Introduction xxxiii 



unresolved as a datum, and employing it as an explanation. 

 The adoption of such a method, as formerly by Samuel Butler, 

 and recently by Pauly, I regard as a big and dangerous step 

 backward " (ed. 2, pp. 380-1, note). 



Thus Butler's alleged retrogressions belong to the same 

 order of thinking that we have seen shared by Driesch, 

 Baldwin, and Jennings, and most explicitly avowed, as 

 we shall see, by Francis Darwin. Semon makes one rather 

 candid admission, " The impossibility of interpreting the 

 phenomena of physiological stimulation by those of direct 

 reaction, and the undeception of those who had put faith 

 in this being possible, have led many on the backward path 

 of vitalism." Semon assuredly will never be able to complete 

 his theory of " Mneme " until, guided by the experience 

 of Jennings and Driesch, he forsakes the blind alley 

 of mechanisticism and retraces his steps to reasonable 

 vitalism. 



But the most notable publications bearing on our matter 

 are incidental to the Darwin Celebrations of 1908-9. 

 Dr. Francis Darwin, son, collaborator, and biographer of 

 Charles Darwin, was selected to preside over the Meeting 

 of the British Association held in Dublin in 1908, the 

 jubilee of the first publications on Natural Selection by 

 his father and Alfred Russel Wallace. In this address we 

 find the theory of Hering, Butler, Rignano, and Semon 

 taking its proper place as a vera causa of that variation 

 which Natural Selection must find before it can act, and 

 recognised as the basis of a rational theory of the develop- 

 ment of the individual and of the race. The organism is 

 essentially purposive : the impossibility of devising any 

 adequate accounts of organic form and function without 

 taking account of the psychical side is most strenuously 

 asserted. And with our regret that past misunderstand- 

 ings should be so prominent in Butler's works, it was very 

 pleasant to hear Francis Darwin's quotation from Butler's 



