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.
When Dr. Francis Darwin called on me a day or two before “Life and Habit”
went to the press, he said the theory which had pleased him more than any
he had seen for some time was one which referred all life to memory;
{44a} he doubtless intended “which referred all the phenomena of heredity
to memory.” He then mentioned Professor Ray Lankester’s article in
_Nature_, of which I had not heard, but he said nothing about Mr.
Spencer, and spoke of the idea as one which had been quite new to him.
The above names comprise (excluding Mr. Spencer himself) perhaps those of
the best-known writers on evolution that can be mentioned as now before
the public; it is curious that Mr Spencer should be the only one of them
to see any substantial resemblance between the “Principles of Psychology”
and Professor Hering’s address and “Life and Habit.”
I ought, perhaps, to say that Mr. Romanes, writing to the _Athenæum_
(March 8, 1884), took a different view of the value of the theory of
inherited memory to the one he took in 1881.
In 1881 he said it was “simply absurd” to suppose it could “possibly be
fraught with any benefit to science” or “reveal any truth of profound
significance;” in 1884 he said of the same theory, that “it formed the
backbone of all the previous literature upon instinct” by Darwin,
Spencer, Lewes, Fiske, and Spalding, “not to mention their numerous
followers, and is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any
theory can be stated in words.”
Few except Mr. Romanes will say this. I grant it ought to “have formed
the backbone,” &c., and ought “to have been elaborately stated,” &c., but
when I wrote “Life and Habit” neither Mr Romanes nor any one else
understood it to have been even glanced at by more than a very few, and
as for having been “elaborately stated,” it had been stated by Professor
Hering as elaborately as it could be stated within the limits of an
address of only twenty-two pages, but with this exception it had never
been stated at all. It is not too much to say that “Life and Habit,”
when it first came out, was considered so startling a paradox that people
would not believe in my desire to be taken seriously, or at any rate were
able to pretend that they thought I was not writing seriously.
Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who keep an eye on
evolution; he himself, indeed, had said (_Nature_, January 27, 1881) that
so long as I “aimed only at entertaining” my “readers by such works as
‘Erewhon’ and ‘Life and Habit’” (as though these books were of kindred
character) I was in my proper sphere. It would be doing too little
credit to Mr. Romanes’ intelligence to suppose him not to have known when
he said this that “Life and Habit” was written as seriously as my
subsequent books on evolution, but it suited him at the moment to join
those who professed to consider it another book of paradoxes such as, I
suppose, “Erewhon” had been, so he classed the two together. He could
not have done this unless enough people thought, or said they thought,
the books akin, to give colour to his doing so.
One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, brought Mr. Spencer
against me. This was a writer in the _St. James’s Gazette_ (December 2,
1880). I challenged him in a letter which appeared (December 8, 1880),
and said, “I would ask your reviewer to be kind enough to refer your
readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer’s “Principles of Psychology”
which in any direct intelligible way refer the phenomena of instinct and
heredity generally, to memory on the part of offspring of the action it
_bonâ fide_ took in the persons of its forefathers.” The reviewer made
no reply, and I concluded, as I have since found correctly, that he could
not find the passages.
True, in his “Principles of Psychology” (vol. ii. p. 195) Mr. Spencer
says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all intelligence is
acquired through experience “so as to make it include with the experience
of each individual the experiences of all ancestral individuals,” &c.
This is all very good, but it is much the same as saying, “We have only
got to stand on our heads and we shall be able to do so and so.” We did
not see our way to standing on our heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help
us; we had been accustomed, as I am afraid I must have said _usque ad
nauseam_ already, to lose sight of the physical connection existing
between parents and offspring; we understood from the marriage service
that husband and wife were in a sense one flesh, but not that parents and
children were so also; and without this conception of the matter, which
in its way is just as true as the more commonly received one, we could
not extend the experience of parents to offspring. It was not in the
bond or _nexus_ of our ideas to consider experience as appertaining to
more than a single individual in the common acceptance of the term; these
two ideas were so closely bound together that wherever the one went the
other went perforce. Here, indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer’s
just referred to, the race is throughout regarded as “a series of
individuals”—without an attempt to call attention to that other view, in
virtue of which we are able to extend to many an idea we had been
accustomed to confine to one.
In his chapter on Memory, Mr. Spencer certainly approaches the Heringian
view. He says, “On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of
organised memory; on the other, Memory may be regarded as a kind of
incipient instinct” (“Principles of Psychology,” ed. 2, vol. i. p. 445).
Here the ball has fallen into his hands, but if he had got firm hold of
it he could not have written, “Instinct _may be_ regarded as _a kind of_,
&c.;” to us there is neither “may be regarded as” nor “kind of” about it;
we require, “Instinct is inherited memory,” with an explanation making it
intelligible how memory can come to be inherited at all. I do not like,
again, calling memory “a kind of incipient instinct;” as Mr. Spencer puts
them the words have a pleasant antithesis, but “instinct is inherited
memory” covers all the ground, and to say that memory is inherited
instinct is surplusage.
Nor does he stick to it long when he says that “instinct is a kind of
organised memory,” for two pages later he says that memory, to be memory
at all, must be tolerably conscious or deliberate; he, therefore (vol. i.
p. 447), denies that there can be such a thing as unconscious memory; but
without this it is impossible for us to see instinct as the “kind of
organised memory” which he has just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct
is notably undeliberate and unreflecting.
A few pages farther on (vol. i. p. 452) he finds himself driven to
unconscious memory after all, and says that “conscious memory passes into
unconscious or organic memory.” Having admitted unconscious memory, he
declares (vol. i. p. 450) that “as fast as those connections among
psychical states, which we form in memory, grow by constant repetition
automatic—they _cease to be part of memory_,” or, in other words, he
again denies that there can be an unconscious memory.
Mr. Spencer doubtless saw that he was involved in contradiction in terms,
and having always understood that contradictions in terms were very
dreadful things—which, of course, under some circumstances they
are—thought it well so to express himself that his readers should be more
likely to push on than dwell on what was before them at the moment. I
should be the last to complain of him merely on the ground that he could
not escape contradiction in terms: who can? When facts conflict,
contradict one another, melt into one another as the colours of the
spectrum so insensibly that none can say where one begins and the other
ends, contradictions in terms become first fruits of thought and speech.
They are the basis of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that a
physical obstacle is the basis of physical sensation. No opposition, no
sensation, applies as much to the psychical as to the physical kingdom,
as soon as these two have got well above the horizon of our thoughts and
can be seen as two. No contradiction, no consciousness; no cross, no
crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without which there is
no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or
deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small
scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of
pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger,
kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said
in “Life and Habit,” hates that any principle should breed
hermaphroditically, but will give to each an helpmeet for it which shall
cross it and be the undoing of it; and in the undoing, do; and in the
doing, undo, and so _ad infinitum_. Cross-fertilisation is just as
necessary for continued fertility of ideas as for that of organic life,
and the attempt to frown this or that down merely on the ground that it
involves contradiction in terms, without at the same time showing that
the contradiction is on a larger scale than healthy thought can stomach,
argues either small sense or small sincerity on the part of those who
make it. The contradictions employed by Mr. Spencer are objectionable,
not on the ground of their being contradictions at all, but on the ground
of their being blinked, and used unintelligently.
But though it is not possible for any one to get a clear conception of
Mr. Spencer’s meaning, we may say with more confidence what it was that
he did not mean. He did not mean to make memory the keystone of his
system; he has none of that sense of the unifying, binding force of
memory which Professor Hering has so well expressed, nor does he show any
signs of perceiving the far-reaching consequences that ensue if the
phenomena of heredity are considered as phenomena of memory. Thus, when
he is dealing with the phenomena of old age (vol. i. p. 538, ed. 2) he
does not ascribe them to lapse and failure of memory, nor surmise the
principle underlying longevity. He never mentions memory in connection
with heredity without presently saying something which makes us
involuntarily think of a man missing an easy catch at cricket; it is only
rarely, however, that he connects the two at all. I have only been able
to find the word “inherited” or any derivative of the verb “to inherit”
in connection with memory once in all the 1300 long pages of the
“Principles of Psychology.” It occurs in vol ii. p. 200, 2d ed., where
the words stand, “Memory, inherited or acquired.” I submit that this was
unintelligible when Mr. Spencer wrote it, for want of an explanation
which he never gave; I submit, also, that he could not have left it
unexplained, nor yet as an unrepeated expression not introduced till late
in his work, if he had had any idea of its pregnancy.
At any rate, whether he intended to imply what he now implies that he
intended to imply (for Mr. Spencer, like the late Mr. Darwin, is fond of
qualifying phrases), I have shown that those most able and willing to
understand him did not take him to mean what he now appears anxious to
have it supposed that he meant. Surely, moreover, if he had meant it he
would have spoken sooner, when he saw his meaning had been missed. I
can, however, have no hesitation in saying that if I had known the
“Principles of Psychology” earlier, as well as I know the work now, I
should have used it largely.
It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to see whether he
even now assigns to continued personality and memory the place assigned
to it by Professor Hering and myself. I will therefore give the
concluding words of the letter to the _Athenæum_ already referred to, in
which he tells us to stand aside. He writes “I still hold that
inheritance of functionally produced modifications is the chief factor
throughout the higher stages of organic evolution, bodily as well as
mental (see ‘Principles of Biology,’ i. 166), while I recognise the truth
that throughout the lower stages survival of the fittest is the chief
factor, and in the lowest the almost exclusive factor.”
This is the same confused and confusing utterance which Mr. Spencer has
been giving us any time this thirty years. According to him the fact
that variations can be inherited and accumulated has less to do with the
first development of organic life, than the fact that if a square
organism happens to get into a square hole, it will live longer and more
happily than a square organism which happens to get into a round one; he
declares “the survival of the fittest”—and this is nothing but the fact
that those who “fit” best into their surroundings will live longest and
most comfortably—to have more to do with the development of the amœba
into, we will say, a mollusc than heredity itself. True, “inheritance of
functionally produced modifications” is allowed to be the chief factor
throughout the “higher stages of organic evolution,” but it has very
little to do in the lower; in these “the almost exclusive factor” is not
heredity, or inheritance, but “survival of the fittest.”
Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe this; of course,
also, all who are fairly well up in the history of the development theory
will see why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this distinction between
the “factors” of the development of the higher and lower forms of life;
but no matter how or why Mr. Spencer has been led to say what he has, he
has no business to have said it. What can we think of a writer who,
after so many years of writing upon his subject, in a passage in which he
should make his meaning doubly clear, inasmuch as he is claiming ground
taken by other writers, declares that though hereditary use and disuse,
or, to use his own words, “the inheritance of functionally produced
modifications,” is indeed very important in connection with the
development of the higher forms of life, yet heredity itself has little
or nothing to do with that of the lower? Variations, whether produced
functionally or not, can only be perpetuated and accumulated because they
can be inherited;—and this applies just as much to the lower as to the
higher forms of life; the question which Professor Hering and I have
tried to answer is, “How comes it that anything can be inherited at all?
In virtue of what power is it that offspring can repeat and improve upon
the performances of their parents?” Our answer was, “Because in a very
valid sense, though not perhaps in the most usually understood, there is
continued personality and an abiding memory between successive
generations.” How does Mr. Spencer’s confession of faith touch this? If
any meaning can be extracted from his words, he is no more supporting
this view now than he was when he wrote the passages he has adduced to
show that he was supporting it thirty years ago; but after all no
coherent meaning can be got out of Mr. Spencer’s letter—except, of
course, that Professor Hering and myself are to stand aside. I have
abundantly shown that I am very ready to do this in favour of Professor
Hering, but see no reason for admitting Mr. Spencer’s claim to have been
among the forestallers of “Life and Habit.”