cementing together grains of ferruginous quartz, which it must have picked out from the general

mass.

So much for the unconscious and yet wonderful action of this atomy. We human folk act with an apparent unconsciousness in many things-to wit, in those in which we have had most practice, and in which, as Mr. Butler would put it, we have by that means "got past thought." A consummate player on the piano, for instance, in the quasi- unconsciousness of habit resulting from constant practice, will strike four or five thousand notes in four or five minutes. This he will do accurately, and yet think and talk at the same time, his attention being engaged upon thousands of minute points, in any one of which a mistake might be made.

That the faculty is so developed as to have passed into the domain of unconsciousness may be thus proved. If the player be made conscious by anyone's disturbing him and then desiring him to start again, he is put out, and may have to begin a difficult passage, which he was performing swimmingly in his unconsciousness of effort, over again in order to catch the rhythm from the first.

"In fact, it seems as though he knew the piece too well to be able to know that he knows it, and is only conscious of knowing those passages which he does not know so thoroughly."

When the performance is concluded any portion of it may be repeated; but it would require an effort-indeed, would be almost an impossibility to recall, or rather produce a consciousness of the effort that resulted in the production of any given note.

In writing "the formation of each letter requires attention and volition, yet in a few minutes a practised

writer will form several hundred letters, and be able to think and talk of something else all the time he is doing so. He will not probably remember the formation of a single character in any page that he has written; nor will he be able to give more than the substance of his writing if asked to do so. He knows how to form each letter so well, and he knows so well each word that he is about to write, that he has ceased to be conscious of his knowledge or to notice his acts of volition, each one of which is, nevertheless, followed by a corresponding muscular action. the uniformity of our handwriting, and the manner in which we almost invariably adhere to one method of forming the same character, would seem to suggest that during the momentary formation of each letter our memories must revert (with an intensity too rapid for our perception) to many if not to all the occasions on which we have ever written the same letter previously-the memory of these occasions dwelling in our minds as what has been called a residuum

Yet

-an unconsciously struck balance or average of them all-a fused mass of individual reminiscences of which no trace can be found in our consciousness, and of which the only effect would seem to lie in the gradual changes of handwriting which are perceptible in most people till they have reached middle age, and sometimes even later. So far are we from consciously remembering any one of the occasions on which we have written such and such a letter, that we are not even conscious of exercising our memory at all, any more than we are in health conscious of the action of our heart. But, if we are writing in some unfamiliar way, as when printing our letters instead of writing them in our usual running hand, our

memory is so far awakened that we become conscious of every character we form; sometimes it is even perceptible as memory to ourselves, as when we try to remember how to print some letter, for example a 'g,' and cannot call to mind on which side of the upper half of the letter we ought to put the link which connects it with the lower, and are successful in remembering; but if we become very conscious of remembering, it shows that we are on the brink of only trying to remember-that is to say, of not remembering at all."

Other instances are to be found in reading, walking, swimming, talking, and also in calculation. In the last-named province we can support the theory from experience. Our first additions of long columns were laboriously made, with a consciousness of each figure.

After

some practice we learned to perform the same process with so little consciousness of it, and so little appreciation of each individual figure, that we could think pleasantly at the time the pencil and the eye were passing up and down the column in the process of addition. A friend whom we consulted as to the metaphysics of such a matter said that the thoughts slipped in between the interstices of the figures. Our own theory was that the practice had helped to form a mechanical part of the brain fit to have a matter like addition relegated to it.

Mr. Butler would have it that the instinctive or mechanical life is the attainment of an aristocratic unconscious ease which far transcends imperfect and conscious effort.

It being proved that constant practice leads to unconsciousness, how long indeed must not have been the practice of the creature of so-called instinct to enable it to perform its almost infallible pro

cesses, such as the dome building of the amoeba!

The little atomy presumably does its work with such marvellous perfection and unconsciousness of effort, because it knows so well how to do it.

When we do not know well that on which we are engaged, there arrives a painful consciousness of its details. When we are only a growing cell, we are untroubled by such consciousness of effort. "Birth is but the beginning of doubt, the first hankering after scepticism, the dreaming of a dawn of trouble, the end of certainty and of settled convictions.

Not

but what before birth there have been unsettled convictions (more's the pity) with not a few, and after birth we have still so made up our minds upon many points as to have no further need of reflection concerning them; nevertheless, in the main, birth is the end of that time when we really knew our business, and the beginning of the days wherein we know not what we would do, or do. It is therefore the beginning of consciousness, and infancy is as the dosing of one who turns in his bed on waking, and takes another short sleep before he rises."

Again, "A chicken is never so full of activity, reasoning faculty, and volition as when it is an embryo in the eggshell, making bones, and flesh, and feathers, and eyes, and claws, with nothing but a little warmth and white of egg to make them from. This is indeed to make bricks with but a small modicum of straw. There is no man in the whole world who knows consciously and articulately as much as a halfhatched hen's egg knows unconsciously."

How are we to account for the arrival at such unconsciousness? Where is the primeval repetition of effort: "The embryo chicken would

presumably act as it does, provided it were always the same chicken which made itself over and over again." This sounds somewhat absurd, but Mr. Butler means that the knowledge and volition of all chickens would seem to be parts of the knowledge and volition of a primordial cell, which slumbers but never dies.

The argument as to comparative consciousness is summed up in the following statements:

“That we are most conscious of, and have most control over, such habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences, which are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely human.

"That we are less conscious of, and have less control over, eating and drinking, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing, which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which are still, geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent.

"That we are most unconscious of, and have least control over, our digestion and circulation, which belonged even to our invertebrate ancestry, and which are habits, geologically speaking, of extreme antiquity."

And again, as we learn from Mr. Butler,

"I wish also to show reason for thinking that this creature, Life, has only come to be what it is, by the same sort of process as that by which any human art or manufacture is developed, i.e., through constantly doing the same thing over and over again, beginning from something which is barely recognisable as faith, or as the desire to know, or do, or live at all, and as to

the origin of which we are in utter darkness and growing till it is first conscious of effort, then conscious of power, then powerful with but little consciousness, and finally, so powerful and so charged with memory as to be absolutely without all self-consciousness whatever, except as regards its latest phases in each of its many differentiations, or when placed in such new circumstances as compel it to choose between death and a reconsideration of its position."

Mr. Butler's conclusion is "Life, then, is memory. The life of a creature is the memory of a creature. We are all the same stuff to start with, but we remember different things, and if we did not remember different things we should be absolutely like each other. As for the stuff itself of which we are made, we know nothing save only that it is such as 'dreams are made of.""

The argument is most plausible, but it is somewhat too novel for us to be wholly converted by it, according to Mr. Butler's own principles, that the best advances are those made slowly.

It would appear reasonable that there are two kinds of consciousness, one (or perhaps many) of the bodily frame, another-in beings of the higher grades of the unseen nature, which latter may depend upon memory for its life quite as reasonably as may the embryo chicken upon that kind of memory which manifests itself as what we call instinct.

When the mechanical certainty of a creature's life is disturbed, it is by the entrance of a new element, which marks off a new development. From the utmost perfection of the most complicated mechanical creature we see traces of a strange descent, which proves to be but the reculer pour mieux sauter of a development on an infinitely

ascending scale. The blind mechanical certainty by which an animal creature of the lower grades seeks its foods, and converts them into movement, is but like the manner of a steam engine, which, by working a coal-heaving apparatus to fill its own furnace, a pump to fill its own boiler, and an apparatus for disposing of its undigested refuse, would (after the fire of life were once set alight) continue its vital movements so long as the supply of inflammable matter and water was unexhausted. That blind mechanical certainty begins to be infringed, very delicately at first, and never, so far as we know it, in any but a partial way, in higher life as compared with lower forms; that certainty begins to be traversed, intersected, and impaired by a new quality that is not mechanical, so far as we know what is mechanical, for it ofttimes acts directly contrary to the course which its action would have taken had it followed the calculable routine of the machine.

We may touch now again upon Mr. Butler's doctrine that the power of the creature lies in its memory, and question whether that memory must not be of two kinds. The machine memory, or the quality by which one machine (even a manmade one) acts like another machine of identical construction; and the memory by which there enters into the mechanical life of an organism a dominating entity furnished with an attribute that in its rudimentary form we may fairly name self-will. This self-will is not a blind calculable thing. If it be memory, it is the memory of former freedom, and therefore has an individuality of its own, and can be included in no class of objects whose course is ascertainable with certainty.

The difference between the machine as we make it and the

mechanical organisms of Nature would seem mainly to lie in the fact that we do not know how the unseen Promethean fire is brought down to the latter to start the machinery; and Nature's mechanisms have multiform powers of self-reproduction which no man knows how to include in his mechanical masterpieces.

But this difference would bring no argument against our thesis from Mr. Butler, for in his "Erewhon," where he finds more advanced philosophers than ourselves, he has with admirable humour included among their discoveries that of the progression of machines into enhanced consciousness and power. A later development than man, they were tabooed by the Erewhonian wiseacres on the ground that they would manifest a subservience to man only so long as it might suit them, and would, if unchecked while there was opportunity, eventually take their place as his superiors and masters.

In an ultimate truth of Pantheism, we may agree with Mr. Butler that even the higher memory, or quality, which is life, is the memory of the universal life; but for all practical purposes, and-notwithstanding the apparent paradox-in all practical truth, it is the memory of the particular life.

Perhaps we are rather mistaking his position, and ought to say that the memory of a creature is the memory of its class. This tenet seems to be fairly supported by the instances most ingeniously worked out by our metaphysician of the result of hybridism. The dual inherent memories will sometimes be found to be compatible, and result in a new species; but otherwise it is as if we should try to blend into one a sewing machine and, for instance, the new machine for chiselling blocks of stone.

A

sewing machine and a musical box, it is conceivable, might be blended; and the result would be a sewing machine playing as it worked. If, then, this instrument, owing so much to either parent, were married to a phonograph, it would be possible to have the "Song of the Shirt' as an ever-present accompaniment to the stitch, stitch, stitch.

An automatic condition of energy is comparatively not difficult to realise, provided the existence of matter and force and the conversions of them be first allowed for. There would seem no reason why the greater part of the marvel work of the amoeba, once the creature is created, should not be as automatic as the routine of the selffeeding printing press that, with steam supplied for life blood, multiplies sheets of writing, and throws them neatly folded into a basket.

The mystery would appear not to lie in the work done by classes of animals with the infallible certainty of instinct, or, in other words, with the regularity of a set of machines constructed on the same model. The mystery of memory would rather seem to begin with the infinitesimal entrance of that wondrous faculty of self-will. We may act on a balance of considerations; but we have the power to tilt the balances for very caprice, if we will, or to refuse to act at all.

The mackerel forms one of a shiny cluster with his brethren, bound to the shoal by mechanical bonds, from which there is no voluntary escape. We who are men and not mackerels, 66 we mortal millions live alone," and can leave the crowded thoroughfares and sit and think in our loneliness, and be almost emancipated from any mechanical condition whatsoever.

This, it might be said, is the prerogative of genius only; but in such a case it is because genius is more in the sphere of the higher laws, while the generality are still addicted to mechanical conditions.

There would seem to be a greater presumption that a quality like genius should be of essence of memory than even the most marvellous constructiveness of the class amaba, which may not, after all, so nearly be paralleled by mechanical engines of our own manufacture.

The adverse criticism that we should be disposed to make upon Mr. Butler's present work is one that could be made upon most modern books. Its principles have not been felt long enough to be evolved with the perfection that comes with repetion. The dictum of a mathematical pioneer can never be too fully borne in mind, "Never regard anything as true until you can also see it as beautiful." A book like this should have been perfected into an exquisite prose poem. Erewhon," by reason of the latitude allowed to a work of imagination, was highly successful in its way. The present work, being philosophic in its aim. is impaired by the reader's frequent dilemma as to whether the ancestry of the motive of certain of its utterances is to be found with such a Butler as that of the "Analogy or with the Butler of "Hudibras." We hoped that the present literary re-incarnation of the universal or parent Butler-entity (we try to follow the author's doctrines here) had exhausted his faculty of evolving marsh lights and mystification in his preceding work, "The Fair Haven," which was, in truth, no harbour of rest at all, but a bay full of stakes and torpedoes.

Mr. Butler, while alluding to the