Unconscious Memory | Page 5

ascribe them to his lack of personal familiarity 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, that is to say, on the characteristics of the vibrations that are going on within it. The exterior object vibrating in a certain way imparts some of its vibrations to our brain; but if the state of the thing itself depends upon its vibrations, it [the thing] must be considered as to all intents and purposes the vibrations themselves--plus, of course, the underlying substance that is vibrating. . . . The same vibrations, therefore, form the substance remembered, introduce an infinitesimal dose of it within the brain, modify the substance remembering, and, in the course of time, create and further modify the mechanism of both the sensory and the motor nerves. Thought and thing are one.
"I commend these two last speculations to the reader's charitable consideration, as feeling that I am here travelling beyond the ground on which I can safely venture. . . . I believe they are both substantially true."
In 1885 he had written an abstract of these ideas in his notebooks (see New Quarterly Review, 1910, p. 116), and as in "Luck, or Cunning?" associated them vaguely with the unitary conceptions introduced into chemistry by Newlands and Mendelejeff. Judging himself as an outsider, the author of "Life and Habit" would certainly have considered the mild expression of faith, "I believe they are both substantially true," equivalent to one of extreme doubt. Thus "the fact of the Archbishop's recognising this as among the number of his beliefs is conclusive evidence, with those who have devoted attention to the laws of thought, that his mind is not yet clear" on the matter of the belief avowed (see "Life and Habit," pp. 24, 25).
To sum up: Butler's fundamental attitude to the vibration hypothesis was all through that taken in "Unconscious Memory"; he played with it as a pretty pet, and fancied it more and more as time went on; but instead of backing it for all he was worth, like the main theses of "Life and Habit," he put a big stake on it--and then hedged.
The last of Butler's biological writings is the Essay, "THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM," containing much valuable criticism on Wallace and Weismann. It is in allusion to the misnomer of Wallace's book, "Darwinism," that he introduces the term "Wallaceism" {0d} for a theory of descent that excludes the transmission of acquired characters. This was, indeed, the chief factor that led Charles Darwin to invent his hypothesis of pangenesis, which, unacceptable as it has proved, had far more to recommend it as a formal hypothesis than the equally formal germ-plasm hypothesis of Weismann.
The chief difficulty in accepting the main theses of Butler and Hering is one familiar to every biologist, and not at all difficult to understand by the layman. Everyone knows that the complicated beings that we term "Animals" and "Plants," consist of a number of more or less individualised units, the cells, each analogous to a simpler being, a Protist--save in so far as the character of the cell unit of the Higher being is modified in accordance with the part it plays in that complex being as a whole. Most people, too, are familiar with the fact that the complex being starts as a single cell, separated from its parent; or, where bisexual reproduction occurs, from a cell due to the fusion of two cells, each detached from its parent. Such cells are called "Germ-cells." The germ-cell, whether of single or of dual origin, starts by dividing repeatedly, so as to form the PRIMARY EMBRYONIC CELLS, a complex mass of cells, at first essentially similar, which, however, as they go on multiplying, undergo differentiations and migrations, losing their simplicity as they do so. Those cells that are modified to take part in the proper work of the whole are called tissue-cells. In virtue of their activities, their growth and reproductive power are limited- -much more in Animals than in Plants, in Higher than in Lower beings. It is these tissues, or some of them, that receive the impressions from the outside which leave the imprint of memory. Other cells, which may be closely associated into a continuous organ, or more or less surrounded by tissue-cells, whose part it is to nourish them, are called "secondary embryonic cells," or "germ-cells." The germ- cells