THE SYSTEM 61 



elsewhere in this book, and in other similar books, 

 and a few instances may now be examined. 



Samuel Butler, in Life and Habit, warns his 

 readers against the dicta of scientific men, and 

 more particularly against his own dicta, though 

 he made no claim to be a scientist. If his reader 

 must believe in something, " let him believe in 

 the music of Handel, the painting of Giovanni 

 Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's 

 first Epistle to the Corinthians." And he ex- 

 claims : " Let us have no more ' Lo, here ! ' with 

 the professor ; he very rarely knows what he says 

 he knows ; no sooner has he misled the world for 

 a sufficient time with a great flourish of trumpets 

 than he is toppled over by one more plausible than 

 himself." That is a somewhat unkind way of 

 putting it ; but undoubtedly theory after theory is 

 put forward, and often claimed to be final, only 

 to disappear when another explanation takes its 

 place. Thus at the moment we are in the full 

 flood of the chemical theory which is employed 

 to explain inheritance. That heredity exists we 

 all know, but so far we know nothing about its 

 mechanism. Darwin, with " Pangenesis," and 

 others, using other titles, argued in favour of a 

 " particulate " explanation, but the number of 

 particles which would be necessary to account 

 for the phenomena involved, this and other 

 difficulties, have practically put this explanation 

 out of court. Then we had the Mnemic theory 

 of Hering, Butler, and others, by which the 

 unconscious memory of the embryo even the 

 germ is the explanation. Quite lately the 



