NATURE 



THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 1881 



UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY 



Uuconsciotis Memory, &>£. By Samuel Butler. Cp. 5. 



(London : David Bogue, 1880.) 



MR. BUTLER is already known to the public as the 

 author of two or three books which display a 

 certain amount of literary ability. So long therefore as 

 he aimed only at entertaining his readers by such works 

 as " Erewhon," or " Life and Habit,"' he was acting in a 

 suitable sphere. But of late his ambition seems to have 

 prompted him to other labours ; for in his " Evokition, 

 Old and New," as well as in the work we are about to 

 consider, he formally enters the arena of philosophical 

 discussion. To this arena, however, he is in no way 

 adapted, either by mental stature or mental equipment ; 

 and therefore makes so sorry an exhibition that Mr. 

 Darwin may well be glad that his enemy has written 

 a book. But while we may smile at the vanity which 

 has induced so incapable and ill-informed a man 

 gravely to pose before the world as a philosopher, we 

 should not on this account have deemed " Unconscious 

 Memory" worth reviewing. On the contrary, as a hasty 

 glance would have been sufficient to show that the book 

 is bad in philosophy, bad in judgment, bad in taste, and, 

 in fact, that the only good thing in it is the writer's own 

 opinion of himself — w-ith all that was bad we should not 

 have troubled ourselves, and that which was good we 

 should not have inflicted on our readers. The case, 

 however, is changed when we meet, as we do, with a vile 

 and abusive attack upon the personal character of a man 

 in the position of Mr. Darwin ; for however preposterous, 

 and indeed ridiculous, the charges may be, the petty 

 malice which appears to underlie them deserves to be 

 duly repudiated. We shall therefore do our duty in this 

 respect, and at the same time take the opportunity of 

 pointing out the nonsense that Mr. Butler has been 

 writing, both about the philosophy of evolution and the 

 history of biological thought. 



The great theory which Mr. Butler has propounded, 

 and which with characteristic modesty he says seems to 

 himself " one, the importance of which is hardly inferior 

 to that of the theory of evolution itself" — this epoch- 

 making theory is as follows. The processes of embry- 

 onic development and instinctive actions are merely 

 " repetitions of the same kind of action by the same 

 individuals in successive generations." Therefore ani- 

 mals know, as it were, how to pass through their embry- 

 onic stages, and, after birth, are taught by instinctive 

 knowledge, simply because fas parts of their ancestral 

 organisms they have done the same things many times 

 before ; there is thus a race-memory as there is an indi- 

 vidual memory, and the expression of the former consti- 

 tutes the phenomena of heredity. 



Now this view, in which Mr. Butler was anticipated by 

 Prof. Hering, is interesting if advanced merely as an 

 illustration ; but to imagine that it reveals any truth of 

 profound significance, or that it can possibly be fraught 

 with any benefit to science, is simply absurd. The most 

 cursory thought is enough to show that, wliether we call 

 heredity unconscious memory, or memory of past states I 

 Vol. xxiii. — No. 587 



of consciousness the hereditary offspring of those states, 

 we have added nothing to our previous knowledge either 

 of heredity or of memory. All that lends any sense to 

 the analogy we perfectly well knew before — namely, that 

 in the race, as in the individual, certain alterations of 

 structure (whether in the brain or elsewhere) when 

 once made, tend to remain. But the analogy throws 

 no light at all upon the only point which re- 

 quires illumination --namely, how is it thnt, in the 

 case of heredity, alterations of structure can be car- 

 ried over from one individual to another by means of 

 the sexual elements. We can understand in some 

 measure how an alteration, of brain structure, when once 

 made, should be permanent, and we believe that in this 

 fact w-e have the physical basis of memory ; but we can- 

 not understand how this alteration is transmitted to 

 progeny through structures so unlike the brain as are 

 the products of the generative glands. And we merely 

 stultify ourselves if we suppose that the problem is 

 brought any nearer to a solution by asserting that a future 

 individual while still in the germ has already partici- 

 pated, say in the cerebral alterations of its parent — and 

 this in a manner analogous to that in which the brain of 

 the parent is structurally altered by the effects of 

 individual experience. But Mr. Butler goes even further 

 than this, and extends his so-called theory even to 

 inorganic matter. He " would recommend the reader to 

 see every atom of the universe as living, and able to feel 

 and remember, though in a humble way." Indeed he 

 " can conceive of no matter which is not able to remember 

 a little" ; and he does "not see how action of any kind 

 is conceivable without the supposition that every atom 

 retains a memoiy of certain antecedents." It is hard to 

 be patient with sucli hypertrophied absurdity ; but if the 

 bubble deserves pricking, it is enough to ask how it is 

 "conceivable" that an " afom,'" even if forming part of 

 a living brain, could possibly have "a memory of certain 

 antecedents," when, as an atom, it cannot be conceived 

 capable of undergoing any structural modification. 



So much for Mr. Butler's main theory. But he has also 

 a great deal to say on the philosophy of evolution. " Op. 

 4" was called " Evolution, Old and New," and now "Op. 

 5 " continues the strain that was struck in the earlier 

 composition. This consists for the most part in a strangely 

 silly notion that "the public generally" — including, of 

 course, the world of science — was as ignorant of the writings 

 of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck as was Mr. 

 Butler when he first read the " Origin of Species." That 

 is to say, " Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded too 

 like ' buffoon ' for any good to come from him. We had 

 heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a kind of 

 French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his 

 doctrine. . . . Dr. Erasmus Darwin we believed to be a 

 forgotten minor poet," &c. No wonder, therefore, when 

 such was our manner of regarding these men, that we 

 required a Mr. Samuel Butler to show us our error. And 

 no wonder that Mr. Charles Darwin, who doubtless may 

 have peeped into the literature which Mr. Butler has 

 discovered, should so well have succeeded in his life-long 

 purpose of concealing from the eyes of all men how much 

 he owes to his predecessors. No wonder, also, that Mr. 

 Darwin, when he chanced to see an advertisement of a 

 fortlicoming work by Mr. Butler with the title " Evolution, 



