EVOLUTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 



79 



a healthy, pleasurable and successful life, as for a successful 

 accumulation of variations. 



Samuel Butler was among the first writers on Evolutional 

 Psychology to adumbrate the " thoughtfulness of food." If 

 it was not given to him to reach the bio-economic interpretation 

 of evolution, he at any rate hinted that evolution had a moral 

 basis. Just as he declared, respecting the pioneers of " Evolu- 

 tion," that they had been too busy proving that organisms had 

 descended with modification at all, to give due attention to the 

 particular factor of mind, so it may be said of him, that he was 

 loo busy vindicating the general claims of mind to go beyond 

 this task and tackle the matter of the needed qualifications. 

 It became clear, however, from his contribution to the subject 

 that a vast array of facts concerning mental evolution remained 

 to be deciphered. There was, first of all, the great question 

 of memory, of the mechanism of handing on habits and instincts, 

 a subject to which Butler more particularly addressed himself, 

 and which may be fitly touched upon here. 



Sir Francis Darwin, as President of the British Association, 

 1908, conceded that 



A plant has memory in Hering's and Samuel Butler's sense of the word, 

 according to which memory and inheritance are different aspects of the 

 same quality of living things. 



This view of memory gains in exactness if we supplement 

 it by bio -economic considerations. For, is it not that the 

 fundamental quality in virtue of which the plant " stores " 

 memory, pari passu with other important organic capital, may 

 justly be viewed as an essentially economic quality, ' which, 

 moreover, was never totally unconnected with the needs of the 

 biological community ? The storing of even the most funda- 

 mental sense impression for racial purposes entails work ; and 

 it is the capacity to perform such work which really lies at the 

 root of other useful qualities, of memory and of heredity generally. 

 The psychic life of the plant is, therefore, pre-eminently bound 

 up with work, which is the grand regulator of all consciousness, 

 and which provides certainly one of the keys to an understanding 

 of the phenomena of memory. Once mind is thus conceived 

 as correlated with work, it is possible to amplify considerably 

 Sir Francis Darwin's further statement, made on the same 

 occasion, that " Evolution now becomes definable as a process 



