e 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