Mr. Butler's “Unconscious Memory”

Abstract

WILL it go any way towards calming Mr. Butler's zeal in the cause of literary honesty to remark that at any rate fifteen years ago, and it may have been further back, Mr. Darwin prefixed to “The Origin of Species” a historical sketch of the progress of opinion on that subject? In view of this it is at least very misleading on the part of Mr. Butler to quote the first sentence from the edition of 1859, and then to ask: “What could more completely throw us off the scent of the earliest evolutionists?” as if in those days it would have made a pin's difference to him, or any one else whom he includes in the us, whether the scent of the earlier evolutionists lay strong or weak in the track. In these days he should know, if he knows anything of the history of opinion, that these predecessors of Mr. Darwin, with their great though varied merits, had been laughed down, and, for all popular estimation, might be said to have disappeared. To have relied in any way on their authority when Mr. Darwin's book was first published might well have increased the mountain of prejudice against his views without in any way relieving the weight of ridicule that lay upon theirs. When the whole scientific world had been stirred to its foundations and when the whole world almost had been roused into paying attention to science by the awakening genius displayed in the new exposition de rerum naturâ, then, when it could best be done, Mr. Darwin turned ridicule into renown, and made all who could even remotely claim to have anticipated or shared his views participators of his fame. Not those who scatter seed at random, but those who cultivate it in chosen ground with indefatigable industry and prevailing skill should, I imagine, be considered the chief benefactors of mankind; and in like manner the fancy that may have fluttered uselessly through many brains becomes at last a fruitful hypothesis or a wide-stretching theory when it falls beneath the cultivation of undaunted genius.