364 SYMBIOGENESIS 



company with the old. More briefly, instinct is inherited 

 memory." And he adds the rider : " If a habit is acquired as 

 a new one, during any given lifetime, it is not an instinct. If 

 having been acquired in one lifetime it is transmitted to 

 offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring though it was not an 

 instinct in the parent. If the habit is transmitted partially, 

 it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly 

 acquired." 



Butler thought that Charles Darwin was in reality in 

 substantial agreement with, although apparently differing 

 from, Erasmus Darwin on these matters, and he applies to the 

 former the same criticism as to Romanes : 



He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to 

 avoid appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting. 



In Mr. Darwin's case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste 

 of time, money, and trouble that has been caused by his not having 

 been content to appear as descending with modification like other 

 people from those who went before him. It will take years to get the 

 evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He 

 was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited 

 fallacy. 



Butler, as is well known, of course, was " out " to discredit 

 the "mindless theory of Charles Darwinian Natural 

 Selection," and to substitute in its place a mindful theory of 

 evolution (to which end he promulgated his own theory 

 which had already been independently formulated by Prof. 

 Hering regarding " unconscious memory "). What he has to 

 say about incipient consciousness is throughout congruous with 

 the place accorded to it in my symbiogenetic theory : 



Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as 

 functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and sub- 

 stance are for the condition of every substance may be considered as 

 the expression and outcome of its mind. Where there is consciousness 

 there is change ; where there is no change there is no consciousness ; 

 may we not suspect that there is no change without a pro tan to con- 

 sciousness, however simple and unspecialised ? Change and motion are 

 one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or motion), as the 

 ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, 

 and all feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited, to be the 



