Unconscious Memory | Page 8

various directions may appear simultaneously in many individuals, and in various directions. In the gardener's phrase, the species may take to sporting in various directions at the same time, and each sport may be represented by numerous specimens.
De Vries shows the probability that species go on for long periods showing only fluctuations, and then suddenly take to sporting in the way described, short periods of mutation alternating with long intervals of relative constancy. It is to mutations that De Vries and his school, as well as Luther Burbank, the great former of new fruit- and flower-plants, look for those variations which form the material of Natural Selection. In "God the Known and God the Unknown," which appeared in the Examiner (May, June, and July), 1879, but though then revised was only published posthumously in 1909, Butler anticipates this distinction:-
"Under these circumstances organism must act in one or other of these two ways: it must either change slowly and continuously with the surroundings, paying cash for everything, meeting the smallest change with a corresponding modification, so far as is found convenient, or it must put off change as long as possible, and then make larger and more sweeping changes.
"Both these courses are the same in principle, the difference being one of scale, and the one being a miniature of the other, as a ripple is an Atlantic wave in little; both have their advantages and disadvantages, so that most organisms will take the one course for one set of things and the other for another. They will deal promptly with things which they can get at easily, and which lie more upon the surface; THOSE, HOWEVER, WHICH ARE MORE TROUBLESOME TO REACH, AND LIE DEEPER, WILL BE HANDLED UPON MORE CATACLYSMIC PRINCIPLES, BEING ALLOWED LONGER PERIODS OF REPOSE FOLLOWED BY SHORT PERIODS OF GREATER ACTIVITY . . . it may be questioned whether what is called a sport is not the organic expression of discontent which has been long felt, but which has not been attended to, nor been met step by step by as much small remedial modification as was found practicable: so that when a change does come it comes by way of revolution. Or, again (only that it comes to much the same thing), it may be compared to one of those happy thoughts which sometimes come to us unbidden after we have been thinking for a long time what to do, or how to arrange our ideas, and have yet been unable to come to any conclusion" (pp. 14, 15). {0g}
We come to another order of mind in Hans Driesch. At the time he began his work biologists were largely busy in a region indicated by Darwin, and roughly mapped out by Haeckel--that of phylogeny. From the facts of development of the individual, from the comparison of fossils in successive strata, they set to work at the construction of pedigrees, and strove to bring into line the principles of classification with the more or less hypothetical "stemtrees." Driesch considered this futile, since we never could reconstruct from such evidence anything certain in the history of the past. He therefore asserted that a more complete knowledge of the physics and chemistry of the organic world might give a scientific explanation of the phenomena, and maintained that the proper work of the biologist was to deepen our knowledge in these respects. He embodied his views, seeking the explanation on this track, filling up gaps and tracing projected roads along lines of probable truth in his "Analytische Theorie der organische Entwicklung." But his own work convinced him of the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken, and he has become as strenuous a vitalist as Butler. The most complete statement of his present views is to be found in "The Philosophy of Life" (1908-9), being the Giffold Lectures for 1907-8. Herein he postulates a quality ("psychoid") in all living beings, directing energy and matter for the purpose of the organism, and to this he applies the Aristotelian designation "Entelechy." The question of the transmission of acquired characters is regarded as doubtful, and he does not emphasise--if he accepts--the doctrine of continuous personality. His early youthful impatience with descent theories and hypotheses has, however, disappeared.
In the next work the influence of Hering and Butler is definitely present and recognised. In 1906 Signor Eugenio Rignano, an engineer keenly interested in all branches of science, and a little later the founder of the international review, Rivista di Scienza (now simply called Scientia), published in French a volume entitled "Sur la transmissibilite des Caracteres acquis--Hypothese d'un Centro- epigenese." Into the details of the author's work we will not enter fully. Suffice it to know that he accepts the Hering-Butler theory, and makes a distinct advance on Hering's rather crude hypothesis of persistent vibrations by