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.