Mr. Herbert Spencer
MR. HERBERT SPENCER wrote to the _Athenæum_ (April 5, 1884), and quoted
certain passages from the 1855 edition of his “Principles of Psychology,”
“the meanings and implications” from which he contended were sufficiently
clear. The passages he quoted were as follows:—
Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive sequences are not
determined by the experiences of the _individual_ organism
manifesting them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they
are determined by the experiences of the _race_ of organisms forming
its ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless successive
generations have established these sequences as organic relations (p.
526).
The modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life
are also bequeathed (p. 526).
That is to say, the tendencies to certain combinations of psychical
changes have become organic (p. 527).
The doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by
experience must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the
connections established by the accumulated experiences of every
individual, but to all those established by the accumulated
experiences of every race (p. 529).
Here, then, we have one of the simpler forms of instinct which, under
the requisite conditions, must necessarily be established by
accumulated experiences (p. 547).
And manifestly, if the organisation of inner relations, in
correspondence with outer relations, results from a continual
registration of experiences, &c. (p. 551).
On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised
memory; on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of
incipient instinct (pp. 555–6).
Memory, then, pertains to all that class of psychical states which
are in process of being organised. It continues so long as the
organising of them continues; and disappears when the organisation of
them is complete. In the advance of the correspondence, each more
complex class of phenomena which the organism acquires the power of
recognising is responded to at first irregularly and uncertainly; and
there is then a weak remembrance of the relations. By multiplication
of experiences this remembrance becomes stronger, and the response
more certain. By further multiplication of experiences the internal
relations are at last automatically organised in correspondence with
the external ones; and so conscious memory passes into unconscious or
organic memory. At the same time, a new and still more complex order
of experiences is thus rendered appreciable; the relations they
present occupy the memory in place of the simpler one; they become
gradually organised; and, like the previous ones, are succeeded by
others more complex still (p. 563).
Just as we saw that the establishment of those compound reflex
actions which we call instincts is comprehensible on the principle
that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into
correspondence with outer relations; so the establishment of those
consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations
constituting our ideas of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the
same principle (p. 579).
In a book published a few weeks before Mr. Spencer’s letter appeared
{29a} I had said that though Mr. Spencer at times closely approached
Professor Hering and “Life and Habit,” he had nevertheless nowhere shown
that he considered memory and heredity to be parts of the same story and
parcel of one another. In his letter to the _Athenæum_, indeed, he does
not profess to have upheld this view, except “by implications;” nor yet,
though in the course of the six or seven years that had elapsed since
“Life and Habit” was published I had brought out more than one book to
support my earlier one, had he said anything during those years to lead
me to suppose that I was trespassing upon ground already taken by
himself. Nor, again, had he said anything which enabled me to appeal to
his authority—which I should have been only too glad to do; at last,
however, he wrote, as I have said, to the _Athenæum_ a letter which,
indeed, made no express claim, and nowhere mentioned myself, but “the
meanings and implications” from which were this time as clear as could be
desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering and myself to stand
aside.
The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. Spencer, or any
others that can be found in his works, show that he regarded heredity in
all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit that this
conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer’s writings, and that even
the passages in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible
till read by the light of Professor Hering’s address and of “Life and
Habit.”
True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as “the
experience of the race,” “accumulated experiences,” and others like them,
but he did not explain—and it was here the difficulty lay—how a race
could have any experience at all. We know what we mean when we say that
an individual has had experience; we mean that he is the same person now
(in the common use of the words), on the occasion of some present action,
as the one who performed a like action at some past time or times, and
that he remembers how he acted before, so as to be able to turn his past
action to account, gaining in proficiency through practice. Continued
personality and memory are the elements that constitute experience; where
these are present there may, and commonly will, be experience; where they
are absent the word “experience” cannot properly be used.
Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many. We now
see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no means the
whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is the race that
is one, and the individual many. We all admit and understand this
readily enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer wrote the
passages he adduced in the letter to the _Athenæum_ above referred to.
In the then state of our ideas a race was only a succession of
individuals, each one of them new persons, and as such incapable of
profiting by the experience of its predecessors except in the very
limited number of cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times,
writing, was possible. The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere said,
remorselessly shorn between each successive generation, and the
importance of the physical and psychical connection between parents and
offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost sight of. It seems
strange how this could ever have been allowed to come about, but it
should be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly
discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise
troublesome questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible
for what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the
generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody else is
on many grounds the most convenient. Every now and then, however, there
comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued personality side of the
connection between successive generations is as convenient as the new
personality side is for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes—some
of which are not unimportant—are obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to
the completeness with which the more commonly needed conception has
overgrown the other.
Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted every
hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to speak, in
stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our mental storehouse,
while the other was so seldom asked for that it became not worth while to
keep it. By-and-by it was found so troublesome to send out for it, and
so hard to come by even then, that people left off selling it at all, and
if any one wanted it he must think it out at home as best he could; this
was troublesome, so by common consent the world decided no longer to busy
itself with the continued personality of successive generations—which was
all very well until it also decided to busy itself with the theory of
descent with modification. On the introduction of a foe so inimical to
many of our pre-existing ideas the balance of power among them was upset,
and a readjustment became necessary, which is still far from having
attained the next settlement that seems likely to be reasonably
permanent.
To change the illustration, the ordinary view is true for seven places of
decimals, and this commonly is enough; occasions, however, have now
arisen when the error caused by neglect of the omitted places is
appreciably disturbing, and we must have three or four more. Mr. Spencer
showed no more signs of seeing that he must supply these, and make
personal identity continue between successive generations before talking
about inherited (as opposed to post-natal and educational) experience,
than others had done before him; the race with him, as with every one
else till recently, was not one long individual living indeed in
pulsations, so to speak, but no more losing continued personality by
living in successive generations, than an individual loses it by living
in consecutive days; a race was simply a succession of individuals, each
one of which was held to be an entirely new person, and was regarded
exclusively, or very nearly so, from this point of view.
When I wrote “Life and Habit” I knew that the words “experience of the
race” sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines and newspapers,
but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I should have given
their source. To me they conveyed no meaning, and vexed me as an attempt
to make me take stones instead of bread, and to palm off an illustration
upon me as though it were an explanation. When I had worked the matter
out in my own way, I saw that the illustration, with certain additions,
would become an explanation, but I saw also that neither he who had
adduced it nor any one else could have seen how right he was, till much
had been said which had not, so far as I knew, been said yet, and which
undoubtedly would have been said if people had seen their way to saying
it.
“What is this talk,” I wrote, “which is made about the experience of the
race, as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows
nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner it nourishes him and not his
neighbour; if he learns a difficult art it is he that can do it and not
his neighbour” (“Life and Habit,” p. 49).
When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the
father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the son was
fed when the father ate before he begot him.
“Is there any way,” I continued, “of showing that this experience of the
race about which so much is said without the least attempt to show in
what way it may, or does, become the experience of the individual, is in
sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, who repeats on
a great many different occasions, and in slightly different ways, certain
performances with which he has already become exceedingly familiar?”
I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the
expression in question, that it was fallacious till this was done. When
I first began to write “Life and Habit” I did not believe it could be
done, but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were, of my _cu de
sac_, I saw the path which led straight to the point I had despaired of
reaching—I mean I saw that personality could not be broken as between
generations, without also breaking it between the years, days, and
moments of a man’s life. What differentiates “Life and Habit” from the
“Principles of Psychology” is the prominence given to continued personal
identity, and hence to _bonâ fide_ memory, as between successive
generations; but surely this makes the two books differ widely.
Ideas can be changed to almost any extent in almost any direction, if the
change is brought about gradually and in accordance with the rules of all
development. As in music we may take almost any possible discord with
pleasing effect if we have prepared and resolved it rightly, so our ideas
will outlive and outgrow almost any modification which is approached and
quitted in such a way as to fuse the old and new harmoniously. Words are
to ideas what the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore
it—only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak, whereas ideas
are unseen until they don the robe of words which reveals them to us; the
words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit each other and stick
to one another in our minds as soon as they are brought together, or the
ideas will fly off, and leave the words void of that spirit by the aid of
which alone they can become transmuted into physical action and shape
material things with their own impress. Whether a discord is too violent
or no, depends on what we have been accustomed to, and on how widely the
new differs from the old, but in no case can we fuse and assimilate more
than a very little new at a time without exhausting our tempering
power—and hence presently our temper.
Mr. Spencer appears to have forgotten that though _de minimis non curat
lex_,—though all the laws fail when applied to trifles,—yet too sudden a
change in the manner in which our ideas are associated is as cataclysmic
and subversive of healthy evolution as are material convulsions, or too
violent revolutions in politics. This must always be the case, for
change is essentially miraculous, and the only lawful home of the miracle
is in the microscopically small. Here, indeed, miracles were in the
beginning, are now, and ever shall be, but we are deadened if they are
required of us on a scale which is visible to the naked eye. If we are
told to work them our hands fall nerveless down; if, come what may, we
must do or die, we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If
we are required to believe them—which only means to fuse them with our
other ideas—we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds
being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have
fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds
swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and _pro tanto_
kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as
fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a
small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to
cease to work them is to die. And by miracle I do not merely mean
something new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension—I mean
something which violates every canon of thought which in the palpable
world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and
inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of
force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing. This,
which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and
drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the
ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as
consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life and
death.
Claude Bernard says, _Rien ne nait_, _rien ne se crée_, _tout se
continue_. _La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d’aucune création_,
_elle est d’une éternelle continuation_; {35a} but surely he is insisting
upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another which is just
as real, and just as important; he might have said, _Rien ne se
continue_, _tout nait_, _tout se crée_. _La nature ne nous offre le
spectacle d’aucune continuation_. _Elle est d’une éternelle création_;
for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and, indeed, the two
stand or fall together. True, discontinuity, where development is
normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the difference between
looking at distances on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have
even the smallest change without a small partial corresponding
discontinuity; on a small scale—too small, indeed, for us to
cognise—these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our
understanding goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the
phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall
normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out. Creations, then,
there must be, but they must be so small that practically they are no
creations. We must have a continuity in discontinuity, and a
discontinuity in continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the
help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It
comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and
harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no
conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by flying in
the face of every rule that professors of the art of thinking have drawn
up for our instruction. These rules may be good enough as servants, but
we have let them become the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy
is made for man, not man for philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower
of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into
the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—nor has
confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul
said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what
faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as
species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its own way
both living and saving.
All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is
miraculous. It is the two in one, and at the same time one in two, which
is only two and two making five put before us in another shape; yet this
fusion—so easy to think so long as it is not thought about, and so
unthinkable if we try to think it—is, as it were, the matrix from which
our more thinkable thought is taken; it is the cloud gathering in the
unseen world from which the waters of life descend in an impalpable dew.
Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or
things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon
our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted
that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should
vitiate the whole process _ab initio_, still, if we have faith we can so
work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world
into the seen again—provided we do not look back, and provided also we do
not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time. To think is to fuse
and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed. We can all
feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can fuse ideas; or
we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can
feed; we know not which comes first, the food or the ideas, but we must
not overtax our strength; the moment we do this we taste of death.
It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food fine
before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large lumps will
choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again, that that which
is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas. Food is very thoughtful:
through thought it comes, and back through thought it shall return; the
process of its conversion and comprehension within our own system is
mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and
evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross—that is to
say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale. Granted that
no one can draw a clear line and define the limits within which a miracle
is healthy working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he
can prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute our
food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and that at all
times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass themselves, still we know
as a general rule near enough, and find that the strongest can do but
very little at a time, and, to return to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two
such hitherto unassociated ideas as race and experience was a miracle
beyond our strength.
Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter to
the _Athenæum_ above referred to, we were not in the habit of thinking of
any one as able to remember things that had happened before he had been
born or thought of. This notion will still strike many of my non-readers
as harsh and strained; no such discord, therefore, should have been taken
unprepared, and when taken it should have been resolved with pomp and
circumstance. Mr Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never
either prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words
“experience of the race” sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the
result that his words were barren. They were barren because they were
incoherent; they were incoherent because they were approached and quitted
too suddenly. While we were realising “experience” our minds excluded
“race,” inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed
hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea
“race,” for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded
experience. We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien to one
another, without having had those other ideas presented to us which would
alone flux them. The absence of these—which indeed were not immediately
ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them—made
nonsense of the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one
against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer’s pages, only to find that they
had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we put down
his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know what to do with
his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly while he chastised us
with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, according to our
temperaments.
I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and the
sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are
one in principle—the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to
inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent
whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself
ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas—that is to
say, into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as their
neighbours do.
If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race are
_bonâ fide_ united by a common personality, and that in virtue of being
so united each generation remembers (within, of course, the limits to
which all memory is subject) what happened to it while still in the
persons of its progenitors—then his order to Professor Hering and myself
should be immediately obeyed; but this was just what was at once most
wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the passages given
above—passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself—this point is altogether
ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made it—put continued
personality and memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead
of leaving them to be discovered “by implications,” and then such
expressions as “accumulated experiences” and “experience of the race”
become luminous; till this had been done they were _Vox et præterea
nihil_.
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.”