Read Ebook: Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification by Butler Samuel

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Here, then, we have one of the simpler forms of instinct which, under the requisite conditions, must necessarily be established by accumulated experiences .

And manifestly, if the organisation of inner relations, in correspondence with outer relations, results from a continual registration of experiences, &c. .

On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised memory; on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of incipient instinct .

Just as we saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions which we call instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into correspondence with outer relations; so the establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the same principle .

In a book published a few weeks before Mr. Spencer's letter appeared I had said that though Mr. Spencer at times closely approached Professor Hering and "Life and Habit," he had nevertheless nowhere shown that he considered memory and heredity to be parts of the same story and parcel of one another. In his letter to the Athenaeum, indeed, he does not profess to have upheld this view, except "by implications;" nor yet, though in the course of the six or seven years that had elapsed since "Life and Habit" was published I had brought out more than one book to support my earlier one, had he said anything during those years to lead me to suppose that I was trespassing upon ground already taken by himself. Nor, again, had he said anything which enabled me to appeal to his authority--which I should have been only too glad to do; at last, however, he wrote, as I have said, to the Athenaeum a letter which, indeed, made no express claim, and nowhere mentioned myself, but "the meanings and implications" from which were this time as clear as could be desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering and myself to stand aside.

The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. Spencer, or any others that can be found in his works, show that he regarded heredity in all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit that this conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer's writings, and that even the passages in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible till read by the light of Professor Hering's address and of "Life and Habit."

True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as "the experience of the race," "accumulated experiences," and others like them, but he did not explain--and it was here the difficulty lay-- how a race could have any experience at all. We know what we mean when we say that an individual has had experience; we mean that he is the same person now , on the occasion of some present action, as the one who performed a like action at some past time or times, and that he remembers how he acted before, so as to be able to turn his past action to account, gaining in proficiency through practice. Continued personality and memory are the elements that constitute experience; where these are present there may, and commonly will, be experience; where they are absent the word "experience" cannot properly be used.

Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many. We now see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no means the whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is the race that is one, and the individual many. We all admit and understand this readily enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the Athenaeum above referred to. In the then state of our ideas a race was only a succession of individuals, each one of them new persons, and as such incapable of profiting by the experience of its predecessors except in the very limited number of cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, was possible. The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between each successive generation, and the importance of the physical and psychical connection between parents and offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost sight of. It seems strange how this could ever have been allowed to come about, but it should be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise troublesome questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible for what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody else is on many grounds the most convenient. Every now and then, however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued personality side of the connection between successive generations is as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes--some of which are not unimportant--are obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which the more commonly needed conception has overgrown the other.

Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted every hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to speak, in stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our mental storehouse, while the other was so seldom asked for that it became not worth while to keep it. By-and-by it was found so troublesome to send out for it, and so hard to come by even then, that people left off selling it at all, and if any one wanted it he must think it out at home as best he could; this was troublesome, so by common consent the world decided no longer to busy itself with the continued personality of successive generations--which was all very well until it also decided to busy itself with the theory of descent with modification. On the introduction of a foe so inimical to many of our pre-existing ideas the balance of power among them was upset, and a readjustment became necessary, which is still far from having attained the next settlement that seems likely to be reasonably permanent.

To change the illustration, the ordinary view is true for seven places of decimals, and this commonly is enough; occasions, however, have now arisen when the error caused by neglect of the omitted places is appreciably disturbing, and we must have three or four more. Mr. Spencer showed no more signs of seeing that he must supply these, and make personal identity continue between successive generations before talking about inherited experience, than others had done before him; the race with him, as with every one else till recently, was not one long individual living indeed in pulsations, so to speak, but no more losing continued personality by living in successive generations, than an individual loses it by living in consecutive days; a race was simply a succession of individuals, each one of which was held to be an entirely new person, and was regarded exclusively, or very nearly so, from this point of view.

When I wrote "Life and Habit" I knew that the words "experience of the race" sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines and newspapers, but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I should have given their source. To me they conveyed no meaning, and vexed me as an attempt to make me take stones instead of bread, and to palm off an illustration upon me as though it were an explanation. When I had worked the matter out in my own way, I saw that the illustration, with certain additions, would become an explanation, but I saw also that neither he who had adduced it nor any one else could have seen how right he was, till much had been said which had not, so far as 1 knew, been said yet, and which undoubtedly would have been said if people had seen their way to saying it.

"What is this talk," I wrote, "which is made about the experience of the race, as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner it nourishes him and not his neighbour; if he learns a difficult art it is he that can do it and not his neighbour" .

When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the son was fed when the father ate before he begot him.

"Is there any way," I continued, "of showing that this experience of the race about which so much is said without the least attempt to show in what way it may, or does, become the experience of the individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, who repeats on a great many different occasions, and in slightly different ways, certain performances with which he has already become exceedingly familiar?"

I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the expression in question, that it was fallacious till this was done. When I first began to write "Life and Habit" I did not believe it could be done, but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were, of my cu de sac, I saw the path which led straight to the point I had despaired of reaching--I mean I saw that personality could not be broken as between generations, without also breaking it between the years, days, and moments of a man's life. What differentiates "Life and Habit" from the "Principles of Psychology" is the prominence given to continued personal identity, and hence to bona fide memory, as between successive generations; but surely this makes the two books differ widely.

Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost any direction, if the change is brought about gradually and in accordance with the rules of all development. As in music we may take almost any possible discord with pleasing effect if we have prepared and resolved it rightly, so our ideas will outlive and outgrow almost any modification which is approached and quitted in such a way as to fuse the old and new harmoniously. Words are to ideas what the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore it--only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak, whereas ideas are unseen until they don the robe of words which reveals them to us; the words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit each other and stick to one another in our minds as soon as they are brought together, or the ideas will fly off, and leave the words void of that spirit by the aid of which alone they can become transmuted into physical action and shape material things with their own impress. Whether a discord is too violent or no, depends on what we have been accustomed to, and on how widely the new differs from the old, but in no case can we fuse and assimilate more than a very little new at a time without exhausting our tempering power--and hence presently our temper.

Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though de minimis non curat lex,--though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,--yet too sudden a change in the manner in which our ideas are associated is as cataclysmic and subversive of healthy evolution as are material convulsions, or too violent revolutions in politics. This must always be the case, for change is essentially miraculous, and the only lawful home of the miracle is in the microscopically small. Here, indeed, miracles were in the beginning, are now, and ever shall be, but we are deadened if they are required of us on a scale which is visible to the naked eye. If we are told to work them our hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If we are required to believe them--which only means to fuse them with our other ideas- -we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to cease to work them is to die. And by miracle I do not merely mean something new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension--I mean something which violates every canon of thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing. This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life and death.

All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is miraculous. It is the two in one, and at the same time one in two, which is only two and two making five put before us in another shape; yet this fusion--so easy to think so long as it is not thought about, and so unthinkable if we try to think it--is, as it were, the matrix from which our more thinkable thought is taken; it is the cloud gathering in the unseen world from which the waters of life descend in an impalpable dew. Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into the seen again--provided we do not look back, and provided also we do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time. To think is to fuse and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed. We can all feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can fuse ideas; or we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can feed; we know not which comes first, the food or the ideas, but we must not overtax our strength; the moment we do this we taste of death.

It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food fine before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large lumps will choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again, that that which is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas. Food is very thoughtful: through thought it comes, and back through thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and comprehension within our own system is mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross--that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale. Granted that no one can draw a clear line and define the limits within which a miracle is healthy working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he can prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute our food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and that at all times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass themselves, still we know as a general rule near enough, and find that the strongest can do but very little at a time, and, to return to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two such hitherto unassociated ideas as race and experience was a miracle beyond our strength.

Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter to the Athenaeum above referred to, we were not in the habit of thinking of any one as able to remember things that had happened before he had been born or thought of. This notion will still strike many of my non-readers as harsh and strained; no such discord, therefore, should have been taken unprepared, and when taken it should have been resolved with pomp and circumstance. Mr Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never either prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words "experience of the race" sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the result that his words were barren. They were barren because they were incoherent; they were incoherent because they were approached and quitted too suddenly. While we were realising "experience" our minds excluded "race," inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea "race," for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded experience. We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien to one another, without having had those other ideas presented to us which would alone flux them. The absence of these--which indeed were not immediately ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them--made nonsense of the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer's pages, only to find that they had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we put down his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know what to do with his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly while he chastised us with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, according to our temperaments.

I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are one in principle--the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas--that is to say, into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as their neighbours do.

If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race are bona fide united by a common personality, and that in virtue of being so united each generation remembers what happened to it while still in the persons of its progenitors--then his order to Professor Hering and myself should be immediately obeyed; but this was just what was at once most wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the passages given above--passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself--this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made it--put continued personality and memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to be discovered "by implications," and then such expressions as "accumulated experiences" and "experience of the race" become luminous; till this had been done they were Vox et praeterea nihil.

To sum up briefly. The passages quoted by Mr. Spencer from his "Principles of Psychology" can hardly be called clear, even now that Professor Hering and others have thrown light upon them. If, indeed, they had been clear Mr. Spencer would probably have seen what they necesitated, and found the way of meeting the difficulties of the case which occurred to Professor Hering and myself. Till we wrote, very few writers had even suggested this. The idea that offspring was only "an elongation or branch proceeding from its parents" had scintillated in the ingenious brain of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and in that of the designer of Jesse tree windows, but it had kindled no fire; it now turns out that Canon Kingsley had once called instinct inherited memory, but the idea, if born alive at all, died on the page on which it saw light: Professor Ray Lankester, again called attention to Professor Hering's address , but no discussion followed, and the matter dropped without having produced visible effect. As for offspring remembering in any legitimate sense of the words what it had done, and what had happened to it, before it was born, no such notion was understood to have been gravely mooted till very recently. I doubt whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes would accept this even now, when it is put thus undisguisedly; but this is what Professor Hering and I mean, and it is the only thing that should be meant, by those who speak of instinct as inherited memory. Mr Spencer cannot maintain that these two startling novelties went without saying "by implication" from the use of such expressions as "accumulated experiences" or "experience of the race."

Whether they ought to have gone or not, they did not go.

When "Life and Habit" was first published no one considered Mr. Spencer to be maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be in reality phenomena of memory. When, for example, Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to Professor Hering's address, he did not understand Mr. Spencer to be intending this. "Professor Hering," he wrote , "helps us to a comprehensive view of the nature of heredity and adaptation, by giving us the word 'memory,' conscious or unconscious, for the continuity of Mr. Spencer's polar forces or polarities of physiological units." He evidently found the prominence given to memory a help to him which he had not derived from reading Mr. Spencer's works.

When, again, he attacked me in the Athenaeum , he spoke of my "tardy recognition" of the fact that Professor Hering had preceded me "in treating all manifestations of heredity as a form of memory." Professor Lankester's words could have no force if he held that any other writer, and much less so well known a writer as Mr. Spencer, had preceded me in putting forward the theory in question.

When Mr. Romanes reviewed "Unconscious Memory" in Nature the notion of a "race-memory," to use his own words, was still so new to him that he declared it "simply absurd" to suppose that it could "possibly be fraught with any benefit to science," and with him too it was Professor Hering who had anticipated me in the matter, not Mr. Spencer.

In his "Mental Evolution in Animals" he said that Canon Kingsley, writing in 1867, was the first to advance the theory that instinct is inherited memory; he could not have said this if Mr. Spencer had been understood to have been upholding this view for the last thirty years.

Mr. A. R. Wallace reviewed "Life and Habit" in Nature , but he did not find the line I had taken a familiar one, as he surely must have done if it had followed easily by implication from Mr. Spencer's works. He called it "an ingenious and paradoxical explanation" which was evidently new to him. He concluded by saying that "it might yet afford a clue to some of the deepest mysteries of the organic world."

Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on Evolution in the American Catholic Quarterly Review , said, "Mr Butler is not only perfectly logical and consistent in the startling consequences he deduces from his principles, but," &c. Professor Mivart could not have found my consequences startling if they had already been insisted upon for many years by one of the best-known writers of the day.

The reviewer of "Evolution Old and New" in the Saturday Review , of whom all I can venture to say is that he or she is a person whose name carries weight in matters connected with biology, though he was in the humour for seeing everything objectionable in me that could be seen, still saw no Mr. Spencer in me. He said--"Mr Butler's own particular contribution to the terminology of Evolution is the phrase two or three times repeated with some emphasis" "oneness of personality between parents and offspring." The writer proceeded to reprobate this in language upon which a Huxley could hardly improve, but as he declares himself unable to discover what it means, it may be presumed that the idea of continued personality between successive generations was new to him.

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; 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 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 Athenaeum , 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 that so long as I "aimed only at entertaining" my "readers by such works as 'Erewhon' and 'Life and Habit'" 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 . I challenged him in a letter which appeared , 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 bona 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" 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" . 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 , 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 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 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 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 , 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 Athenaeum 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 , 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 amoeba 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."

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.

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.

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