I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin “had told us what the earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed from them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would have taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and more likely to remove misconception from his own mind and from those of his readers.” [239] This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made Mr. Romanes so angry with me. I can find no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes himself. He knows perfectly well what others have written about the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows
no less well that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that they have taken. If he had begun by saying what they had said and had then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be improved upon.
Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned method of procedure was not good enough for him. One-half the obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin’s work—I mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement. He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.
Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes’ definition of instinct:—
“Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of consciousness. The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained, but similarly performed under similar and frequently recurring circumstances by all the individuals of the same species.” [240]
If Mr. Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor Hering’s foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly admitted, he might have said—
“Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations—the new generation remembering what
happened to it before it parted company with the old.” Then he might have added as a rider—
“If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime, it is not an instinct. If having been acquired in one lifetime it is transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring though it was not an instinct in the parent. If the habit is transmitted partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly acquired.”
This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose, knowledge of purpose, &c.; it both introduces the feature of inheritance which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from so-called intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pass into the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition; finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said [241]) as “a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.