BIOLOGICAL WRITINGS OF SAMUEL BUTLER 31 



ties, with the resulting renewal through movement of conditions 

 that are pleasure-giving and beneficial, and the consequent 

 repetition of the movements is called * circular reaction.' " 



Of course the inhibition of such movements as would be 

 painful on repetition is merely the negative case of the circular 

 reaction. We must not put too much of our own ideas into 

 the author's mind : he nowhere says explicitly that the animal 

 or plant shows its sense and does this because it likes the 

 one thing and wants it repeated, or dislikes the other and 

 stops its repetition, as Butler would have said. Baldwin is 

 very strong in insisting that no full explanation can be given 

 of living processes, any more than of history, on purely 

 chemico-physical grounds. 



The same view is put differently and independently b}^ 

 H. S. Jennings,^ who started his investigations of living- 

 Protista, the simplest of living beings, with the idea that 

 onl}" accurate and ample observation was needed to enable 

 us to explain all their activities on a mechanical basis ; and 

 devised ingenious models of protoplastic movements. He was 

 led, like Driesch, to renounce such efforts as illusory, and has 

 come to the conviction that in the behaviour of these lowly 

 beings there is a purposive and a tentative character— a method 

 of " trial and error" — that can only be interpreted by the 

 invocation of psychology. He points out that after stimula- 

 tion the "state" of the organism may be altered, so that the 

 response to the same stimulus on repetition is other. Or, 

 as he puts it, the first stimulus has caused the organism to 

 pass into a new " physiological state." As the change of 

 state from what we may call the " primary indifferent state " 

 is advantageous to the organism, we may regard this as 

 equivalent to the doctrine of the " circular reaction " and also 

 as containing the essence of Semon's doctrine of " engrams " 

 or imprints which we are about to consider. We cite one 

 passage which for audacity of thought (underlying, it is true, 

 most guarded expression) may well compare with many ol 

 the boldest flights in Life and Habit : 



" It may be noted that regulation in the manner we have 

 set forth is what, in the behaviour of higher organisms, at 



' "Contributions to the Study of the Lower Animals " (1904) ; " Modifiability 

 in Behaviour"; and " Method of Regulabihty in Behaviour and in Other Fields," 

 mjotirn. Exp. Zool. ii. 1905. 



