, and hence, if any now living organism must be 

 considered without quibble as being itself millions of years 



