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.

H