During the embryonic stages and in childhood we are almost entirely under the guidance of a practised and powerful memory of circumstances which have been often repeated, not only in detail and piecemeal, but as a whole, and under many slightly varying conditions; thus the performance has become well averaged and matured in its arrangements, so as to meet all ordinary emergencies.  We therefore act with great unconsciousness and vary our performances little.  Babies are much more alike than persons of middle age.

CONCLUSION.  (chapter xiii. of unconscious memory.)

There is life infinitely lower and more minute than any which our most powerful microscopes reveal to us, but let us leave this upon one side and begin with the amœba.  Let us suppose that this “structureless” morsel of protoplasm is, for all its “structurelessness,” composed of an infinite number of living molecules, each one of them with hopes and fears of its own, and all dwelling together like Tekke Turcomans, of whom we read that they live for plunder only, and that each man of them is entirely independent, acknowledging no constituted authority, but that some among them exercise a tacit and undefined influence over the others.  Let us suppose these molecules capable of memory, both in their capacity as individuals and as societies, and able to transmit their memories to their descendants from the traditions of the dimmest past to the experiences of their own lifetime.  Some of these societies will remain simple, as having had no history, but to the greater number unfamiliar, and therefore striking, incidents will from time to time occur, which, when they do not disturb memory so greatly as to kill, will leave their impression upon it.  The body or society will remember these incidents and be modified by them in its conduct, and therefore more or less in its internal arrangements, which will tend inevitably to specialisation.  This memory of the most striking events of varied lifetimes I maintain, with Professor Hering, to be the differentiating cause, which, accumulated in countless generations, has led up from the amœba to man.  If there had been no such memory, the amœba of one generation would have exactly resembled the amœba of the preceding, and a perfect cycle would have been established; the modifying effects of an additional memory in each generation have made the cycle into a spiral, and into a spiral whose eccentricities, in the outset hardly perceptible, is becoming greater and greater with increasing longevity and more complex social and mechanical inventions.

If asked how it is that the chicken shows no sign of consciousness concerning this design, nor yet of the steps it is taking to carry it out, we reply that such unconsciousness is usual in all cases where an action, and the design which prompts it, have been repeated exceedingly often.  If, again, we are asked how we account for the regularity with which each step is taken in its due order, we answer that this too is characteristic of actions that are done habitually—they being very rarely misplaced in respect of any part.

When I wrote Life and Habit, I had arrived at the conclusion that memory was the most essential characteristic of life, and went so far as to say, “Life is that property of matter whereby it can remember—matter which can remember is living.”  I should perhaps have written, “Life is the being possessed of a memory—the life of a thing at any moment is the memories which at that moment it retains;” and I would modify the words that immediately follow, namely, “Matter which cannot remember is dead;” for they imply that there is such a thing as matter which cannot remember anything at all, and this on fuller consideration I do not believe to be the case; I can conceive of no matter which is not able to remember a little, and which is not living in respect of what it can remember.  I do not see how action of any kind (chemical as much as vital) is conceivable without the supposition that every atom retains a memory of certain antecedents.  I cannot, however, at this point, enter upon the reasons which have compelled me to join the many who are now adopting this conclusion.  Whether these would be deemed sufficient or no, at any rate we cannot believe that a system of self-reproducing associations should develop from the simplicity of the amœba to the complexity of the human body without the presence of that memory which can alone account at once for the resemblances and the differences between successive generations, for the arising and the accumulation of divergences—for the tendency to differ and the tendency not to differ.

We should endeavour to see the so-called inorganic as living, in respect of the qualities it has in common with the organic, rather than the organic as non-living in respect of the qualities it has in common with the inorganic.  True, it would be hard to place one’s self on the same moral platform as a stone, but this is not necessary; it is enough that we should feel the stone to have a moral platform of its own, though that platform embraces little more than a profound respect for the laws of gravitation, chemical affinity, &c.  As for the difficulty of conceiving a body as living that has not got a reproductive system—we should remember that neuter insects are living but are believed to have no reproductive system.  Again, we should bear in mind that mere assimilation involves all the essentials of reproduction, and that both air and water possess this power in a very high degree.  The essence of a reproductive system, then, is found low down in the scheme of nature.

“The theory of evolution in its complete form involves the assumption that at some period or other of the earth’s history there occurred what would be now called ‘spontaneous generation.’” [217]  And so Professor Huxley—

“It is argued that a belief in abiogenesis is a necessary corollary from the doctrine of Evolution.  This may be” [which I submit is equivalent here to “is”] “true of the occurrence of abiogenesis at some time.” [218]

Professor Huxley goes on to say that however this may be, abiogenesis (or spontaneous generation) is not respectable and will not do at all now.  There may have been one case once; this may be winked at, but it must not occur again.  “It is enough,” he writes, “that a single particle of living protoplasm should once have appeared on the globe as the result of no matter what agency.  In the eyes of a consistent [!] evolutionist any further [!] independent formation of protoplasm would be sheer waste”—and the sooner the Almighty gets to understand that He must not make that single act of special creation into a precedent the better for Him.

Professor Huxley, in fact, excuses the single case of spontaneous generation which he appears to admit, because however illegitimate, it was still “only a very little one,” and came off a long time ago in a foreign country.  For my own part I think it will prove in the end more convenient if we say that there is a low kind of livingness in every atom of matter, and adopt Life eternal as no less inevitable a conclusion than matter eternal.

It should not be doubted that wherever there is vibration or motion there is life and memory, and that there is vibration and motion at all times in all things.  The reader who takes the above position will find that he can explain the entry of what he calls death among what he calls the living, whereas he could by no means introduce life into his system if he started without it.  Death is deducible; life is not deducible.  Death is a change of memories; it is not the destruction of all memory.  It is as the liquidation of one company each member of which will presently join a new one, and retain a trifle even of the old cancelled memory, by way of greater aptitude for working in concert with other molecules.  This is why animals feed on grass and on each other, and cannot proselytise or convert the rude ground before it has been tutored in the first principles of the higher kinds of association.

Do not let the reader be too much cast down by the bad language with which professional scientists obscure the issue, nor by their seeming to make it their business to fog us under the pretext of removing our difficulties.  It is not the ratcatcher’s interest to catch all the rats; and, as Handel observed so sensibly, “Every professional gentleman must do his best for to live.”  The art of some of our philosophers, however, is sufficiently transparent, and consists too often in saying “organism which . . . must be classified among fishes,” [220a] instead of “fish” and then proclaiming that they have “an ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear.” [220b]

If another example is required, here is the following from an article than which I have seen few with which I more completely agree, or which have given me greater pleasure.  If our men of science would take to writing in this way, we should be glad enough to follow them.  The passage I refer to runs thus:—

“Professor Huxley speaks of a ‘verbal fog by which the question at issue may be hidden;’ is there no verbal fog in the statement that the ætiology of crayfishes resolves itself into a gradual evolution in the course of the mesozoic and subsequent epochs of the world’s history of these animals from a primitive astacomorphous form?  Would it be fog or light that would envelop the history of man if we say that the existence of man was explained by the hypothesis of his gradual evolution from a primitive anthropomorphous form?  I should call this fog, not light.” [220c]

Especially let him mistrust those who are holding forth about protoplasm, and maintaining that this is the only living substance.  Protoplasm may be, and perhaps is, the most living part of an organism, as the most capable of retaining vibrations, of a certain character, but this is the utmost that can be claimed for it.  I have noticed, however, that protoplasm has not been buoyant lately in the scientific market.

Having mentioned protoplasm, I may ask the reader to note the breakdown of that school of philosophy which divided the ego from the non ego.  The protoplasmists, on the one hand, are whittling away at ego, till they have reduced it to a little jelly in certain parts of the body, and they will whittle away this too presently, if they go on as they are doing now.

Lastly, I may predict with some certainty that before long we shall find the original Darwinism of Dr. Erasmus Darwin (with an infusion of Professor Hering into the bargain) generally accepted instead of the neo-Darwinism of to-day, and that the variations whose accumulation results in species will be recognised as due to the wants and endeavours of the living forms in which they appear, instead of being ascribed to chance, or, in other words, to unknown causes, as by Mr. Charles Darwin’s system.  We shall have some idyllic young naturalists bringing up Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s note on Trapa natans [221] and Lamarck’s kindred passage on the descent of Ranunculus hederaceus from Ranunculus aquatilis [222a] as fresh discoveries, and be told with much happy simplicity, that those animals and plants which have felt the need of such a structure have developed it, while those which have not wanted it have gone without it.  Thus it will be declared, every leaf we see around us, every structure of the minutest insect, will bear witness to the truth of the “great guess” of the greatest of naturalists concerning the memory of living matter. [222b]

I dare say the public will not object to this, and am very sure that none of the admirers of Mr. Charles Darwin or Mr. Wallace will protest against it; but it may be as well to point out that this was not the view of the matter taken by Mr. Wallace in 1858 when he and Mr. Darwin first came forward as preachers of natural selection.  At that time Mr. Wallace saw clearly enough the difference between the theory of “natural selection” and that of Lamarck.  He wrote:—

“The hypothesis of Lamarck—that progressive changes in species have been produced by the attempts of animals to increase the development of their own organs and thus modify their structure and habits—has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species, . . . but the view here developed renders such a hypothesis quite unnecessary . . .  The powerful retractile talons of the falcon and the cat tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals, . . . neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their short-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them” (italics in original). [223a]

This is absolutely the neo-Darwin doctrine, and a denial of the mainly fortuitous character of the variations in animal and vegetable forms cuts at its root.  That Mr. Wallace, after years of reflection, still adhered to this view, is proved by his heading a reprint of the paragraph just quoted from [223b] with the words “Lamarck’s hypothesis very different from that now advanced;” nor do any of his more recent works show that he has modified his opinion.  It should be noted that Mr. Wallace does not call his work Contributions to the Theory of Evolution, but to that of Natural Selection.

Mr. Darwin, with characteristic caution, only commits himself to saying that Mr. Wallace has arrived at almost (italics mine) the same general conclusions as he, Mr. Darwin, has done; [223c] but he still, as in 1859, declares that it would be “a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations,” [223d] and he still comprehensively condemns the “well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck.” [224]

As for the statement in the passage quoted from Mr. Wallace, to the effect that Lamarck’s hypothesis “has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species,” it is a very surprising one.  I have searched Evolution literature in vain for any refutation of the Erasmus Darwinian system (for this is what Lamarck’s hypothesis really is), which need make the defenders of that system at all uneasy.  The best attempt at an answer to Erasmus Darwin that has yet been made is Paley’s Natural Theology, which was throughout obviously written to meet Buffon and the Zoonomia.  It is the manner of theologians to say that such and such an objection “has been refuted over and over again,” without at the same time telling us when and where; it is to be regretted that Mr. Wallace has here taken a leaf out of the theologians’ book.  His statement is one which will not pass muster with those whom public opinion is sure in the end to follow.

Did Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, “repeatedly and easily refute” Lamarck’s hypothesis in his brilliant article in the Leader, March 20, 1852?  On the contrary, that article is expressly directed against those “who cavalierly reject the hypothesis of Lamarck and his followers.”  This article was written six years before the words last quoted from Mr. Wallace; how absolutely, however, does the word “cavalierly” apply to them!

Does Isidore Geoffrey, again, bear Mr. Wallace’s assertion out better?  In 1859—that is to say but a short time after Mr. Wallace had written—he wrote as follows:—

“Such was the language which Lamarck heard during his protracted old age, saddened alike by the weight of years and blindness; this was what people did not hesitate to utter over his grave yet barely closed, and what indeed they are still saying—commonly too without any knowledge of what Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at secondhand bad caricatures of his teaching.

“When will the time come when we may see Lamarck’s theory discussed—and, I may as well at once say, refuted in some important points [225a]—with at any rate the respect due to one of the most illustrious masters of our science?  And when will this theory, the hardihood of which has been greatly exaggerated, become freed from the interpretations and commentaries by the false light of which so many naturalists have followed their opinion concerning it?  If its author is to be condemned, let it be, at any rate, not before he has been heard.” [225b]

In 1873 M. Martin published his edition of Lamarck’s Philosophic Zoologique.  He was still able to say, with, I believe, perfect truth, that Lamarck’s theory has “never yet had the honour of being discussed seriously.” [225c]

Professor Huxley in his article on Evolution is no less cavalier than Mr. Wallace.  He writes: [225d]—

“Lamarck introduced the conception of the action of an animal on itself as a factor in producing modification.”

Lamarck did nothing of the kind.  It was Buffon and Dr. Darwin who introduced this, but more especially Dr. Darwin.  The accuracy of Professor Huxley’s statements about the history and literature of evolution is like the direct interference of the Deity—it vanishes whenever and wherever I have occasion to test it.

I think Professor Huxley has been exercising some of his ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear in the article on Evolution, already so often quoted from.  We find him (p. 750) pooh-poohing Lamarck, yet on the next page he says, “How far ‘natural selection’ suffices for the production of species remains to be seen.”  And this when “natural selection” was already so nearly of age!  Why, to those who know how to read between a philosopher’s lines the sentence comes to very nearly the same as a declaration that the writer has no great opinion of “natural selection.”  Professor Huxley continues, “Few can doubt that, if not the whole cause, it is a very important factor in that operation.”  A philosopher’s words should be weighed carefully, and when Professor Huxley says, “few can doubt,” we must remember that he may be including himself among the few whom he considers to have the power of doubting on this matter.  He does not say “few will,” but “few can” doubt, as though it were only the enlightened who would have the power of doing so.  Certainly “nature”—for that is what “natural selection” comes to—is rather an important factor in the operation, but we do not gain much by being told so.  If however, Professor Huxley neither believes in the origin of species, through sense of need on the part of animals themselves, nor yet in “natural selection,” we should be glad to know what he does believe in.

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES’ MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. [228a]

I have said on page 96 of this book that the word “heredity” may be a very good way of stating the difficulty which meets us when we observe the reappearance of like characteristics, whether of body or mind, in successive generations, but that it does nothing whatever towards removing it.

It is here that Mr. Herbert Spencer, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, and Mr. Romanes fail.  Mr. Herbert Spencer does indeed go so far in one place as to call instinct “organised memory,” [228b] and Mr. G. H. Lewes attributes many instincts to what he calls the “lapsing of intelligence.” [228c]  So does Mr. Herbert Spencer, [228d] whom Mr. Romanes should have known that Mr. Lewis was following.  Mr. Romanes, in his recent work, Mental Evolution in Animals (November, 1883), endorses this, and frequently uses such expressions as “the lifetime of the species,” [228e] “hereditary experience,” [228f] and “hereditary memory and instinct,” [228g] but none of these writers (and indeed no writer that I know of except Professor Hering of Prague, for a translation of whose address on this subject I must refer the reader to my book Unconscious Memory) has shown a comprehension of the fact that these expressions are unexplained so long as “heredity,” whereby they explain them, is unexplained; and none of them sees the importance of emphasizing Memory, and making it as it were the keystone of the system.

Professor Hering does mean this, and makes it clear that he does so.  He does not catch the ball and let it slip through his fingers again, but holds it firmly.  “It is to memory,” he says, “that we owe almost all that we have or are; our ideas and conceptions are its work; our every thought and movement are derived from this source.  Memory connects the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole, and as our bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not held together by the cohesion of matter, so our consciousness would be broken up into as many moments as we had lived seconds, but for the binding and unifying force of Memory.” [229]  And he proceeds to show that Memory persists between generations exactly as it does between the various stages in the life of the individual.  If I could find any such passage as the one I have just quoted, in Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, Mr. Lewes’s, or Mr. Romanes’ works, I should be only too glad to quote it, but I know of nothing comparable to it for definiteness of idea, thoroughness and consistency.

No reader indeed can rise from a perusal of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, or Mr. G. H. Lewes’, work with an adequate—if indeed with any—impression that the phenomena of heredity are in fact phenomena of memory; that heredity, whether as regards body or mind, is only possible because each generation is linked on to and made one with its predecessor by the possession of a common and abiding memory, in as far as bodily existence was common—that is to say, until the substance of the one left the substance of the other; and that this memory is exactly of the same general character as that which enables us to remember what we did half an hour ago—strong under the same circumstances as those under which this familiar kind of memory is strong, and weak under those under which it is weak.  Mr. Spencer and Mr. Lewes have even less conception of the connection between heredity and memory than Dr. Erasmus Darwin had at the close of the last century. [230]

Mr. Lewes’ position was briefly this.  He denied that there could be any knowledge independent of experience, but he could not help seeing that young animals come into the world furnished with many organs which they use with great dexterity at a very early age.  This looks as if they are acting on knowledge acquired independently of experience.  “No,” says Mr. Lewes, “not so.  They are born with the organs—I cannot tell how or why, but heredity explains all that, and having once got the organs, the objects that come into contact with them in daily life naturally produce the same effect as on the parents, just as oxygen coming into contact with the right quantity of hydrogen will make water; hence even the first time the offspring come into contact with any given object they act as their parents did.”  The idea of the young having got their experience in a past generation does not seem to have even crossed his mind.

“What marvel is there,” he asks, “that constant conditions acting upon structures which are similar should produce similar results?  It is in this sense that the paradox of Leibnitz is true, and we can be said ‘to acquire an innate idea;’ only the idea is not acquired independently of experience, but through the process of experience similar to that which originally produced it.” [231a]

The impression left upon me is that he is all at sea for want of the clue with which Professor Hering would have furnished him, and that had that clue been presented to him a dozen years or so earlier than it was he would have adopted it.

As regards Mr. Romanes the case is different.  His recent work, Mental Evolution in Animals, [231b] shows that he is well aware of the direction which modern opinion is taking, and in several places he so writes as to warrant me in claiming his authority in support of the views which I have been insisting on for several years past.

Thus Mr. Romanes says that the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily life and hereditary memory “are so numerous and precise” as to justify us in considering them to be of essentially the same kind. [232a]

Again he says that although the memory of milk shown by new-born infants is “at all events in large part hereditary, it is none the less memory” of a certain kind. [232b]

Two lines lower down he writes of “hereditary memory or instinct,” thereby implying that instinct is “hereditary memory.”  “It makes no essential difference,” he says, “whether the past sensation was actually experienced by the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by its ancestors. [232c]  For it makes no essential difference whether the nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the lifetime of the individual or during that of the species, and afterwards impressed by heredity on the individual.”

Lower down on the same page he writes:—

“As showing how close is the connection between hereditary memory and instinct,” &c.

And on the following page:—

“And this shows how closely the phenomena of hereditary memory are related to those of individual memory: at this stage . . . it is practically impossible to disentangle the effects of hereditary memory from those of the individual.”

Again:—

“Another point which we have here to consider is the part which heredity has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to its own experience.  We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their power of perception already largely developed. . . .  The wealth of ready-formed information, and therefore of ready-made powers of perception, with which many newly-born or newly-hatched animals are provided, is so great and so precise that it scarcely requires to be supplemented by the subsequent experience of the individual.” [233a]

Again:—

“Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or other of two principles.

“I.  The first mode of origin consists in natural selection or survival of the fittest, continuously preserving actions, &c. &c. . . .

“II.  The second mode of origin is as follows:—By the effects of habit in successive generations, actions which were originally intelligent become as it were stereotyped into permanent instincts.  Just as in the lifetime of the individual adjustive actions which were originally intelligent may by frequent repetition become automatic, so in the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity so write their effects on the nervous system that the latter is prepared, even before individual experience, to perform adjustive actions mechanically which in previous generations were performed intelligently.  This mode of origin of instincts has been appropriately called (by Lewes—see Problems of Life and Mind [233b]) the ‘lapsing of intelligence.’” [233c]

Later on:—

“That ‘practice makes perfect’ is a matter, as I have previously said, of daily observation.  Whether we regard a juggler, a pianist, or a billiard-player, a child learning his lesson or an actor his part by frequently repeating it, or a thousand other illustrations of the same process, we see at once that there is truth in the cynical definition of a man as a ‘bundle of habits.’  And the same of course is true of animals.” [234a]

From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show “that automatic actions and conscious habits may be inherited,” [234b] and in the course of doing this contends that “instincts may be lost by disuse, and conversely that they may be acquired as instincts by the hereditary transmission of ancestral experience.” [234c]

On another page Mr. Romanes says:—

“Let us now turn to the second of these two assumptions, viz., that some at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued.  It is without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should be prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the year, and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its own parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct which aims at being complete.  Now upon our own theory it can only be met by taking it to be due to inherited memory.” [234d]

Mr. Romanes says in a note that this theory was first advanced by Canon Kingsley in Nature, January 18, 1867, a piece of information which I learn for the first time; otherwise, as I need hardly say, I should have called attention to it in my own books on evolution.  Nature did not begin to appear till the end of 1869, and I can find no communication from Canon Kingsley bearing upon hereditary memory in any number of Nature prior to the date of Canon Kingsley’s death; but no doubt Mr. Romanes has only made a slip in his reference.  Mr. Romanes also says that the theory connecting instinct with inherited memory “has since been independently ‘suggested’ by many writers.”

A little lower Mr. Romanes says: “Of what kind, then, is the inherited memory on which the young cuckoo (if not also other migratory birds) depends?  We can only answer, of the same kind, whatever this may be, as that upon which the old bird depends.” [235]

I have given above most of the more marked passages which I have been able to find in Mr. Romanes’ book which attribute instinct to memory, and which admit that there is no fundamental difference between the kind of memory with which we are all familiar and hereditary memory as transmitted from one generation to another.  But throughout his work there are passages which suggest, though less obviously, the same inference.

The passages I have quoted show that Mr. Romanes is upholding the same opinions as Professor Hering’s and my own, but their effect and tendency is more plain here than in Mr. Romanes’ own book, where they are overlaid by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always easy of comprehension.

The late Mr. Darwin himself, indeed—whose mantle seems to have fallen more especially and particularly on Mr. Romanes—could not contradict himself more hopelessly than Mr. Romanes often does.  Indeed in one of the very passages I have quoted in order to show that Mr. Romanes accepts the phenomena of heredity as phenomena of memory, he speaks of “heredity as playing an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences;” so that whereas I want him to say that the phenomena of heredity are due to memory, he will have it that the memory is due to the heredity, [236a] which seems to me absurd.

Over and over again Mr. Romanes insists that it is heredity which does this or that.  Thus it is “heredity with natural selection which adapt the anatomical plan of the ganglia.” [236b]  It is heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual. [236c]  “In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity,” &c. [236d]; but he nowhere tells us what heredity is any more than Messrs. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, and Lewes have done.  This, however, is, exactly what Professor Hering, whom I have unwittingly followed, does.  He resolves all phenomena of heredity, whether in respect of body or mind, into phenomena of memory.  He says in effect, “A man grows his body as he does, and a bird makes her nest as she does, because both man and bird remember having grown body and made nest as they now do, or very nearly so, on innumerable past occasions.”  He thus reduces life from an equation of say 100 unknown quantities to one of 99 only by showing that heredity and memory, two of the original 100 unknown quantities, are in reality part of one and the same thing.

That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very unsatisfactory way.

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES’ MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS—(continued).

On a later page, indeed, Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child as “embodying the results of a great mass of hereditary experience” (p. 77), so that what he is driving at can be collected by those who take trouble, but is not seen until we call up from our own knowledge matter whose relevancy does not appear on the face of it, and until we connect passages many pages asunder, the first of which may easily be forgotten before we reach the second.  There can be no doubt, however, that Mr. Romanes does in reality, like Professor Hering and myself, regard development, whether of mind or body, as due to memory, for it is nonsense indeed to talk about “hereditary experience” or “hereditary memory” if anything else is intended.

Another example may be found on p. 43 of Mr. Romanes’ book.  “Lastly,” he writes, “just as innumerable special mechanisms of muscular co-ordinations are found to be inherited, innumerable special associations of ideas are found to be the same, and in one case as in the other the strength of the organically imposed connection is found to bear a direct proportion to the frequency with which in the history of the species it has occurred.”

I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin “had told us what the earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed from them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would have taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and more likely to remove misconception from his own mind and from those of his readers.” [239]  This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made Mr. Romanes so angry with me.  I can find no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes himself.  He knows perfectly well what others have written about the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that they have taken.  If he had begun by saying what they had said and had then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be improved upon.

“Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of consciousness.  The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained, but similarly performed under similar and frequently recurring circumstances by all the individuals of the same species.” [240]

If Mr. Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor Hering’s foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly admitted, he might have said—

“Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations—the new generation remembering what happened to it before it parted company with the old.”  Then he might have added as a rider—

This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose, knowledge of purpose, &c.; it both introduces the feature of inheritance which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from so-called intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pass into the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition; finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said [241]) as “a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.

But then to have said this would have made it too plain that Mr. Romanes was following some one else.  Mr. Romanes should remember that no one would mind how much he took if he would only take it well.  But this is what those who take without due acknowledgment never do.

In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of time, money, and trouble that has been caused by his not having been content to appear as descending with modification like other people from those who went before him.  It will take years to get the evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it.  He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy.  Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got Evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about “heredity being able to work up the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration,” [242a] or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” [242b] is little likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with advantage either to himself or any one else.  Fortunately Mr. Romanes is not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s mantle, and got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’ shoulders hide a good deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin wore it.

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES’ MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS—(concluded).

I gather that in the end the late Mr. Darwin himself admitted the soundness of the view which the reader will have found insisted upon in the extracts from my earlier books given in this volume.  Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming “instinctive, i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another.” [243a]

Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of hereditary memory are as follows:—

1859.  “It would be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” [243b]  And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.

1876.  “It would be a serious error to suppose” &c., as before. [243c]

1881.  “We should remember what a mass of inherited knowledge is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” [243d]

1881 or 1882.  Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes:—“It does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:” i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another. [244a]

And yet in 1839 or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped the conception from which until the last year or two of his life he so fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account of the voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, he wrote: “Nature by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country” (p. 237).

What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common-sense view of the matter which he took when he was a young man?  I imagine simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter,—over-anxiety to appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck.

I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed.  For in the preface to Hermann Müller’s Fertilisation of Flowers, [244b] which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin’s death, I find him saying:—“Design in nature has for a long time deeply interested many men, and though the subject must now be looked at from a somewhat different point of view from what was formerly the case, it is not on that account rendered less interesting.”  This is mused forth as a general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing: the writer of the letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore’s Almanac could not be more guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.

I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly.  Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner.

I imagine that if he had got hold of the idea that heredity was only a mode of memory before 1870, when he published the second edition of his Principles of Psychology, he would have gladly adopted it, for he seems continually groping after it, and aware of it as near him, though he is never able to grasp it.  He probably failed to grasp it because Lamarck had failed.  He could not adopt it in his edition of 1880, for this is evidently printed from stereos taken from the 1870 edition, and no considerable alteration was therefore possible.

The late Mr. G. H. Lewes did not get hold of the memory theory, probably because neither Mr. Spencer nor any of the well-known German philosophers had done so.  Mr. Romanes, as I think I have shown, actually has adopted it, but he does not say where he got it from.  I suppose from reading Canon Kingsley in Nature some years before Nature began to exist, or (for has not the mantle of Mr. Darwin fallen upon him?) he has thought it all out independently; but however Mr. Romanes may have reached his conclusion, he must have done so comparatively recently, for when he reviewed my book, Unconscious Memory, [247] he scoffed at the very theory which he is now adopting.

Of the view that “there is thus a race memory, as there is an individual memory, and that the expression of the former constitutes the phenomena of heredity”—for it is thus Mr. Romanes with fair accuracy describes the theory I was supporting—he wrote:

“Now this view, in which Mr. Butler was anticipated by Prof. Hering, is interesting if advanced merely as an illustration; but to imagine that it maintains any truth of profound significance, or that it can possibly be fraught with any benefit to science, is simply absurd.  The most cursory thought is enough to show,” &c. &c.

“We can understand,” he continued, “in some measure how an alteration in brain structure when once made should be permanent, . . . but we cannot understand how this alteration is transmitted to progeny through structures so unlike the brain as are the products of the generative glands.  And we merely stultify ourselves if we suppose that the problem is brought any nearer to a solution by asserting that a future individual while still in the germ has already participated, say in the cerebral alterations of its parents,” &c.  Mr. Romanes could find no measure of abuse strong enough for me,—as any reader may see who feels curious enough to turn to Mr. Romanes’ article in Nature already referred to.

As for Evolution, Old and New, he said I had written it “in the hope of gaining some notoriety by deserving and perhaps receiving a contemptuous refutation from” Mr. Darwin. [248a]  In my reply to Mr. Romanes I said, “I will not characterise this accusation in the terms which it merits.” [248b]  Mr. Romanes, in the following number of Nature, withdrew his accusation and immediately added, “I was induced to advance it because it seemed the only rational motive that could have led to the publication of such a book.”  Again I will not characterise such a withdrawal in the terms it merits, but I may say in passing that if Mr. Romanes thinks the motive he assigned to me “a rational one,” his view of what is rational and mine differ.  It does not commend itself as “rational” to me, that a man should spend a good deal of money and two or three years of work in the hope of deserving a contemptuous refutation from any one—not even from Mr. Darwin.  But then Mr. Romanes has written such a lot about reason and intelligence.

The reply to Evolution, Old and New, which I actually did get from Mr. Darwin, was one which I do not see advertised among Mr. Darwin’s other works now, and which I venture to say never will be advertised among them again—not at least until it has been altered.  I have seen no reason to leave off advertising Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory.

I have never that I know of seen Mr. Romanes, but am told that he is still young.  I can find no publication of his indexed in the British Museum Catalogue earlier than 1874, and then it was only about Christian Prayer.  Mr. Romanes was good enough to advise me to turn painter or homœopathist; [249] as he has introduced the subject, and considering how many years I am his senior, I might be justified (if it could be any pleasure to me to do so) in suggesting to him too what I should imagine most likely to tend to his advancement in life; but there are examples so bad that even those who have no wish to be any better than their neighbours may yet decline to follow them, and I think Mr. Romanes’ is one of these.  I will not therefore find him a profession.

But leaving this matter on one side, the point I wish to insist on is that Mr. Romanes is saying almost in my own words what less than three years ago he was very angry with me for saying.  I do not think that under these circumstances much explanation is necessary as to the reasons which have led Mr. Romanes to fight so shy of any reference to Life and Habit, Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory—works in which, if I may venture to say so, the theory connecting the phenomena of heredity with memory has been not only “suggested,” but so far established that even Mr. Romanes has been led to think the matter over independently and to arrive at the same general conclusion as myself.