338 SAMUEL BUTLER AND MEMORY THEORIES 



knowledge of the processes to be gone through, and an assured 

 power of will and judgment. Is it conceivable, says Butler, 

 that the embryo can do all these things without knowing 

 how to do them, and without having done them before? 

 " Shall we say . . . that a baby of a day old sucks (which 

 involves the whole principle of the pump, and hence a 

 profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and 

 hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood (millions of 

 years before Sir Humphrey Davy discovered oxygen), sees 

 and hears all most difficult and complicated operations, 

 involving a knowledge of the facts concerning optics and 

 acoustics, compared with which the discoveries of Newton 

 sink into utter insignificance? Shall we say that a baby 

 can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so 

 regularly, without being even able to direct its attention to 

 them, and without mistake, and at the same time not know 

 how to do them, and never have done them before?" (p. 54). 

 Assuredly not. 



The only possible explanation is that the embryo's 

 ancestors have done these things so often, throughout so 

 many millions of generations, that the embryo's knowledge 

 of how to do them has become unconscious and automatic 

 by reason of this age-long practice. This implies that there 

 is iira very real sense actual personal continuity between 

 the embryo and all its ancestors, so that their experiences 

 are his, their memory also his. " We must suppose the 

 continuity of life and sameness between living beings, 

 whether plants or animals, to be far closer than we have 

 hitherto believed ; so that the experience of one person is 

 not enjoyed by his successor, so much as that the suc- 

 cessor is bo)ia fide but a part of the life of his progenitor, 

 imbued with all his memories, profiting by all his experi- 

 ences which are, in fact, his own and only uncon- 

 scious of the extent of his own memories and experiences 

 owing to their vastness and already infinite repetitions " 

 (p. 50). It is very suggestive in this connection, he con- 

 tinues " I. That we are most conscious of, atid hare most 

 control over, such habits as speech, the upright position, 

 the arts and sciences, which are acquisitions peculiar to the 

 human race, always acquired after birth, and not common 



