INTRODUCTIONIn reviewing Samuel Butlers works, Unconscious Memory gives us aninvaluable lead; for it tells us (Chaps. II, III) how the author cameto write the Book of the Machines in Erewhon (1872), with itsforeshadowing of the later theory, Life and Habit, (1878),Evolution, Old and New (1879), as well as Unconscious Memory(1880) itself. His fourth book on biological theory was Luck? orCunning? (1887). {0a}Besides these books, his contributions to biology comprise several essays:Remarks on Romanes Mental Evolution in Animals, contained inSelections from Previous Works (1884) incorporated into Luck? orCunning, The Deadlock in Darwinism (Universal Review, April-June,1890), republished in the posthumous volume of Essays on Life, Art, andScience (1904), and, finally, some of the Extracts from the Notebooks ofthe late Samuel Butler, edited by Mr. H. Festing Jones, now in course ofpublication in the New Quarterly Review.Of all these, LIFE AND HABIT (1878) is the most important, the mainbuilding to which the other writings are buttresses or, at most, annexes. Itsteaching has been summarised in Unconscious Memory in four mainprinciples: (1) the oneness of personality between parent and offspring; (2)memory on the part of the offspring of certain actions which it did when inthe persons of its forefathers; (3) the latency of that memory until it isrekindled by a recurrence of the associated ideas; (4) the unconsciousnesswith which habitual actions come to be performed. To these we must add afifth: the purposiveness of the actions of living beings, as of the machineswhich they make or select.Butler tells (Life and Habit, p. 33) that he sometimes hoped that thisbook would be regarded as a valuable adjunct to Darwinism. He wasbitterly disappointed in the event, for the book, as a whole, was received byprofessional biologists as a gigantic jokea joke, moreover, not in the bestpossible taste. True, its central ideas, largely those of Lamarck, had beenpresented by Hering in 1870 (as Butler found shortly after his publication);they had been favourably received, developed by Haeckel, expounded andpraised by Ray Lankester. Coming from Butler, they met with contumely,even from such men as Romanes, who, as Butler had no difficulty inproving, were unconsciously inspired by the same ideasNur mit einbischen andern Worter.It is easy, looking back, to see why Life and Habit so missed its mark.Charles Darwins presentation of the evolution theory had, for the first time,rendered it possible for a sound naturalist to accept the doctrine ofcommon descent with divergence; and so given a real meaning to the termnatural relationship, which had forced itself upon the older naturalists,despite their belief in special and independent creations. The immediate aimof the naturalists of the day was now to fill up the gaps in their knowledge,so as to strengthen the fabric of a unified biology. For this purpose theyfound their actual scientific equipment so inadequate that they were fullyoccupied in inventing fresh technique, and working therewith at factssavea few critics, such as St. George Mivart, who was regarded as negligible,since he evidently held a brief for a party standing outside the scientificworld.Butler introduced himself as what we now call The Man in the Street, fartoo bare of scientific clothing to satisfy the Mrs. Grundy of the domain:lacking all recognised tools of science and all sense of the difficulties in hisway, he proceeded to tackle the problems of science with little save the deftpen of the literary expert in his hand. His very failure to appreciate thedifficulties gave greater power to his workmuch as Tartarin of Tarasconascended the Jungfrau and faced successfully all dangers of Alpine travel, solong as he believed them to be the mere blagues de reclame of the wilySwiss host. His brilliant qualities of style and irony themselves told heavilyagainst him. Was he not already known for having written the mosttrenchant satire that had appeared since Gullivers Travels? Had he notsneered therein at the very foundations of society, and followed up itssuccess by a pseudo-biography that had taken in the Record and theRock? In Life and Habit, at the very start, he goes out of his way toheap scorn at the respected names of Marcus Aurelius, Lord Bacon, Goethe,Arnold of Rugby, and Dr. W. B. Carpenter. He expressed the lowestopinion of the Fellows of the Royal Society. To him the professional man ofscience, with self-conscious knowledge for his ideal and aim, was amedicine-man, priest, auguruseful, perhaps, in his way, but to be carefullywatched by all who value freedom of thought and person, lest withopportunity he develop into a persecutor of the worst type. Not content withblackguarding the audience to whom his work should most appeal, he wenton to depreciate that work itself and its author in his finest vein of irony.Having argued that our best and highest knowledge is that of whosepossession we are most ignorant, he proceeds: Above all, let no unwaryreader do me the injustice of believing in me. In that I write at all I amamong the damned.His writing of EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW (1879) was due to hisconviction that scant justice had been done by Charles Darwin and AlfredWallace and their admirers to the pioneering work of Buffon, ErasmusDarwin, and Lamarck. To repair this he gives a brilliant exposition of whatseemed to him the most valuable portion of their teachings on evolution.His analysis of Buffons true meaning, veiled by the reticences due to theconditions under which he wrote, is as masterly as the English in which hedevelops it. His sense of wounded justice explains the vigorous polemicwhich here, as in all his later writings, he carries to the extreme.As a matter of fact, he never realised Charles Darwins utter lack ofsympathetic understanding of the work of his French precursors, let alonehis own grandfather, Erasmus. Yet this practical ignorance, which to Butlerwas so strange as to transcend belief, was altogether genuine, and easy torealise when we recall the position of Natural Science in the early thirties inDarwins student days at Cambridge, and for a decade or two later.Catastropharianism was the tenet of the day: to the last it commended itselfto his Professors of Botany and Geology,--for whom Darwin held the ferventallegiance of the Indian scholar, or chela, to his guru. As Geikie has recentlypointed out, it was only later, when Lyell had shown that the breaks in thesuccession of the rocks were only partial and local, without involving theuniversal catastrophes that destroyed all life and rendered fresh creationsthereof necessary, that any general acceptance of a descent theory could beexpected. We may be very sure that Darwin must have received manysolemn warnings against the dangerous speculations of the FrenchRevolutionary School. He himself was far too busy at the time with thereception and assimilation of new facts to be awake to the deeper interest offar-reaching theories