hat 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