Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on Evolution in the _American Catholic Quarterly Review_ (July 1881), said, “Mr Butler is not only perfectly logical and consistent in the startling consequences he deduces from his principles, but,” &c. Professor Mivart could not have found my consequences startling if they had already been insisted upon for many years by one of the best-known writers of the day.
The reviewer of “Evolution Old and New” in the _Saturday Review_ (March 31, 1879), of whom all I can venture to say is that he or she is a person whose name carries weight in matters connected with biology, though he (for brevity) was in the humour for seeing everything objectionable in me that could be seen, still saw no Mr. Spencer in me. He said—“Mr Butler’s own particular contribution to the terminology of Evolution is the phrase two or three times repeated with some emphasis” (I repeated it not two or three times only, but whenever and wherever I could venture to do so without wearying the reader beyond endurance) “oneness of personality between parents and offspring.” The writer proceeded to reprobate this in language upon which a Huxley could hardly improve, but as he declares himself unable to discover what it means, it may be presumed that the idea of continued personality between successive generations was new to him.
When Dr. Francis Darwin called on me a day or two before “Life and Habit” went to the press, he said the theory which had pleased him more than any he had seen for some time was one which referred all life to memory; { 44a} he doubtless intended “which referred all the phenomena of heredity to memory.” He then mentioned Professor Ray Lankester’s article in _Nature_, of which I had not heard, but he said nothing about Mr. Spencer, and spoke of the idea as one which had been quite new to him.
The above names comprise (excluding Mr. Spencer himself) perhaps those of the best-known writers on evolution that can be mentioned as now before the public; it is curious that Mr Spencer should be the only one of them to see any substantial resemblance between the “Principles of Psychology” and Professor Hering’s address and “Life and Habit.”
I ought, perhaps, to say that Mr. Romanes, writing to the _Athenæum_ (March 8, 1884), took a different view of the value of the theory of inherited memory to the one he took in 1881.