Unconscious Memory

A purposive action, with consciousness of the purpose and where the course taken is the result of deliberation is not said to be instinctive; nor yet, again, is blind aimless ac...

IF we observed the resemblance between successive generations to be as close as that between distilled water and distilled water through all time, and if we observed that perfec...

I WILL now lay before the reader a translation of Professor Hering’s own words. I have had it carefully revised throughout by a gentleman whose native language is German, but wh...

to the translation of the Address, which bulks so large in this book, but points out that he was “not committed to this hypothesis, though inclined to accept it on a _prima faci...

BY far the most important notice of “Evolution, Old and New,” was that taken by Mr. Darwin himself; for I can hardly be mistaken in believing that Dr. Krause’s article would hav...

IT was impossible, however, for Mr. Darwin’s readers to leave the matter as Mr. Darwin had left it. We wanted to know whence came that germ or those germs of life which, if Mr....

TO meet the objections in the two foregoing chapters, I need do little more than show that the fact of certain often inherited diseases and developments, whether of youth or old...

AFTER I had finished “Evolution, Old and New,” I wrote some articles for the _Examiner_, {52} in which I carried out the idea put forward in “Life and Habit,” that we are one pe...

THERE are few things which strike us with more surprise, when we review the course taken by opinion in the last century, than the suddenness with which belief in witchcraft and...

THE true theory of unconscious action, then, is that of Professor Hering, from whose lecture it is no strained conclusion to gather that he holds the action of all living beings...

UNCERTAIN how far the foregoing chapter is not better left without comment of any kind, I nevertheless think that some of my readers may be helped by the following extracts from...

FOR many years a link in the chain of Samuel Butler’s biological works has been missing. “Unconscious Memory” was originally published thirty years ago, but for fully half that...

How I came to write “Evolution, Old and New”—Mr Darwin’s “brief but imperfect” sketch of the opinions of the writers on evolution who had preceded him—The reception which “Evolu...

I gather that some one must have complained to Mr. Darwin of his saying that Isidore Geoffroy gave an account of Buffon’s “fluctuating conclusions” concerning evolution, when he...

THE one faith on which all normal living beings consciously or unconsciously act, is that like antecedents will be followed by like consequents. This is the one true and catholi...

I AM afraid my readers will find the chapter on instinct from Von Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” which will now follow, as distasteful to read as I did to translate...