But throughout his work there are passages which suggest, though less obviously, the same inference.
The passages I have quoted show that Mr. Romanes is upholding the same opinions as Professor Hering’s and my own, but their effect and tendency is more plain here than in Mr Romanes’ own book, where they are overlaid by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always easy of comprehension.
Moreover, at the same time that I claim the weight of Mr. Romanes’ authority, I am bound to admit that I do not find his support satisfactory. The late Mr. Darwin himself—whose mantle seems to have fallen more especially and particularly on Mr. Romanes—could not contradict himself more hopelessly than Mr. Romanes often does. Indeed in one of the very passages I have quoted in order to show that Mr. Romanes accepts the phenomena of heredity as phenomena of memory, he speaks of “heredity as playing an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences;” so that, whereas I want him to say that the phenomena of heredity are due to memory, he will have it that the memory is due to the heredity, which seems to me absurd.
Over and over again Mr. Romanes insists that it is heredity which does this or that. Thus it is “heredity with natural selection which adapt the anatomical plan of the ganglia.” [56a] It is heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual. [56b] “In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity,” &c.; [56c] but he nowhere tells us what heredity is any more than Messrs. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, and Lewes have done. This, however, is exactly what Professor Hering, whom I have unwittingly followed, does. He resolves all phenomena of heredity, whether in respect of body or mind, into phenomena of memory. He says in effect, “A man grows his body as he does, and a bird makes her nest as she does, because both man and bird remember having grown body and made nest as they now do, or very nearly so, on innumerable past occasions.” He thus, as I have said on an earlier page, reduces life from an equation of say 100 unknown quantities to one of 99 only by showing that heredity and memory, two of the original 100 unknown quantities, are in reality part of one and the same thing.
That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very unsatisfactory way.
What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following?—Mr. Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation is that of memory, and that this “is the conditio sine quâ non of all mental life” (page 35).
I do not understand Mr. Romanes to hold that there is any living being which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to admit that development of body and mind are closely interdependent.
If, then, “the most fundamental principle” of mind is memory, it follows that memory enters also as a fundamental principle into development of body. For mind and body are so closely connected that nothing can enter largely into the one without correspondingly affecting the other.
On a later page Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child as “embodying the results of a great mass of hereditary experience” (p. 77), so that what he is driving at can be collected by those who take trouble, but is not seen until we call up from our own knowledge matter whose relevancy does not appear on the face of it, and until we connect passages many pages asunder, the first of which may easily be forgotten before we reach the second. There can be no doubt, however, that Mr. Romanes does in reality, like Professor Hering and myself, regard development, whether of mind or body, as due to memory, for it is now pretty generally seen to be nonsense to talk about “hereditary experience” or “hereditary memory” if anything else is intended.
I have said above that on page 113 of his recent work Mr. Romanes declares the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily life, and hereditary memory, to be “so numerous and precise” as to justify us in considering them as of one and the same kind.