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 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.