XVI Unconscious Memory 



Modification ? an Attempt to throw Additional Light 

 upon the late Mi\ Charles Darwin's Theory of Natural 

 Selection " (1887), completes the series of biological books. 

 Tliis is mainly a book of strenuous polemic. It brings out 

 still more forcibly the Hering-Butler doctrine of continued 

 personality from generation to generation, and of the 

 working of unconscious memory throughout ; and points 

 out that, while this is implicit in much of the teaching of 

 Herbert Spencer, Romanes, and others, it was nowhere — 

 even after the appearance of " Life and Habit " — explicitly 

 recognised by them, but, on the contrary, masked by in- 

 consistent statements and teaching. Not Luck but 

 Cunning, not the uninspired weeding out by Natural 

 Selection but the intelligent striving of the organism, is 

 at the bottom of the useful variet}^ of organic life. And 

 the parallel is drawn that not the happy accident of time 

 and place, but the Macchiavellian cunning of Charles 

 Darwin, succeeded in imposing, as entirely his own, on the 

 civilised world an uninspired and inadequate theory of evo- 

 lution wherein luck played the leading part ; while the more 

 inspired and inspiring views of the older evolutionists had 

 failed by the inferiority of their luck. On this controversy 

 I am bound to say that I do not in the very least share 

 Butler's opinions ; and I must ascribe them to his lack 

 of personal famiharity with the biologists of the day and 

 their modes of thought and of work. Butler everywhere 

 undervalues the important work of elimination played by 

 Natural Selection in its widest sense. 



The " Conclusion " of " Luck, or Cunning? " shows a 

 strong advance in monistic views, and a yet more marked 

 development in the vibration hypothesis of memory given 

 by Hering and only adopted with the greatest reserve in 

 " Unconscious Memory." 



" Our conception, then, concerning the nature of any matter 

 depends solely upon its kind and degree of unrest, tliat is to 

 say, on the characteristics of the vibrations that are going on 

 within it. The exterior object \-ibrating in a certain way 



