BIOLOGICAL WRITINGS OF SAMUEL BUTLER 19 



We have already alluded to an anticipation of Butler's 

 Unconscious Memory (1880) main theses. In 1870 Dr. Ewald 

 Hering, one of the most eminent physiologists of the day, 

 Professor at Vienna, gave an Inaugural Address to the Imperial 

 Royal Academy of Sciences : " Das Gedachtniss als allgemeine 

 Funktion der organisirter Substanz " (" Memory as a Universal 

 Function of Organised Matter "). When Life and Habit was 

 well advanced, Francis Darwin, at the time his frequent visitor, 

 called Butler's attention to this essay, which he himself only 

 knew from an article in Nature. Herein Professor E. Ray 

 Lankester had referred to it with admiring sympathy in con- 

 nection with its further development by Haeckel in a pamphlet 

 entitled Die Perigenese der Plastidtde. We may note, however, 

 that in his collected essays, TJie Advancement of Science (1890), 

 Sir Ray Lankester, while including this essay, inserts on the 

 blank page^ — we had almost written "the white sheet" — at the 

 back of it an apology for having ever advocated the possibility 

 of the transmission of acquired characters. 



Unconscious Memory was largely written to show the re- 

 lation of Butler's views to Hering's and contains an exquisitely 

 written translation of the essay. Hering does, indeed, anticipate 

 Butler, and that in language far more suitable to the persuasion 

 of the scientific public. It contains a subsidiary hypothesis that 

 memory has for its mechanism special vibrations of the proto- 

 plasm, and the acquired capacity to respond to such vibrations 

 once felt upon their repetition. I do not think that the theory 

 gains anything by the introduction of this even as a mere formal 

 hypothesis ; and there is no evidence for its being anything 

 more. Butler, however, gives it a warm, nay enthusiastic, re- 

 ception in his introduction and notes to the translation of the 

 address, which bulks so large in this book ; but points out that 

 he was " not committed to this hypothesis, though inclined to 

 accept it on a prima facie view." Later on, as we shall see, he 

 attached more importance to it. 



The Hering address is followed in Unconscious Memory by 

 translations of selected passages from Von Hartmann's Philosophy 

 of the Ujiconscious and annotations to explain the difference from 

 this personification of "The Unconscious" as a mighty all- 

 ruling, all-creating personality, and his own scientific recognition 



^ I.e. after p. 285 : it bears no number of its own ! 



