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.

The

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. 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

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 amœba, 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, "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

complaint of his friends who say they can never tell whether he is in jest or earnest, avows his seriousness. But his fantasy takes such humorous forms that there is always a temptation to regard his books as belonging to the same

category as Mark Twain's, rather than to treat him with the respect due to an earnest philosopher. The idiosyncratic oddness, if not the originality and power, of Mr. Butler's books will always, however, command attention.