14 MAN THE ANIMAL 



All other animals except man are able to accumulate only 

 the experience of their own individual life times, so far as 

 concerns everything except the basic physiological processes that 

 have become embedded in their protoplasm as instincts and 

 habits, so-called. This embedding has probably been imple- 

 mented by a process that m_ay be called "protoplasmic memory," 

 as, on the whole, the best choice from the various terms that 

 have been used to designate it. This process has been particularly 

 discussed by three important persons, the physiologist Hering, 

 who was the first professional biologist to develop the concept 

 in modern times, in a short but valuable essay j the zoologist 

 Semon who wrote a somewhat too verbose book about it (Die 

 Mneme ah er halt end es Prinzif im Weeks el des organlschen 

 Geschehens. Leipzig, 1904) j and Samuel Butler, the author of 

 Erewhon and of various biological treatises that still probably 

 deserve more attention from professional biologists than they 

 have ever received, except from a few. The concept of proto- 

 plasmic memory is basic in Butler's philosophy of biology. He 

 brings pretty much everything under its wide explicatory em- 

 brace, with great skill and imagination. Butler's book Life and 

 Habit develops the matter in extenso^ but in 1876 he sum- 

 marized his views in a letter that may be quoted here, both 

 because of its piquant Butlerian charm and because it offers as 

 inherently probable an explanation for certain biological phe- 

 nomena as any that has ever been proposed by anybody. The 

 extract is quoted from Festing Jones's Samuel Butler ^ Vol. II, 

 pp. 445-5 (1919): 



"1. Actions which we have acquired with difliculty we now 

 perform almost unconsciously, e.g.^ playing the piano, reading, 

 writing, walking. As soon as we know how to do a thing ex- 

 ceedingly well, consciousness in respect of it vanishes. As long 

 as we know that we know a thing we do not know itj we only 

 know it when we do not know of our knowledge. 



"2. Whatever we do in this way is all one in kind, the dif- 

 ference is in degree. We play the piano almost unconsciously, 

 we write more unconsciously, we read very unconsciously, we 



