The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

y and

en and

a of Heredity delivered by Butler at the Working Men's Col

e it can become another clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not conven

the devil said that it was good as far as it went. We want more; we want to know with what familiar set of facts we are to connect the one in question which, though in our midst, at present dwells apart as a mysteriou

ut it. I have for some years maintained this to be a mistake and have urged, in company with Professor Hering, of Prague, and others, that the connection between memory and heredity is so close that there is no reason for regarding the two as generical

to reach back to the last "why" that any one can ask, and to answer it. Fortunately for philosophers, people generally become fatigued after they have heard the answer to two or three "whys" and are glad enough to let the matter drop. If, however, any one will insist on pushing question behind question long enough,

ecedent of, and the phenomenon most closely connected with, heredity is memory. I do not profess to show why anything can remember at all, I only maintain that whereas, to borrow an illus

mo

ger than the cause which excited it. There is thus induced a state of things in which mental images, and even physical sensations (if there can be such

inuing to reverberate af

aving done so. Memory is to mind as viscosity is to protoplasm, it gives a tenacity to t

us memory. Memory is, as it were, the body of thought, and it is through memory that body and mind are linked together in rhythm or vibration; for body is such as it is by reason of the characteristics of the vibrations

ith

e and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death. So with light and darkness, heat and cold, you never can get either all t

cious

y being able to beat them off their conscious memory; that they cannot deny the legitimacy of my maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be phenomena of memory without my being able to deny the legitimacy of their maintaining the recollection of what they had for dinner yesterday to be a phenomenon of memory. My t

ction a

duction is certainly an effort of memory. It should not therefore surprise us if the second reproduction should turn out to be an effort of memory also. Indeed all forms of re

nal I

ins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers; they ate the sour grapes bef

sat

n different places and at different times. If we feel them at

s in t

er's web woven across the road, what a shock that thin lin

s and

we are being shocked no

oc

memory of each shock for a little while afterwards, able to feel whether two shocks are simultaneous or in succession, and able to know

si

hake something down without design, or as when a man runs up against another in th

ee design in a connection where they sho

on without design; as when a man treads on another's corns, it is not

he Church too much, and that I should probably be more prosperous if I paid more attention to them: so I hung up three pieces of ivy in my rooms on Xmas Eve. A few months af

should know anything whatever about the ultimate, or even deeper springs of growth an

Design a

ten confused detail into homogeneous and consistent mind and matter, but they do not originate. The increment in each generation, at the moment of its being an increment, has nothing to do with memory or heredity, it is due to the chances and changes of this mortal state. Design comes in at the moment that a living being either feels a want and forecas

vourable circumstances, but our whole conscious life is the performance of acts either imperfectly remembered or not remembered at all. There are rain-drops of new experiences in every life which are not within the hold of our memory or past experience, and, as each one of these rai

and M

ion is not quite the same which makes us find it so nearly the same. We remember by the aid of differences as much as by that of samenesses. If there could be no difference

h according to our past experience we ought to find no difficulty in doing, then we may guess what a bee must feel as it goes flying up and down a window-pane. Then

its effects go, unless it happens to come more into collision with

usions occur ma

lightness in itself, the importance depending upon its relations to something else which make a very small change have an importance it would not otherwise have: in these cases the memory reverts to the old circumstances unmodified,

g in full perfection, though the circumst

emb

Handel's, or else a solid, tangible object, as a piano or an organ, but always the thing must be linked on to matter by a longer or shorter chain as the case may be. I was thinking of this once while walking by the side of the Serpentine and, looki

Finge

rom the nail-and this reminded him that many years previously, while quite a child, he had done the same thing. Thereon he fell to thinking of that time which was impr

as his hands wandered over the wooden frame, he felt that there was a place where nut had come out so that he could put his fingers in. One day, in trying to stuff a piece of paper into this hole, he stuffed it in so far and so tightly that he tore the quick of nail. The whole th

e money was missing, he had thought it was five sovereigns; or perhaps he was too ill to think anything, or to be questioned; I forget what I was told about this-at any rate he had no idea of the value of the piece of paper he was stuffing into the hole. But now the matter had recurred to him at all he felt so sure that it was the note that he immediately went down to Hertfordshire, w

He rang the bell and when the servant came asked for a bed-key. All this time he was rapidly acquiring the reputation of being a lunatic throughout the whole house, but the ke

esent brings back the presents t

ious As

elf the air "In Sweetest Harmony"

why you are w

d I d

r me, two minutes ago, whistli

oubt whether I should have consciously recognised it. That I did recognise it unconsciously is to

oci

set and the cat will exhibit none of the phenomena of consciousness. But if you say "Me-e-at," the

ng

s been artificially introduced among the associated i