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.