< Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu
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BOOKS. 295

tions to evolutionary speculation. The " two main points " on which he has been " insisting for some years past " could not be better stated than they are in the opening sentence, viz., " the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and the re-introduction of design into organic development " ; this " design " being the Lamarcldan or " Erasmus Dar- winian " design, or " cunning," of the organism itself, as opposed at once to the Paleyan or external design and to the " luck " of " Charles Dar- winian " spontaneous variation. If Mr. Butler wishes to secure for these ideas all the recognition they deserve, he should present them thus separately, as elements in a complete theory of evolution. Instead of this, although he sees clearly that they are two ideas and not one, he insists on presenting them fused into the single theory of Life and Habit, which, how- ever many incidental points he may make against the scientific men, after all cannot be accepted as an adequate theory. Hering's identification of heredity with memory is of course just as consistent with Darwinian as with Lamarckian evolution, both of which equally imply inheritance of variations, "spontaneous" or "functional" as the case may be ; and the explanations of Darwin and of Lamarck, as Mr. Spencer is now showing, are not mutually exclusive. For Mr. Butler to admit this, however, would spoil the fun. He would not be able, out of Mr. Spencer's opposi- tion of "inheritance of functionally produced modifications" and "sur- vival of the fittest" (p. 46) to make the antithesis of "survival of the fittest " arid " heredity " / The same antithesis, with the assumption that heredity is the special property of the Lamarckian doctrine, is constantly appearing in the anti-Darwinian chapters. There are one or two passages (e.g., pp. 262-3) from which it may be inferred that the perversity of the chapters just referred to is not altogether unconscious. It is worth while to point out that the really strong resemblance between Hering's and Mr. Butler's theory of memory and instinct and certain passages recently selected by Mr. Spencer from the Principles of Psychology is not, where Mr. Butler looks for it (and of course does not find it), in the identification of the subject of " race-experience " and personal experience, but in the identification of their characters ; both tending to become unconscious as they are perfected, and by the same psychological law. The superiority of '" unconscious " mind, which was so prominent in Op. 3, is an idea to which the author does not now recur. He seeks rather to prove that there is conscious mind everywhere. Perhaps he thinks he has worked the former vein sufficiently. In his character of the restorer of mind to the universe, he is able to write a delightful description of the collapse of " the protoplasm boom " " in the autumn of 1879 " (pp. 146-7). The most remarkable feature of his present work, however, is not the criticisms of men of science, but the Heraclitean theory developed in c. xi. and in single passages of other chapters, notably pp. 28-31, 43-4, 75-9, 313-17. May his readers indulge the hope that this theory will not become to him " a white elephant," as he confesses the theory of Life and Habit has been ? Social History of the Races of Mankind. Second Division : ' Papuo- and Malayo-Melanesians '. By A. FEATHERMAN. London : Triibner & Co., 1887. Pp. xviii., 507. This second division of the author's herculean enterprise, issued after the fifth and the first (see MIND vii. 153, x. 300), appears after a shorter interval than separated the two others, and encourages the hope that remaining volumes (of which there should be five, according to what was said in the first) may see the light in progressively shorter times. Yet it is not surprising that the publication of matter that has to be collected by such wide and laborious research and reduced to sufficiently uniform

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