To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have been
mainly these:
1. The identification of heredity and memory and the corollaries
relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of
old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids and the principles
underlying longevity—all of which follow as a matter of course. This was
_Life and Habit_. [1877.]
2. The re-introduction of teleology into organic life which, to me,
seems hardly (if at all) less important than the _Life and Habit_ theory.
This was _Evolution Old and New_. [1879.]
3. An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory. I was
alarmed by the suggestion and fathered it upon Professor Hering who
never, that I can see, meant to say anything of the kind, but I forced my
view on him, as it were, by taking hold of a sentence or two in his
lecture, on _Memory as a Universal Function of Organised Matter_ and thus
connected memory with vibrations. This was _Unconscious Memory_.
[1880.]
What I want to do now [1885] is to connect vibrations not only with
memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the
memory resides, thus adopting Newland’s law (sometimes called
Mendelejeff’s law) that there is only one substance, and that the
characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given time
will determine whether it will appear to us as (say) hydrogen, or sodium,
or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other. [This touched upon in
the concluding chapter of _Luck or Cunning_? 1887.]
I would make not only the mind, but the body of the organism to depend on
the characteristics of the vibrations going on within it. The same
vibrations which remind the chicken that it wants iron for its blood
actually turn the pre-existing matter in the egg into the required
material. According to this view the form and characteristics of the
elements are as much the living expositions of certain vibrations—are as
much our manner of perceiving that the vibrations going on in that part
of the one universal substance are such and such—as the colour yellow is
our perception that a substance is being struck by vibrations of light,
so many to the second, or as the action of a man walking about is our
mode of perceiving that such and such another combination of vibrations
is, for the present, going on in the substance which, in consequence, has
assumed the shape of the particular man.
It is somewhere in this neighbourhood that I look for the connection
between organic and inorganic.