.l.'.G SAMUEL Bl'TLER AND MEMORY THEORIES 



only later to have become aware that Lamarck had in a 

 measure forestalled him. He puts this very beautifully in 

 the following passage from his chief biological work Life 

 and Habit (1877 *) : "I admit that when I began to write 

 upon my subject I did not seriously believe in it. I saw, as 

 it were, a pebble upon the ground, with a sheen that pleased 

 me ; taking it up, I turned it over and over for my amuse- 

 ment, and found it always grow brighter and brighter the 

 more I examined* it. At length I became fascinated, and 

 gave loose rein to self-illusion. The aspect of the world 

 changed ; the trifle which I had picked up idly had proved 

 to be a talisman of inestimable value, and had opened a 

 door through which I caught glimpses of a strange and 

 interesting transformation. Then came one who told me 

 that the stone was not mine, but that it had been dropped 

 by Lamarck, to whom it belonged rightfully, but who had 

 lost it ; whereon I said I cared not who was the owner, if 

 only I might use it and enjoy it. Now, therefore, having 

 polished it with what art and care one who is no jeweller 

 cculd bestow upon it, I return it, as best I may, to its 

 possessor" (p. 306). In one of his later works, however, 

 Butler made up for his first neglect of his predecessors by 

 giving what is undeniably the best account in English 

 literature of the work of Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus 

 Darwin in his Involution, Old and New (1879). Many 

 of his facts he took from Charles Darwin, whose theory of 

 natural selection he bitterly opposed, in the two books just 

 mentioned and in L'ncotiscions Memory (1880) and Luck 

 or Cunning (1887). 



Butler's main thesis is that living things arc active, 

 intelligent agents, personally continuous with all their 

 ancestors, possessing an intense but unconscious memory 

 of all that their ancestors did and suffered, and moving 

 through habit from the spontaneity of striving to the 

 automatism of remembrance. 



The primary cause of all variation in structure is the 



active response of the organism to needs experienced by it, 



and the indispensable link between the outer world and the 



nature itself is that same "sense of need" upon which 



I In quotations arc taken from the l<;io reprint, London, Fifield. fc 



