Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology

by E. S. Russell

A man of singular freshness and openness of mind, combining in an extraordinary degree extreme intellectual subtlety with a childlike simplicity of outlook, Butler was one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century. He was not a professional biologist, and much of his biological work is, for that reason, imperfect. But he brought to bear upon the central problems of biology an unbiassed and powerful intelligence, and his attitude to these problems, just because it is that of a cultivated layman, is singularly illuminating.

He was not well acquainted with biological literature; he seems to have hit upon the main ideas of his theory of life and habit in complete independence of Lamarck, and only later to have become aware that Lamarck had in a measure forestalled him. He puts this very beautifully in the following passage from his chief biological work Life and Habit (1877[508]):—"I admit that when I began to write upon my subject I did not seriously believe in it. I saw, as it were, a pebble upon the ground, with a sheen that pleased me; taking it up, I turned it over and over for my amusement, and found it always grow brighter and brighter the more I examined it. At length I became fascinated, and gave loose rein to self-illusion. The aspect of the world changed; the trifle which I had picked up idly had proved to be a talisman of inestimable value, and had opened a door through which I caught glimpses of a strange and interesting transformation. Then came one who told me that the stone was not mine, but that it had been dropped by Lamarck, to whom it belonged rightfully, but who had lost it; whereon I said I cared not who was the owner, if only I might use it and enjoy it. Now, therefore, having polished it with what art and care one who is no jeweller could bestow upon it, I return it, as best I may, to its possessor" (p. 306). In one of his later works, however, Butler made up for his first neglect of his predecessors by giving what is undeniably the best account in English literature of the work of Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin—in his Evolution, Old and New (1879). Many of his facts he took from Charles Darwin, whose theory of natural selection he bitterly opposed, in the two books just mentioned and in Unconscious Memory (1880) and Luck or Cunning (1887).

Butler's main thesis is that living things are active, intelligent agents, personally continuous with all their ancestors, possessing an intense but unconscious memory of all that their ancestors did and suffered, and moving through habit from the spontaneity of striving to the automatism of remembrance.

The primary cause of all variation in structure is the active response of the organism to needs experienced by it, and the indispensable link between the outer world and the creature itself is that same "sense of need" upon which Lamarck insisted. "According to Lamarck, genera and species have been evolved, in the main, by exactly the same process as that by which human inventions and civilisations are now progressing; and this involves that intelligence, ingenuity, heroism, and all the elements of romance, should have had the main share in the development of every herb and living creature around us" (Life and Habit, p. 253). Variations are indubitably the raw material of evolution—"The question is as to the origin and character of these variations. We say they mainly originate in a creature through a sense of its needs, and vary through the varying surroundings which will cause those needs to vary, and through the opening-up of new desires in many creatures, as the consequence of the gratification of old ones; they depend greatly on differences of individual capacity and temperament; they are communicated, and in the course of time transmitted, as what we call hereditary habits or structures, though these are only, in truth, intense and epitomised memories of how certain creatures liked to deal with protoplasm" (p. 267).

Butler's theory then is essentially a bold and enlightened Lamarckism, completed and rounded off by the conception that heredity too is a psychological process, of the same nature as memory.

In seeking to establish a close analogy between memory and heredity Butler starts out from the fact of common experience, that actions which on their first performance require the conscious exercise of will and intelligence, and are then carried out with difficulty and hesitation, gradually through long-continued practice come to be performed easily and automatically, without the conscious exercise of intelligence or will.

He tries to show that this is a general law—that knowledge and will become intense and perfect only when through long-continued exercise they become automatic and unconscious—and he applies this conception to the elucidation of development.

Developmental processes, especially the early ones (of Roux's first stage) are automatic and unconscious, and yet imply the possession by the embryo of a wonderfully perfect knowledge of the processes to be gone through, and an assured power of will and judgment. Is it conceivable, says Butler, that the embryo can do all these things without knowing how to do them, and without having done them before? "Shall we say ... that a baby of a day old sucks (which involves the whole principle of the pump, and hence a profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood (millions of years before Sir Humphrey Davy discovered oxygen), sees and hears—all most difficult and complicated operations, involving a knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics, compared with which the discoveries of Newton sink into utter insignificance? Shall we say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly, without being even able to direct its attention to them, and without mistake, and at the same time not know how to do them, and never have done them before?" (p. 54). Assuredly not.

The only possible explanation is that the embryo's ancestors have done these things so often, throughout so many millions of generations, that the embryo's knowledge of how to do them has become unconscious and automatic by reason of this age-long practice. This implies that there is in a very real sense actual personal continuity between the embryo and all its ancestors, so that their experiences are his, their memory also his. "We must suppose the continuity of life and sameness between living beings, whether plants or animals, to be far closer than we have hitherto believed; so that the experience of one person is not enjoyed by his successor, so much as that the successor is bona fide but a part of the life of his progenitor, imbued with all his memories, profiting by all his experiences—which are, in fact, his own—and only unconscious of the extent of his own memories and experiences owing to their vastness and already infinite repetitions" (p. 50). It is very suggestive in this connection, he continues—"I. That we are most conscious of, and have most control over, such habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences, which are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely human.

"II. That we are less conscious of, and have less control over, eating and drinking, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing, which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which are, geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent.