Introduction xiii 



suggested by George Bernard Shaw, his acquaintance and 

 admirer, he was also swayed by philosophical resent- 

 ment at that banishment of mind from the organic uni- 

 verse, which was generally thought to have been achieved 

 by Charles Darwin's theory. Still, we must remember 

 that this mindless view is not implicit in Charles Darwin's 

 presentment of his own theory, nor was it accepted by 

 him as it has been by so many of his professed disciples. 



" UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY " (1880).— We have already 

 alluded to an anticipation of Butler's main theses. In 

 1870 Dr. Ewald Hering, one of the most eminent phy- 

 siologists of the day. Professor at Vienna, gave an 

 Inaugural Address to the Imperial Royal Academy of 

 Sciences : " Das Gedachtniss als allgemeine Funktion 

 der organisirter Substanz " (" Memory as a Universal 

 Function of Organised Matter "). When " Life and 

 Habit " was well advanced, Francis Darwin, at the time 

 a frequent visitor, called Butler's attention to this essay, 

 which he himself only knew from an article in " Nature." 

 Herein Professor E. Ray Lankester had referred to it with 

 admiring sympathy in connection with its further develop- 

 ment by Haeckel in a pamphlet entitled " Die Perigenese 

 der Plastidule." We may note, however, that in his 

 collected Essays, " The Advancement of Science " (1890), 

 Sir Ray Lankester, while including this Essay, inserts on 

 the blank page^ — we had almost written "the white 

 sheet " — at the back of it an apology for having ever 

 advocated the possibiHty of the transmission of acquired 

 characters. 



"Unconscious Memory " was largely written to show the 

 relation of Butler's views to Hering's, and contains an ex- 

 quisitely written translation of the Address. Hering does, 

 indeed, anticipate Butler, and that in language far more 

 suitable to the persuasion of the scientific pubUc. It con- 

 tains a subsidiary hypothesis that memory has for its 

 » i,e. after p. 285 : it bears no number of its own ! 



