Chapter VIII: Part 8

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

At parting, therefore, I would recommend the reader to see every atom in the universe as living and able to feel and to remember, but in a humble way. He must have life eternal, as well as matter eternal; and the life and the matter must be joined together inseparably as body and soul to one another. Thus he will see God everywhere, not as those who repeat phrases conventionally, but as people who would have their words taken according to their most natural and legitimate meaning; and he will feel that the main difference between him and many of those who oppose him lies in the fact that whereas both he and they use the same language, his opponents only half mean what they say, while he means it entirely.

The attempt to get a higher form of a life from a lower one is in accordance with our observation and experience. It is therefore proper to be believed. The attempt to get it from that which has absolutely no life is like trying to get something out of nothing. The millionth part of a farthing put out to interest at ten per cent. will in five hundred years become over a million pounds, and so long as we have any millionth of a millionth of the farthing to start with, our getting as many million pounds as we have a fancy for is only a question of time, but without the initial millionth of a millionth of a millionth part, we shall get no increment whatever. A little leaven will leaven the whole lump, but there must be _some_ leaven.

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

At present our leading men of science are in this difficulty; on the one hand their experiments and their theories alike teach them that spontaneous generation ought not to be accepted; on the other, they must have an origin for the life of the living forms, which, by their own theory, have been evolved, and they can at present get this origin in no other way than by _Deus ex machina_ method, which they reject as unproved, or spontaneous generation of living from non-living matter, which is no less foreign to their experience. As a general rule, they prefer the latter alternative. So Professor Tyndall, in his celebrated article (_Nineteenth Century_, November 1878), wrote:--

"The theory of evolution in its complete form involves the assumption that at some period or other of the earth's history there occurred what would be now called 'spontaneous generation.'" {217} And so Professor Huxley--

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

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

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

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

Again, I would recommend the reader to beware of believing anything in this book unless he either likes it, or feels angry at being told it. If required belief in this or that makes a man angry, I suppose he should, as a general rule, swallow it whole then and there upon the spot, otherwise he may take it or leave it as he likes.

I have not gone far for my facts, nor yet far from them; all on which I rest are as open to the reader as to me. If I have sometimes used hard terms, the probability is that I have not understood them, but have done so by a slip, as one who has caught a bad habit from the company he has been lately keeping. They should be skipped.

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

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

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

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

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

Others, again, are so unifying the _ego_ and the _non ego_, that with them there will soon be as little of the _non ego_ left as there is of the _ego_ with their opponents. Both, however, are so far agreed as that we know not where to draw the line between the two, and this renders nugatory any system which is founded upon a distinction between them.

The truth is, that all classification whatever, when we examine its _raison d'etre_ closely, is found to be arbitrary--to depend on our sense of our own convenience, and not on any inherent distinction in the nature of the things themselves. Strictly speaking, there is only one thing and one action. The universe, or God, and the action of the universe as a whole.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1873 M. Martin published his edition of Lamarck's _Philosophic Zoologique_. He was still able to say, with, I believe, perfect truth, that Lamarck's theory has "never yet had the honour of being discussed seriously." {225c}

Professor Huxley in his article on Evolution is no less cavalier than Mr. Wallace. He writes: {225d}--

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

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

"But _a little consideration showed_" (italics mine) "that though Lamarck had seized what, as far as it goes, is a true cause of modification, it is a cause the actual effects of which are wholly inadequate to account for any considerable modification in animals, and which can have no influence whatever in the vegetable world," &c.

I should be very glad to come across some of the "little consideration" which will show this. I have searched for it far and wide, and have never been able to find it.

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

The battle is one of greater importance than appears at first sight. It is a battle between teleology and non-teleology, between the purposiveness and the non-purposiveness of the organs in animal and vegetable bodies. According to Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Paley, organs are purposive; according to Mr. Darwin and his followers, they are not purposive. But the main arguments against the system of Dr. Erasmus Darwin are arguments which, so far as they have any weight, tell against evolution generally. Now that these have been disposed of, and the prejudice against evolution has been overcome, it will be seen that there is nothing to be said against the system of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck which does not tell with far greater force against that of Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Wallace.

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. {228a}

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

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

Mr. Spencer may very well call instinct "organised memory" if he means that offspring can remember--within the limitations to which all memory is subject--what happened to it while it was yet in the person or persons of its parent or parents; but if he does not mean this, his use of the word "memory," his talk about "the experience of the race," and other expressions of kindred nature, are delusive. If he does mean this, it is a pity he has nowhere said so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lower down on the same page he writes:--

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

And on the following page:--

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

Again:--

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

Again:--

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

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

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

Later on:--

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

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

On another page Mr. Romanes says:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS--(_continued_).

I will give examples of my meaning. Mr. Romanes says on an early page, "The most fundamental principle of mental operation is that of memory, for this is the _conditio sine qua 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, indeed, Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child as "_embodying_ the results of a great mass of _hereditary experience_" (p. 77), so that what he is driving at can be collected by those who take trouble, but is not seen until we call up from our own knowledge matter whose relevancy does not appear on the face of it, and until we connect passages many pages asunder, the first of which may easily be forgotten before we reach the second. There can be no doubt, however, that Mr. Romanes does in reality, like Professor Hering and myself, regard development, whether of mind or body, as due to memory, for it is nonsense indeed to talk about "hereditary experience" or "hereditary memory" if anything else is intended.

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 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. 98 of the present volume; 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." {239} This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made Mr. Romanes so angry with me. I can find no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes himself. He knows perfectly well what others have written about the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that they have taken. If he had begun by saying what they had said and had then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be improved upon.

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." {240}

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

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

"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 {241}) as "a branch or elongation" of the one immediately preceding it.

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

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

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS--(_concluded_).

I gather that in the end the late Mr. Darwin himself admitted the soundness of the view which the reader will have found insisted upon in the extracts from my earlier books given in this volume. Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming "_instinctive_, _i.e._, _memory transmitted from one generation to another_." {243a}

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

1859. "It would be _the most serious error_ to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations." {243b} And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.

1876. "It would be _a serious error_ to suppose" &c., as before. {243c}

1881. "We should remember _what a mass of inherited knowledge_ is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant." {243d}

1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes:--"It does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:" _i.e._, _memory transmitted from one generation to another_. {244a}

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

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

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

I 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 Muller's book, for what little Hermann Muller 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 1882.

"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.

Mr Herbert Spencer has not in his more recent works said anything which enables me to appeal to his authority.

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

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

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

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

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