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, [40a] 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 (Nature, July 13, 1876), 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.”
Chapter III
Mr. Herbert Spencer (continued)
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 (Nature, July 13, 1876), “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 Athenæum (March 29, 1884), 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 (January 27, 1881) 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” (p. 296) 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 (March 27, 1879), 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 (July 1881), 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 (March 31, 1879), 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 (for brevity) 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” (I repeated it not two or three times only, but whenever and wherever I could venture to do so without wearying the reader beyond endurance) “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.