CHAPTER VI 

 LIFE AND HABIT 



That Butler's genius gave him insight into evolutionary problems has 

 been generally, though tardily, recognised. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, 

 Nature, loth May, 1917. 



IN previous chapters it became to some extent evident that 

 there is a substratum of truth in the Pan-Psychism of Fechner, 

 James, Maeterlinck, and in that of more recent writers, more 

 especially in view of the symbiotic inter-relatedness of beings, 

 which seems to me to represent a very real form of Pan-Psychism. 



That there is a concrete form of Pan-Psychism, wholesome 

 or morbid, and of great importance in our daily life, is now more 

 fully to be inferred from a critical examination of Samuel Butler's 

 work on Life and Habit, in which he endeavours to propound 

 a pan-psychic view of life. 



Butler contends that " Personal Identity " does not exclude 

 the idea that each individual may be manifold in the sense of 

 being compounded of a vast number of subordinate individual- 

 ities which have their separate lives within him, with their 

 hopes and fears, and intrigues, being born and dying within 

 us, many generations of them during our single life-time. In 

 order to support this proposition, he has recourse to the illus- 

 tration of the micro-organisms which live within us and which 

 seem, in a general way, to form a part of us and even to deter- 

 mine many of our activities. This is what he says : 



These parasites are they part of us or no ? Some are plainly not so 

 in any strict sense of the word, yet their action may, in cases which it is 

 unnecessary to detail, affect us so powerfully that we are irresistibly 

 impelled to act in such or such a manner ; and yet we are as wholly 

 unconscious of any impulse outside of our own " ego " as though they were 

 part of ourselves ; others again are essential to our very existence, as 

 the corpuscles of the blood, which the best authorities concur in supposing 

 to be composed of an infinite number of living souls, on whose welfare 

 the healthy condition of our blood, and hence of our whole bodies, depends. 

 We breathe that they may breathe, not that we may do so ; we only 

 care about oxygen in so far as the infinitely small beings which course 

 up and down in our veins care about it ; the whole arrangement and 

 mechanism of our lungs may be our doing, but is for their convenience, 



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