Chapter III
Mr. Herbert Spencer (continued)

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.

In 1881 he said it was “simply absurd” to suppose it could “possibly be fraught with any benefit to science” or “reveal any truth of profound significance;” in 1884 he said of the same theory, that “it formed the backbone of all the previous literature upon instinct” by Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Fiske, and Spalding, “not to mention their numerous followers, and is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any theory can be stated in words.”

Few except Mr. Romanes will say this.  I grant it ought to “have formed the backbone,” &c., and ought “to have been elaborately stated,” &c., but when I wrote “Life and Habit” neither Mr Romanes nor any one else understood it to have been even glanced at by more than a very few, and as for having been “elaborately stated,” it had been stated by Professor Hering as elaborately as it could be stated within the limits of an address of only twenty-two pages, but with this exception it had never been stated at all.  It is not too much to say that “Life and Habit,” when it first came out, was considered so startling a paradox that people would not believe in my desire to be taken seriously, or at any rate were able to pretend that they thought I was not writing seriously.

Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who keep an eye on evolution; he himself, indeed, had said (Nature, January 27, 1881) that so long as I “aimed only at entertaining” my “readers by such works as ‘Erewhon’ and ‘Life and Habit’” (as though these books were of kindred character) I was in my proper sphere.  It would be doing too little credit to Mr. Romanes’ intelligence to suppose him not to have known when he said this that “Life and Habit” was written as seriously as my subsequent books on evolution, but it suited him at the moment to join those who professed to consider it another book of paradoxes such as, I suppose, “Erewhon” had been, so he classed the two together.  He could not have done this unless enough people thought, or said they thought, the books akin, to give colour to his doing so.

One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, brought Mr. Spencer against me.  This was a writer in the St. James’s Gazette (December 2, 1880).  I challenged him in a letter which appeared (December 8, 1880), and said, “I would ask your reviewer to be kind enough to refer your readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer’s “Principles of Psychology” which in any direct intelligible way refer the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, to memory on the part of offspring of the action it bonâ fide took in the persons of its forefathers.”  The reviewer made no reply, and I concluded, as I have since found correctly, that he could not find the passages.

True, in his “Principles of Psychology” (vol. ii. p. 195) Mr. Spencer says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all intelligence is acquired through experience “so as to make it include with the experience of each individual the experiences of all ancestral individuals,” &c.  This is all very good, but it is much the same as saying, “We have only got to stand on our heads and we shall be able to do so and so.”  We did not see our way to standing on our heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help us; we had been accustomed, as I am afraid I must have said usque ad nauseam already, to lose sight of the physical connection existing between parents and offspring; we understood from the marriage service that husband and wife were in a sense one flesh, but not that parents and children were so also; and without this conception of the matter, which in its way is just as true as the more commonly received one, we could not extend the experience of parents to offspring.  It was not in the bond or nexus of our ideas to consider experience as appertaining to more than a single individual in the common acceptance of the term; these two ideas were so closely bound together that wherever the one went the other went perforce.  Here, indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer’s just referred to, the race is throughout regarded as “a series of individuals”—without an attempt to call attention to that other view, in virtue of which we are able to extend to many an idea we had been accustomed to confine to one.

In his chapter on Memory, Mr. Spencer certainly approaches the Heringian view.  He says, “On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised memory; on the other, Memory may be regarded as a kind of incipient instinct” (“Principles of Psychology,” ed. 2, vol. i. p. 445).  Here the ball has fallen into his hands, but if he had got firm hold of it he could not have written, “Instinct may be regarded as a kind of, &c.;” to us there is neither “may be regarded as” nor “kind of” about it; we require, “Instinct is inherited memory,” with an explanation making it intelligible how memory can come to be inherited at all.  I do not like, again, calling memory “a kind of incipient instinct;” as Mr. Spencer puts them the words have a pleasant antithesis, but “instinct is inherited memory” covers all the ground, and to say that memory is inherited instinct is surplusage.

Nor does he stick to it long when he says that “instinct is a kind of organised memory,” for two pages later he says that memory, to be memory at all, must be tolerably conscious or deliberate; he, therefore (vol. i. p. 447), denies that there can be such a thing as unconscious memory; but without this it is impossible for us to see instinct as the “kind of organised memory” which he has just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct is notably undeliberate and unreflecting.

A few pages farther on (vol. i. p. 452) he finds himself driven to unconscious memory after all, and says that “conscious memory passes into unconscious or organic memory.”  Having admitted unconscious memory, he declares (vol. i. p. 450) that “as fast as those connections among psychical states, which we form in memory, grow by constant repetition automatic—they cease to be part of memory,” or, in other words, he again denies that there can be an unconscious memory.

Mr. Spencer doubtless saw that he was involved in contradiction in terms, and having always understood that contradictions in terms were very dreadful things—which, of course, under some circumstances they are—thought it well so to express himself that his readers should be more likely to push on than dwell on what was before them at the moment.  I should be the last to complain of him merely on the ground that he could not escape contradiction in terms: who can?  When facts conflict, contradict one another, melt into one another as the colours of the spectrum so insensibly that none can say where one begins and the other ends, contradictions in terms become first fruits of thought and speech.  They are the basis of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that a physical obstacle is the basis of physical sensation.  No opposition, no sensation, applies as much to the psychical as to the physical kingdom, as soon as these two have got well above the horizon of our thoughts and can be seen as two.  No contradiction, no consciousness; no cross, no crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without which there is no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger, kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong.  Nature, as I said in “Life and Habit,” hates that any principle should breed hermaphroditically, but will give to each an helpmeet for it which shall cross it and be the undoing of it; and in the undoing, do; and in the doing, undo, and so ad infinitum.  Cross-fertilisation is just as necessary for continued fertility of ideas as for that of organic life, and the attempt to frown this or that down merely on the ground that it involves contradiction in terms, without at the same time showing that the contradiction is on a larger scale than healthy thought can stomach, argues either small sense or small sincerity on the part of those who make it.  The contradictions employed by Mr. Spencer are objectionable, not on the ground of their being contradictions at all, but on the ground of their being blinked, and used unintelligently.

But though it is not possible for any one to get a clear conception of Mr. Spencer’s meaning, we may say with more confidence what it was that he did not mean.  He did not mean to make memory the keystone of his system; he has none of that sense of the unifying, binding force of memory which Professor Hering has so well expressed, nor does he show any signs of perceiving the far-reaching consequences that ensue if the phenomena of heredity are considered as phenomena of memory.  Thus, when he is dealing with the phenomena of old age (vol. i. p. 538, ed. 2) he does not ascribe them to lapse and failure of memory, nor surmise the principle underlying longevity.  He never mentions memory in connection with heredity without presently saying something which makes us involuntarily think of a man missing an easy catch at cricket; it is only rarely, however, that he connects the two at all.  I have only been able to find the word “inherited” or any derivative of the verb “to inherit” in connection with memory once in all the 1300 long pages of the “Principles of Psychology.”  It occurs in vol ii. p. 200, 2d ed., where the words stand, “Memory, inherited or acquired.”  I submit that this was unintelligible when Mr. Spencer wrote it, for want of an explanation which he never gave; I submit, also, that he could not have left it unexplained, nor yet as an unrepeated expression not introduced till late in his work, if he had had any idea of its pregnancy.

At any rate, whether he intended to imply what he now implies that he intended to imply (for Mr. Spencer, like the late Mr. Darwin, is fond of qualifying phrases), I have shown that those most able and willing to understand him did not take him to mean what he now appears anxious to have it supposed that he meant.  Surely, moreover, if he had meant it he would have spoken sooner, when he saw his meaning had been missed.  I can, however, have no hesitation in saying that if I had known the “Principles of Psychology” earlier, as well as I know the work now, I should have used it largely.

It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to see whether he even now assigns to continued personality and memory the place assigned to it by Professor Hering and myself.  I will therefore give the concluding words of the letter to the Athenæum already referred to, in which he tells us to stand aside.  He writes “I still hold that inheritance of functionally produced modifications is the chief factor throughout the higher stages of organic evolution, bodily as well as mental (see ‘Principles of Biology,’ i. 166), while I recognise the truth that throughout the lower stages survival of the fittest is the chief factor, and in the lowest the almost exclusive factor.”

This is the same confused and confusing utterance which Mr. Spencer has been giving us any time this thirty years.  According to him the fact that variations can be inherited and accumulated has less to do with the first development of organic life, than the fact that if a square organism happens to get into a square hole, it will live longer and more happily than a square organism which happens to get into a round one; he declares “the survival of the fittest”—and this is nothing but the fact that those who “fit” best into their surroundings will live longest and most comfortably—to have more to do with the development of the amœba into, we will say, a mollusc than heredity itself.  True, “inheritance of functionally produced modifications” is allowed to be the chief factor throughout the “higher stages of organic evolution,” but it has very little to do in the lower; in these “the almost exclusive factor” is not heredity, or inheritance, but “survival of the fittest.”

Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe this; of course, also, all who are fairly well up in the history of the development theory will see why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this distinction between the “factors” of the development of the higher and lower forms of life; but no matter how or why Mr. Spencer has been led to say what he has, he has no business to have said it.  What can we think of a writer who, after so many years of writing upon his subject, in a passage in which he should make his meaning doubly clear, inasmuch as he is claiming ground taken by other writers, declares that though hereditary use and disuse, or, to use his own words, “the inheritance of functionally produced modifications,” is indeed very important in connection with the development of the higher forms of life, yet heredity itself has little or nothing to do with that of the lower?  Variations, whether produced functionally or not, can only be perpetuated and accumulated because they can be inherited;—and this applies just as much to the lower as to the higher forms of life; the question which Professor Hering and I have tried to answer is, “How comes it that anything can be inherited at all?  In virtue of what power is it that offspring can repeat and improve upon the performances of their parents?”  Our answer was, “Because in a very valid sense, though not perhaps in the most usually understood, there is continued personality and an abiding memory between successive generations.”  How does Mr. Spencer’s confession of faith touch this?  If any meaning can be extracted from his words, he is no more supporting this view now than he was when he wrote the passages he has adduced to show that he was supporting it thirty years ago; but after all no coherent meaning can be got out of Mr. Spencer’s letter—except, of course, that Professor Hering and myself are to stand aside.  I have abundantly shown that I am very ready to do this in favour of Professor Hering, but see no reason for admitting Mr. Spencer’s claim to have been among the forestallers of “Life and Habit.”

Chapter IV [52a]
Mr. Romanes’ “Mental Evolution in Animals”

Without raising the unprofitable question how Mr. Romanes, in spite of the indifference with which he treated the theory of Inherited Memory in 1881, came, in 1883, to be sufficiently imbued with a sense of its importance, I still cannot afford to dispense with the weight of his authority, and in this chapter will show how closely he not infrequently approaches the Heringian position.

Thus, he 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. [52b]

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. [52c]

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. [52d]  For it makes no essential difference whether the nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the life-time 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.” [53a]

Again:—

“Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or other of the 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” [54a]) the ‘lapsing of intelligence.’” [54b]

I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid by Mr. Romanes both in his “Mental Evolution in Animals” and in his letters to the Athenæum in March 1884, on Natural Selection as an originator and developer of instinct, he very soon afterwards let the Natural Selection part of the story go as completely without saying as I do myself, or as Mr. Darwin did during the later years of his life.  Writing to Nature, April 10, 1884, he said: “To deny that experience in the course of successive generations is the source of instinct, is not to meet by way of argument the enormous mass of evidence which goes to prove that this is the case.”  Here, then, instinct is referred, without reservation, to “experience in successive generations,” and this is nonsense unless explained as Professor Hering and I explain it.  Mr. Romanes’ words, in fact, amount to an unqualified acceptance of the chapter “Instinct as Inherited Memory” given in “Life and Habit,” of which Mr. Romanes in March 1884 wrote in terms which it is not necessary to repeat.

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.” [55a]

From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show “that automatic actions and conscious habits may be inherited,” [55b] 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.”

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.”

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.” [55c]

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.

Moreover, at the same time that I claim the weight of Mr. Romanes’ authority, I am bound to admit that I do not find his support satisfactory.  The late Mr. Darwin himself—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, 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.” [56a]  It is heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual. [56b]  “In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity,” &c.; [56c] 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, as I have said on an earlier page, 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.

What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following?—Mr. Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation is that of memory, and that this “is the conditio sine quâ non of all mental life” (page 35).

I do not understand Mr. Romanes to hold that there is any living being which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to admit that development of body and mind are closely interdependent.

If, then, “the most fundamental principle” of mind is memory, it follows that memory enters also as a fundamental principle into development of body.  For mind and body are so closely connected that nothing can enter largely into the one without correspondingly affecting the other.

On a later page 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 now pretty generally seen to be nonsense to talk about “hereditary experience” or “hereditary memory” if anything else is intended.

I have said above that on page 113 of his recent work Mr. Romanes declares the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily life, and hereditary memory, to be “so numerous and precise” as to justify us in considering them as of one and the same kind.

This is certainly his meaning, but, with the exception of the words within inverted commas, it is not his language.  His own words are these:—

“Profound, however, as our ignorance unquestionably is concerning the physical substratum of memory, I think we are at least justified in regarding this substratum as the same both in ganglionic or organic, and in the conscious or psychological memory, seeing that the analogies between them are so numerous and precise.  Consciousness is but an adjunct which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency of repetition, complexity of operation, or other causes, involve what I have before called ganglionic friction.”

I submit that I have correctly translated Mr. Romanes’ meaning, and also that we have a right to complain of his not saying what he has to say in words which will involve less “ganglionic friction” on the part of the reader.

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.”

Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on on p. 51 of “Life and Habit;” but how difficult he has made what could have been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing but the reader’s comfort to be considered.  Unfortunately that seems to have been by no means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes was thinking, or why, after implying and even saying over and over again that instinct is inherited habit due to inherited memory, should he turn sharply round on p. 297 and praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out “the well-known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck”?  The answer is not far to seek.  It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at one and the same time.

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.” [59a]  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.

Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned method of procedure was not good enough for him.  One-half the obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin’s work—I mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement.  He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.

Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes’ definition of instinct:—

“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.” [60a]

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.  More briefly, Instinct is inherited memory.”  Then he might have added a rider—

“If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime, it is not an instinct.  If having been acquired in one lifetime it is transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring, though it was not an instinct in the parent.  If the habit is transmitted partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly acquired.”

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 [61a]) as “a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.

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,” [61b] or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” [61c] 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.

I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory.  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.” [62a]

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.” [62b]  And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.

1876.  “It would be a serious error to suppose,” &c., as before. [62c]

1881.  “We should remember what a mass of inherited knowledge is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” [62d]

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. [62e]

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,” [63a] 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 cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design in organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr. Darwin’s.  This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and, moreover, it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin think it worth while to go out of his way to introduce it.  It has no fitness in its connection with Hermann Müller’s book, for what little Hermann Müller says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why, then, should Mr. Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest attaching to design in organism?  Neither has the passage any connection with the rest of the preface.  There is not another word about design, and even here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which could be disputed.

The explanation is sufficiently obvious.  Mr Darwin wanted to hedge.  He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a burglar’s jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again, and that though, as I insisted in “Evolution Old and New,” and “Unconscious Memory,” it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it, as “was formerly the case,” it was not on that account any the less—design, as well as interesting.

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.

In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin’s manner when he did not quite dare even to hedge.  It is to be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann’s “Studies in the Theory of Descent,” published in 1881.

“Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, “maintain with much confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown.  At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility”—or towards being able to be perfected.

I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor Weismann’s book.  There was a little something here and there, but not much.

It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr. Romanes’ latest contribution to biology—I mean his theory of physiological selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in Nature just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since the foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written.  I admit to feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not appear earlier; as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable of further embryonic change, and this must be my excuse for saying less about Mr. Romanes’ theory than I might perhaps otherwise do.  I cordially, however, agree with the Times, which says that “Mr. George Romanes appears to be the biological investigator on whom the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most conspicuously descended” (August 16, 1886).  Mr. Romanes is just the person whom the late Mr. Darwin would select to carry on his work, and Mr. Darwin was just the kind of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would find himself instinctively attracted.

The Times continues—“The position which Mr. Romanes takes up is the result of his perception shared by many evolutionists, that the theory of natural selection is not really a theory of the origin of species. . . .”  What, then, becomes of Mr. Darwin’s most famous work, which was written expressly to establish natural selection as the main means of organic modification?  “The new factor which Mr. Romanes suggests,” continues the Times, “is that at a certain stage of development of varieties in a state of nature a change takes place in their reproductive systems, rendering those which differ in some particulars mutually infertile, and thus the formation of new permanent species takes place without the swamping effect of free intercrossing. . . .  How his theory can be properly termed one of selection he fails to make clear.  If correct, it is a law or principle of operation rather than a process of selection.  It has been objected to Mr. Romanes’ theory that it is the re-statement of a fact.  This objection is less important than the lack of facts in support of the theory.”  The Times, however, implies it as its opinion that the required facts will be forthcoming by and by, and that when they have been found Mr. Romanes’ suggestion will constitute “the most important addition to the theory of evolution since the publication of the ‘Origin of Species.’”  Considering that the Times has just implied the main thesis of the “Origin of Species” to be one which does not stand examination, this is rather a doubtful compliment.

Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the Times appears to perceive that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do not appear to see that though the expression natural selection must be always more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which is open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly fortuitous is chimerical as well as metaphorical.  Both writers speak of natural selection as though there could not possibly be any selection in the course of nature, or natural survival, of any but accidental variations.  Thus Mr. Romanes says: [66a]  “The swamping effect of free inter-crossing upon an individual variation constitutes perhaps the most formidable difficulty with which the theory of natural selection is beset.”  And the writer of the article in the Times above referred to says: “In truth the theory of natural selection presents many facts and results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of accounting for the existence of species.”  The assertion made in each case is true if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous variations is intended, but it does not hold good if the selection is supposed to be made from variations under which there lies a general principle of wide and abiding application.  It is not likely that a man of Mr. Romanes’ antecedents should not be perfectly awake to considerations so obvious as the foregoing, and I am afraid I am inclined to consider his whole suggestion as only an attempt upon the part of the wearer of Mr. Darwin’s mantle to carry on Mr. Darwin’s work in Mr. Darwin’s spirit.

I have seen Professor Hering’s theory adopted recently more unreservedly by Dr. Creighton in his “Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease.” [67a]  Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering’s address, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen him lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and organ has an individual memory.  In “Life and Habit” I expressed a hope that the opinions it upheld would be found useful by medical men, and am therefore the more glad to see that this has proved to be the case.  I may perhaps be pardoned if I quote the passage in “Life and Habit” to which I am referring.  It runs:—

“Mutatis mutandis, the above would seem to hold as truly about medicine as about politics.  We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so much more” (of course I mean “about their own business”) “than we do, that they cannot understand us;—but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what, therefore, they are most likely to expect; we can see that they get this as far as it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them, only bearing in mind that they will rebel equally against too sudden a change of treatment and no change at all” (p. 305).

Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which—though I did not notice his saying so—he would doubtless see as a mode of cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same advantages as this, and requiring the same precautions against abuse; he would not, however, I am sure, deny that there could be no fertility of good results if too wide a cross were attempted, so that I may claim the weight of his authority as supporting both the theory of an unconscious memory in general, and the particular application of it to medicine which I had ventured to suggest.

“Has the word ‘memory,’” he asks, “a real application to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only in a figure of speech?”

“If I had thought,” he continues later, “that unconscious memory was no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class of maladies in the light of a parable.  None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit.  To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things that we all understand.

“For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain class of maladies according to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description and not a figurative.” (p. 2.)

As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards “alterative action” as “habit-breaking action.”

As regards the organism’s being guided throughout its development to maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that “Professor Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication.”  “I should prefer to say,” he adds, “the acme of organic implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in their form or structure to show for the marvellous potentialities within them.

“I now come to the application of these considerations to the doctrine of unconscious memory.  If generation is the acme of organic implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness?  Obviously the fine flower of consciousness.  Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is potential memory, consciousness is actual memory.”

I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as I should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to turn to Dr. Creighton’s book, I will proceed to the subject indicated in my title.

Chapter V
Statement of the Question at Issue

Of the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book—I mean the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic modification—the second is both the more important and the one which stands most in need of support.  The substantial identity between heredity and memory is becoming generally admitted; as regards my second point, however, I cannot flatter myself that I have made much way against the formidable array of writers on the neo-Darwinian side; I shall therefore devote the rest of my book as far as possible to this subject only.  Natural selection (meaning by these words the preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable variations that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck and in no way arising out of function) has been, to use an Americanism than which I can find nothing apter, the biggest biological boom of the last quarter of a century; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should show some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification called in question.  Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen [70a] and Professor Ray Lankester [70b] in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause [70c] in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by myself; if they are not to be left in possession of the field the sooner they are met the better.

Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;—whether luck or cunning is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development.  Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning.  They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the situation—within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as organism retreats farther backwards from ourselves—and persistent effort to turn it to account.  They made this the soul of all development whether of mind or body.

And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for better and worse.  They held that some organisms show more ready wit and savoir faire than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone through waters of misery which they have used as wells.

The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by “striking oil,” and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired.  No speculation, no commerce; “nothing venture, nothing have,” is as true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting that highly picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture do from time to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest and most dead-level organisms under the name of “sports;” but they would hold that even these occur most often and most happily to those that have persevered in well-doing for some generations.  Unto the organism that hath is given, and from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that even “sports” prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains the sheet anchor of the early evolutionists.  They believe, in fact, that more organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way.  The race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round organism that is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness.  Festina, but festina lente—perhaps as involving so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—is the motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va piano va lontano, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at any rate as the amœba.

To repeat in other words.  All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings.  They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits.  They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity depends in great measure upon their failure to perceive that they are moulding themselves.  If a change is so great that they are seriously incommoded by its novelty, they are not likely to acquiesce in it kindly enough to grow to it, but they will make no difficulty about the miracle involved in accommodating themselves to a difference of only two or three per cent. [72a]

As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as fresh change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established, there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be accumulated in the course of generations—provided, of course, always, that the modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive habits and physical development of the organism in their collective capacity.  Where the change is too great, or where an organ has been modified cumulatively in some one direction, until it has reached a development too seriously out of harmony with the habits of the organism taken collectively, then the organism holds itself excused from further effort, throws up the whole concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation and reconstruction of death.  It is only on the relinquishing of further effort that this death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on from change to change, altering and being altered—that is to say, either killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or killing the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves.  There is a ceaseless higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle between these two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both have in no small part to re-enter into the womb from whence they came and be born again in some form which shall give greater satisfaction.

All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth.  Change is the common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and death are not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one another; in the highest life there is still much death, and in the most complete death there is still not a little life.  La vie, says Claud Bernard, [73a] c’est la mort: he might have added, and perhaps did, et la mort ce n’est que la vie transformée.  Life and death are the extreme modes of something which is partly both and wholly neither; this something is common, ordinary change; solve any change and the mystery of life and death will be revealed; show why and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than what it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left in any other change.  One is not in its ultimate essence more miraculous that another; it may be more striking—a greater congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but not more miraculous; all change is quâ us absolutely incomprehensible and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its phenomena, be inquired into.

But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a dissolution, or a combination of the two.  Growth is the coming together of elements with quasi similar characteristics.  I understand it is believed to be the coming together of matter in certain states of motion with other matter in states so nearly similar that the rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the other—making, rather than marring and undoing them.  Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is “the diapason closing full in man”; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amœba.  Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of complexity.  All pleasant changes are recreative; they are pro tanto births; all unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as such, pro tanto deaths, but we can no more exhaust either wholly of the other, than we can exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and pain lurk within one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as rest and unrest in one another.

There is no greater mystery in life than in death.  We talk as though the riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death is just as great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making five, the other is five splitting into two and two.  Solve either, and we have solved the other; they should be studied not apart, for they are never parted, but together, and they will tell more tales of one another than either will tell about itself.  If there is one thing which advancing knowledge makes clearer than another, it is that death is swallowed up in life, and life in death; so that if the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then indeed is our salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness there is neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures of speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as most convenient.  There is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but a being ever with the Lord only, in the eternal φορα, or going to and fro and heat and fray of the universe.  When we were young we thought the one certain thing was that we should one day come to die; now we know the one certain thing to be that we shall never wholly do so.  Non omnis moriar, says Horace, and “I die daily,” says St. Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death on this side of it, were each some strange thing which happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly called that of death, and who does not die daily and hourly?  Does any man in continuing to live from day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives from moment to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to moment also?  Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and more complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the most essential factor of his life, from the day that he became “he” at all?  When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are sounded, and so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer.  If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live or whether we die, whether we like it and know anything about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—living always, dying always, and in the Lord always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is no respecter of persons.

Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and substance, are—for the condition of every substance may be considered as the expression and outcome of its mind.  Where there is consciousness there is change; where there is no change there is no consciousness; may we not suspect that there is no change without a pro tanto consciousness however simple and unspecialised?  Change and motion are one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or motion), as the ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, and all feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited, to be the interaction of those states which for want of better terms we call mind and matter.  Action may be regarded as a kind of middle term between mind and matter; it is the throe of thought and thing, the quivering clash and union of body and soul; commonplace enough in practice; miraculous, as violating every canon on which thought and reason are founded, if we theorise about it, put it under the microscope, and vivisect it.  It is here, if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction in terms of combining with that which is without material substance and cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with matter, till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.

All body is more or less ensouled.  As it gets farther and farther from ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say to ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about it—as though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power of being understood rather than of understanding.  We are intelligent, and no intelligence, so different from our own as to baffle our powers of comprehension deserves to be called intelligence at all.  The more a thing resembles ourselves, the more it thinks as we do—and thus by implication tells us that we are right, the more intelligent we think it; and the less it thinks as we do, the greater fool it must be; if a substance does not succeed in making it clear that it understands our business, we conclude that it cannot have any business of its own, much less understand it, or indeed understand anything at all.  But letting this pass, so far as we are concerned, χρημάτων πάντων μέτρον άνθρωπος; we are body ensouled, and soul embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible for us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist either of soul without body, or body without soul.  Unmattered condition, therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned matter; and we must hold that all body with which we can be conceivably concerned is more or less ensouled, and all soul, in like manner, more or less embodied.  Strike either body or soul—that is to say, effect either a physical or a mental change, and the harmonics of the other sound.  So long as body is minded in a certain way—so long, that is to say, as it feels, knows, remembers, concludes, and forecasts one set of things—it will be in one form; if it assumes a new one, otherwise than by external violence, no matter how slight the change may be, it is only through having changed its mind, through having forgotten and died to some trains of thought, and having been correspondingly born anew by the adoption of new ones.  What it will adopt depends upon which of the various courses open to it it considers most to its advantage.

What it will think to its advantage depends mainly on the past habits of its race.  Its past and now invisible lives will influence its desires more powerfully than anything it may itself be able to add to the sum of its likes and dislikes; nevertheless, over and above preconceived opinion and the habits to which all are slaves, there is a small salary, or, as it were, agency commission, which each may have for himself, and spend according to his fancy; from this, indeed, income-tax must be deducted; still there remains a little margin of individual taste, and here, high up on this narrow, inaccessible ledge of our souls, from year to year a breed of not unprolific variations build where reason cannot reach them to despoil them; for de gustibus non est disputandum.

Here we are as far as we can go.  Fancy, which sometimes sways so much and is swayed by so little, and which sometimes, again, is so hard to sway, and moves so little when it is swayed; whose ways have a method of their own, but are not as our ways—fancy, lies on the extreme borderland of the realm within which the writs of our thoughts run, and extends into that unseen world wherein they have no jurisdiction.  Fancy is as the mist upon the horizon which blends earth and sky; where, however, it approaches nearest to the earth and can be reckoned with, it is seen as melting into desire, and this as giving birth to design and effort.  As the net result and outcome of these last, living forms grow gradually but persistently into physical conformity with their own intentions, and become outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual faiths, or wants of faith, that have been most within them.  They thus very gradually, but none the less effectually, design themselves.

In effect, therefore, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck introduce uniformity into the moral and spiritual worlds as it was already beginning to be introduced into the physical.  According to both these writers development has ever been a matter of the same energy, effort, good sense, and perseverance, as tend to advancement of life now among ourselves.  In essence it is neither more nor less than this, as the rain-drop which denuded an ancient formation is of the same kind as that which is denuding a modern one, though its effect may vary in geometrical ratio with the effect it has produced already.  As we are extending reason to the lower animals, so we must extend a system of moral government by rewards and punishments no less surely; and if we admit that to some considerable extent man is man, and master of his fate, we should admit also that all organic forms which are saved at all have been in proportionate degree masters of their fate too, and have worked out, not only their own salvation, but their salvation according, in no small measure, to their own goodwill and pleasure, at times with a light heart, and at times in fear and trembling.  I do not say that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck saw all the foregoing as clearly as it is easy to see it now; what I have said, however, is only the natural development of their system.