Unconscious Memory

by Samuel Butler

So long as the physiologist is content to be a physicist, and nothing more—using the word “physicist” in its widest signification—his position in regard to the organic world is one of extreme but legitimate one-sidedness. As the crystal to the mineralogist or the vibrating string to the acoustician, so from this point of view both man and the lower animals are to the physiologist neither more nor less than the matter of which they consist. That animals feel desire and repugnance, that the material mechanism of the human frame is in chose connection with emotions of pleasure or pain, and with the active idea-life of consciousness—this cannot, in the eyes of the physicist, make the animal or human body into anything more than what it actually is. To him it is a combination of matter, subjected to the same inflexible laws as stones and plants—a material combination, the outward and inward movements of which interact as cause and effect, and are in as close connection with each other and with their surroundings as the working of a machine with the revolutions of the wheels that compose it.

Neither sensation, nor idea, nor yet conscious will, can form a link in this chain of material occurrences which make up the physical life of an organism. If I am asked a question and reply to it, the material process which the nerve fibre conveys from the organ of hearing to the brain must travel through my brain as an actual and material process before it can reach the nerves which will act upon my organs of speech. It cannot, on reaching a given place in the brain, change then and there into an immaterial something, and turn up again some time afterwards in another part of the brain as a material process. The traveller in the desert might as well hope, before he again goes forth into the wilderness of reality, to take rest and refreshment in the oasis with which the Fata Morgana illudes him; or as well might a prisoner hope to escape from his prison through a door reflected in a mirror.

So much for the physiologist in his capacity of pure physicist. As long as he remains behind the scenes in painful exploration of the details of the machinery—as long as he only observes the action of the players from behind the stage—so long will he miss the spirit of the performance, which is, nevertheless, caught easily by one who sees it from the front. May he not, then, for once in a way, be allowed to change his standpoint? True, he came not to see the representation of an imaginary world; he is in search of the actual; but surely it must help him to a comprehension of the dramatic apparatus itself, and of the manner in which it is worked, if he were to view its action from in front as well as from behind, or at least allow himself to hear what sober-minded spectators can tell him upon the subject.

There can be no question as to the answer; and hence it comes that psychology is such an indispensable help to physiology, whose fault it only in small part is that she has hitherto made such little use of this assistance; for psychology has been late in beginning to till her fertile field with the plough of the inductive method, and it is only from ground so tilled that fruits can spring which can be of service to physiology.

If, then, the student of nervous physiology takes his stand between the physicist and the psychologist, and if the first of these rightly makes the unbroken causative continuity of all material processes an axiom of his system of investigation, the prudent psychologist, on the other hand, will investigate the laws of conscious life according to the inductive method, and will hence, as much as the physicist, make the existence of fixed laws his initial assumption. If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.

Thus regarded, the phenomena of consciousness become functions of the material changes of organised substance, and inversely—though this is involved in the use of the word “function”—the material processes of brain substance become functions of the phenomena of consciousness. For when two variables are so dependent upon one another in the changes they undergo in accordance with fixed laws that a change in either involves simultaneous and corresponding change in the other, the one is called a function of the other.

This, then, by no means implies that the two variables above-named—matter and consciousness—stand in the relation of cause and effect, antecedent and consequence, to one another. For on this subject we know nothing.

The materialist regards consciousness as a product or result of matter, while the idealist holds matter to be a result of consciousness, and a third maintains that matter and spirit are identical; with all this the physiologist, as such, has nothing whatever to do; his sole concern is with the fact that matter and consciousness are functions one of the other.

By the help of this hypothesis of the functional interdependence of matter and spirit, modern physiology is enabled to bring the phenomena of consciousness within the domain of her investigations without leaving the terra firma of scientific methods. The physiologist, as physicist, can follow the ray of light and the wave of sound or heat till they reach the organ of sense. He can watch them entering upon the ends of the nerves, and finding their way to the cells of the brain by means of the series of undulations or vibrations which they establish in the nerve filaments. Here, however, he loses all trace of them. On the other hand, still looking with the eyes of a pure physicist, he sees sound waves of speech issue from the mouth of a speaker; he observes the motion of his own limbs, and finds how this is conditional upon muscular contractions occasioned by the motor nerves, and how these nerves are in their turn excited by the cells of the central organ. But here again his knowledge comes to an end. True, he sees indications of the bridge which is to carry him from excitation of the sensory to that of the motor nerves in the labyrinth of intricately interwoven nerve cells, but he knows nothing of the inconceivably complex process which is introduced at this stage. Here the physiologist will change his standpoint; what matter will not reveal to his inquiry, he will find in the mirror, as it were, of consciousness; by way of a reflection, indeed, only, but a reflection, nevertheless, which stands in intimate relation to the object of his inquiry. When at this point he observes how one idea gives rise to another, how closely idea is connected with sensation and sensation with will, and how thought, again, and feeling are inseparable from one another, he will be compelled to suppose corresponding successions of material processes, which generate and are closely connected with one another, and which attend the whole machinery of conscious life, according to the law of the functional interdependence of matter and consciousness.

After this explanation I shall venture to regard under a single aspect a great series of phenomena which apparently have nothing to do with one another, and which belong partly to the conscious and partly to the unconscious life of organised beings. I shall regard them as the outcome of one and the same primary force of organised matter—namely, its memory or power of reproduction.