Memory,” and “Luck or Cunning”, which carried its arguments further
afield. It will perhaps interest Butler’s readers if I here quote a
passage from his note-books, lately published in the “New Quarterly
Review” (Vol. III. No. 9), in which he summarizes his work in biology:
“To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have
been mainly these:
“1. The identification of heredity and memory, and the corollaries
relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of
old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids, and the principles
underlying longevity—all of which follow as a matter of course. This was
‘Life and Habit’ [1877].
“2. The re-introduction of teleology into organic life, which to me
seems hardly, if at all, less important than the ‘Life and Habit’ theory.
This was ‘Evolution Old and New’ [1879].
“3. An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory. This
was Unconscious Memory’ [1880]. I was alarmed by the suggestion and
fathered it upon Professor Hering, who never, that I can see, meant to
say anything of the kind, but I forced my view upon him, as it were, by
taking hold of a sentence or two in his lecture, ‘On Memory as a
Universal Function of Organised Matter,’ and thus connected memory with
vibrations.
“What I want to do now (1885) is to connect vibrations not only with
memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the
memory resides, thus adopting Newland’s law (sometimes called
Mendelejeff’s law) that there is only one substance, and that the
characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given time
will determine whether it will appear to us as, we will say, hydrogen, or
sodium, or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other.” [This is
touched upon in the concluding chapter of “Luck or Cunning?” 1887].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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