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

by E. S. Russell

"III. That we are most unconscious of, and have least control over, our digestion and circulation, which belonged even to our invertebrate ancestry, and which are habits, geologically speaking, of extreme antiquity.... Does it not seem as though the older and more confirmed the habit, the more unquestioning the act of volition, till, in the case of the oldest habits, the practice of succeeding existences has so formulated the procedure, that, on being once committed to such and such a line beyond a certain point, the subsequent course is so clear as to be open to no further doubt, to admit of no alternative, till the very power of questioning is gone, and even the consciousness of volition" (pp. 51-2).

The hypothesis then, that heredity and development are due to unconscious memory, finds much to support it—"the self-development of each new life in succeeding generations—the various stages through which it passes (as it would appear, at first sight, without rhyme or reason), the manner in which it prepares structures of the most surpassing intricacy and delicacy, for which it has no use at the time when it prepares them, and the many elaborate instincts which it exhibits immediately on, and indeed before, birth—all point in the direction of habit and memory, as the only causes which could produce them" (p. 125). The hypothesis explains, for instance, the fact of recapitulation:—"Why should the embryo of any animal go through so many stages—embryological allusions to forefathers of a widely different type? And why, again, should the germs of the same kind of creature always go through the same stages? If the germ of any animal now living is, in its simplest state, but part of the personal identity of one of the original germs of all life whatsoever, and hence, if any now living organism must be considered without quibble as being itself millions of years old, and as imbued with an intense though unconscious memory of all that it has done sufficiently often to have made a permanent impression; if this be so, we can answer the above questions perfectly well. The creature goes through so many intermediate stages between its earliest state as life at all, and its latest development, for the simplest of all reasons, namely, because this is the road by which it has always hitherto travelled to its present differentiation; this is the road it knows, and into every turn and up or down of which it has been guided by the force of circumstances and the balance of considerations" (pp. 125-6).

The hypothesis explains also the way in which the orderly succession of stages in embryogeny is brought about, for we can readily understand that the embryo will not remember any stage until it has passed through the stage immediately preceding it. "Each step of normal development will lead the impregnated ovum up to, and remind it of, its next ordinary course of action, in the same way as we, when we recite a well-known passage, are led up to each successive sentence by the sentence which has immediately preceded it.... Though the ovum immediately after impregnation is instinct with all the memories of both parents, not one of these memories can normally become active till both the ovum itself and its surroundings are sufficiently like what they respectively were, when the occurrence now to be remembered last took place. The memory will then immediately return, and the creature will do as it did on the last occasion that it was in like case as now. This ensures that similarity of order shall be preserved in all the stages of development in successive generations" (pp. 297-8).

Abnormal conditions of development will cause the embryo to pause and hesitate, as if at a loss what to do, having no ancestral experience to guide it. Abnormalities of development represent the embryo's attempt to make the best of an unexpected situation. Or, as Butler puts it, "When ... events are happening to it which, if it has the kind of memory we are attributing to it, would baffle that memory, or which have rarely or never been included in the category of its recollections, it acts precisely as a creature acts when its recollection is disturbed, or when it is required to do something which it has never done before" (p. 132). "It is certainly noteworthy that the embryo is never at a loss, unless something happens to it which has not usually happened to its forefathers, and which in the nature of things it cannot remember" (p. 132).

Butler's teleological conception of organic evolution was of course completely antagonistic to the naturalistic conceptions current in his time. In one of his later books he repeats Paley's arguments in favour of design, and to the question, "Where, then, is your designer of beasts and birds, of fishes, and of plants?" he replies: "Our answer is simple enough; it is that we can and do point to a living tangible person with flesh, blood, eyes, nose, ears, organs, senses, dimensions, who did of his own cunning, after infinite proof of every kind of hazard and experiment, scheme out and fashion each organ of the human body. This is the person whom we claim as the designer and artificer of that body, and he is the one of all others the best fitted for the task by his antecedents, and his practical knowledge of the requirements of the case—for he is man himself. Not man, the individual of any given generation, but man in the entirety of his existence from the dawn of life onwards to the present moment" (Evolution, Old and New, p. 30, 1879).

Butler's theory of life and habit remained only a sketch, and he was perhaps not fully aware of its philosophical implications. Since Butler's time, a new complexion has been put upon biological philosophy by the profound speculations of Bergson.

But it is not impossible that the future development of biological thought will follow some such lines as those which he tentatively laid down.

Butler was not the first to suggest that there is a close connection between heredity and memory—it is a thought likely to occur to any unprejudiced thinker. The first enunciation of it which attracted general attention was that contained in Hering's famous lecture "On Memory as a general Function of organised Matter."[509] Butler was not aware of Hering's work when he published his Life and Habit, but in Unconscious Memory (1880) he gave full credit to Hering as the first discoverer, and supplied an admirable translation of Hering's lecture. As far as the assimilation of heredity to memory is concerned Hering and Butler have much in common, but Hering did not share Butler's Lamarckian and vitalistic views, preferring to hold fast, for the practical purposes of physiology at all events, to the general accepted theory of the parallelism between psychical and physical processes. He was inclined to regard memory in the ordinary sense as a function of the brain, and memory in general as a function of all organised matter. Speaking of the psychical life, he says, "Thus the cause which produces the unity of all single phenomena of consciousness must be looked for in unconscious life. As we know nothing of this except what we learn from our investigations of matter, and since in a purely empirical consideration, matter and the unconscious must be regarded as identical, the physiologist may justly define memory in a wider sense to be a faculty of the brain, the results of which to a great extent belong to both consciousness and unconsciousness."[510] Hering's views were supported by Haeckel.[511]

In 1893 an American, H. F. Orr,[512] tried to work out a theory of development and heredity based upon the fundamental idea "that the property which is the basis of bodily development in organisms is the same property which we recognise as the basis of psychic activity and psychic development." He tried also to explain the recapitulation of phylogeny by ontogeny as due to habit.

The neo-Lamarckian school of American palæontologists were also in sympathy with the memory idea, and this was expressed most clearly perhaps by Cope.[513]