342 SAMTKL IH'TLKK AM) MKMOKY Til K< MIES 



aware of Hering's work when he published his Life <nul 

 Habit, but in Unconscious Memory (1880) he gave full credit 

 to Ilering as the first discoverer, and supplied an admirable 

 translation of Hering's lecture. As far as the assimilation 

 of heredity to memory is concerned Hering and Butler 

 have much in common, but Hering did not share Butler's 

 Lamarckian and vitalistic views, preferring to hold fast, for 

 the practical purposes of physiology at all events, to the 

 general accepted theory of the parallelism between psychical 

 and physical processes. He was inclined to regard memory 

 in the ordinary sense as a function of the brain, and 

 memory in general as a function of all organised matter. 

 Speaking of the psychical life, he says, " Thus the cause 

 which produces the unity of all single phenomena of conscious- 

 ness must be looked for in unconscious life. As we know 

 nothing of this except what we learn from our investigations 

 of matter, and since in a purely empirical consideration, 

 matter and the unconscious must be regarded as identical, 

 the physiologist may justly define memory in a wider sense 

 to be a faculty of the brain, the results of which to a great 

 extent belong to both consciousness and unconsciousness." 1 

 Hering's views were supported by Haeckel.- 



In 1893 an American, H. F. Orr, :: tried to work out a 

 theory of development and heredity based upon the funda- 

 mental idea " that the property which is the basis of bodily 

 development in organisms is the same property which we 

 recognise a the basis of psychic activity and psychic develop- 

 ment." He tried also to explain the recapitulation of 

 phylog<*f[y"by ontogeny as due to habit. 



The neo-Lamarckian school of American palaeontologists 

 were also in sympathy with the memory idea, and this was 

 expressed most clearly perhaps by Copr. ' 



In 1904 appeared the work on this subject which has 

 attracted the most attention R. Semon's Hie Mneme:' 



. trans, in K. Hering, Memory * p. 9, Chicago and London, 1913. 

 -' Die Perigenesis der PlastiduU) I ma, 1875. 

 '' A Theory of Development and Heredity^ New York, 1893. 



The /V-///.-.//T Factors of Organic Ki'oliitit>n, Chicago, 1896. 

 " nic Mncmc ti/s erhaltendes I'rinzip ii/i ll'echscl ties organischen 

 Geschchens, Leipzig, 1904 ; 2nd ed., 1908. 



