This judgment needs a little examination. Butler claimed, justly,
that his "Life and Habit" was an advance on Hering in its dealing
with questions of hybridity, and of longevity puberty and sterility.
Since Semon's extended treatment of the phenomena of crosses might
almost be regarded as the rewriting of the corresponding section of
"Life and Habit" in the "Mneme" terminology, we may infer that this
view of the question was one of Butler's "brilliant ideas." That
Butler shrank from accepting such a formal explanation of memory as
Hering did with his hypothesis should certainly be counted as a
distinct "advance upon Hering," for Semon also avoids any attempt at
an explanation of "Mneme." I think, however, we may gather the real
meaning of Semon's strictures from the following passages:-


"I refrain here from a discussion of the development of this theory
of Lamarck's by those Neo-Lamarckians who would ascribe to the
individual elementary organism an equipment of complex psychical
powers--so to say, anthropomorphic perception and volitions. This
treatment is no longer directed by the scientific principle of
referring complex phenomena to simpler laws, of deducing even human
intellect and will from simpler elements. On the contrary, they
follow that most abhorrent method of taking the most complex and
unresolved as a datum, and employing it as an explanation. The
adoption of such a method, as formerly by Samuel Butler, and recently
by Pauly, I regard as a big and dangerous step backward" (ed. 2, pp.
380-1, note).


Thus Butler's alleged retrogressions belong to the same order of
thinking that we have seen shared by Driesch, Baldwin, and Jennings,