Mr. Romanes’ “Mental Evolution in Animals”
WITHOUT raising the unprofitable question how Mr. Romanes, in spite of
the indifference with which he treated the theory of Inherited Memory in
1881, came, in 1883, to be sufficiently imbued with a sense of its
importance, I still cannot afford to dispense with the weight of his
authority, and in this chapter will show how closely he not infrequently
approaches the Heringian position.
Thus, he says that the analogies between the memory with which we are
familiar in daily life and hereditary memory “are so numerous and
precise” as to justify us in considering them to be of essentially the
same kind. {52b}
Again, he says that although the memory of milk shown by new-born infants
is “at all events in large part hereditary, it is none the less memory”
of a certain kind. {52c}
Two lines lower down he writes of “hereditary memory or instinct,”
thereby implying that instinct is “hereditary memory.” “It makes no
essential difference,” he says, “whether the past sensation was actually
experienced by the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by
its ancestors. {52d} For it makes no essential difference whether the
nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the life-time of the
individual or during that of the species, and afterwards impressed by
heredity on the individual.”
Lower down on the same page he writes:—
“As showing how close is the connection between hereditary memory and
instinct,” &c.
And on the following page:—
“And this shows how closely the phenomena of hereditary memory are
related to those of individual memory: at this stage . . . it is
practically impossible to disentangle the effects of hereditary memory
from those of the individual.”
Again:—
“Another point which we have here to consider is the part which heredity
has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to
its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an
important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is
that many animals come into the world with their power of perception
already largely developed. The wealth of ready-formed information, and
therefore of ready-made powers of perception, with which many newly-born
or newly-hatched animals are provided, is so great and so precise that it
scarcely requires to be supplemented by the subsequent experience of the
individual.” {53a}
Again:—
“Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or other of
the two principles.
“I. The first mode of origin consists in natural selection or survival
of the fittest, continuously preserving actions, &c. &c.
“II. The second mode of origin is as follows:—By the effects of habit in
successive generations, actions which were originally intelligent become
as it were stereotyped into permanent instincts. Just as in the lifetime
of the individual adjustive actions which were originally intelligent may
by frequent repetition become automatic, so in the lifetime of species
actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity so
write their effects on the nervous system that the latter is prepared,
even before individual experience, to perform adjustive actions
mechanically which in previous generations were performed intelligently.
This mode of origin of instincts has been appropriately called (by
Lewes—see “Problems of Life and Mind” {54a}) the ‘lapsing of
intelligence.’” {54b}
I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid by Mr.
Romanes both in his “Mental Evolution in Animals” and in his letters to
the _Athenæum_ in March 1884, on Natural Selection as an originator and
developer of instinct, he very soon afterwards let the Natural Selection
part of the story go as completely without saying as I do myself, or as
Mr. Darwin did during the later years of his life. Writing to _Nature_,
April 10, 1884, he said: “To deny _that experience in the course of
successive generations is the source of instinct_, is not to meet by way
of argument the enormous mass of evidence which goes to prove _that this
is the case_.” Here, then, instinct is referred, without reservation, to
“experience in successive generations,” and this is nonsense unless
explained as Professor Hering and I explain it. Mr. Romanes’ words, in
fact, amount to an unqualified acceptance of the chapter “Instinct as
Inherited Memory” given in “Life and Habit,” of which Mr. Romanes in
March 1884 wrote in terms which it is not necessary to repeat.
Later on:—
“That ‘practice makes perfect’ is a matter, as I have previously said, of
daily observation. Whether we regard a juggler, a pianist, or a
billiard-player, a child learning his lesson or an actor his part by
frequently repeating it, or a thousand other illustrations of the same
process, we see at once that there is truth in the cynical definition of
a man as a ‘bundle of habits.’ And the same, of course, is true of
animals.” {55a}
From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show “that automatic actions and
conscious habits may be inherited,” {55b} and in the course of doing this
contends that “instincts may be lost by disuse, and conversely that they
may be acquired as instincts by the hereditary transmission of ancestral
experience.”
On another page Mr. Romanes says:—
“Let us now turn to the second of these two assumptions, viz., that some
at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very
precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued. It is
without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should be
prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the year,
and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its own
parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct
which aims at being complete. Now upon our own theory it can only be met
by taking it to be due to inherited memory.”
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.” {55c}
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.
Moreover, at the same time that I claim the weight of Mr. Romanes’
authority, I am bound to admit that I do not find his support
satisfactory. The late Mr. Darwin himself—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, 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.” {56a} It is heredity which
impresses nervous changes on the individual. {56b} “In the lifetime of
species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and
heredity,” &c.; {56c} 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,
as I have said on an earlier page, 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.
What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following?—Mr.
Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation is
that of memory, and that 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.
If, then, “the most fundamental principle” of mind is memory, it follows
that memory enters also as a fundamental principle into development of
body. For mind and body are so closely connected that nothing can enter
largely into the one without correspondingly affecting the other.
On a later page Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child as
“_embodying_ the results of a great mass of _hereditary experience_” (p.
77), so that what he is driving at can be collected by those who take
trouble, but is not seen until we call up from our own knowledge matter
whose relevancy does not appear on the face of it, and until we connect
passages many pages asunder, the first of which may easily be forgotten
before we reach the second. There can be no doubt, however, that Mr.
Romanes does in reality, like Professor Hering and myself, regard
development, whether of mind or body, as due to memory, for it is now
pretty generally seen to be nonsense to talk about “hereditary
experience” or “hereditary memory” if anything else is intended.
I have said above that on page 113 of his recent work Mr. Romanes
declares the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in
daily life, and hereditary memory, to be “so numerous and precise” as to
justify us in considering them as of one and the same kind.
This is certainly his meaning, but, with the exception of the words
within inverted commas, it is not his language. His own words are
these:—
“Profound, however, as our ignorance unquestionably is concerning the
physical substratum of memory, I think we are at least justified in
regarding this substratum as the same both in ganglionic or organic, and
in the conscious or psychological memory, seeing that the analogies
between them are so numerous and precise. Consciousness is but an
adjunct which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency of
repetition, complexity of operation, or other causes, involve what I have
before called ganglionic friction.”
I submit that I have correctly translated Mr. Romanes’ meaning, and also
that we have a right to complain of his not saying what he has to say in
words which will involve less “ganglionic friction” on the part of the
reader.
Another example may be found on p. 43 of Mr. Romanes’ book. “Lastly,” he
writes, “just as innumerable special mechanisms of muscular
co-ordinations are found to be inherited, innumerable special
associations of ideas are found to be the same, and in one case as in the
other the strength of the organically imposed connection is found to bear
a direct proportion to the frequency with which in the history of the
species it has occurred.”
Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on on p.
51 of “Life and Habit;” but how difficult he has made what could have
been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing but the reader’s
comfort to be considered. Unfortunately that seems to have been by no
means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes was thinking, or why, after
implying and even saying over and over again that instinct is inherited
habit due to inherited memory, should he turn sharply round on p. 297 and
praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out “the well-known doctrine of
inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck”? The answer is not far to seek.
It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about
instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with
the hounds and run with the hare at one and the same time.
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.” {59a} 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.” {60a}
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. More briefly, Instinct is inherited memory.” Then he might
have added 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 {61a}) as
“a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.
In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of
time, money and trouble that has been caused, by his not having been
content to appear as descending with modification like other people from
those who went before him. It will take years to get the evolution
theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a
discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr.
Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting
heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got
evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about “_heredity being able
to work up_ the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration,” {61b}
or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of
lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” {61c} is little
likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with
advantage either to himself or any one else. Fortunately Mr. Romanes is
not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s mantle, and
got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’ shoulders hide a good
deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin
wore it.
I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to
have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory.
Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his
life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming
“_instinctive_, _i.e._, _memory transmitted from one generation to
another_.” {62a}
Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of
hereditary memory are as follows:—
1859. “It would be _the most serious error_ to suppose that the greater
number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and
transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” {62b} And this
more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.
1876. “It would be a _serious error_ to suppose,” &c., as before. {62c}
1881. “We should remember _what a mass of inherited knowledge_ is
crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” {62d}
1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes: “It
does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more
than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:” i.e.,
_memory transmitted from one generation to another_. {62e}
And yet in 1839, or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped the
conception from which until the last year or two of his life he so
fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account
of the voyages of the _Adventure_ and _Beagle_, he wrote: “Nature by
making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the
Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country” (p. 237).
What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common-sense
view of the matter which he took when he was a young man? I imagine
simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter, over-anxiety to
appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and
Lamarck.
I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the
connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must
readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed. For
in the preface to Hermann Müller’s “Fertilisation of Flowers,” {63a}
which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin’s death, I
find him saying:—“Design in nature has for a long time deeply interested
many men, and though the subject must now be looked at from a somewhat
different point of view from what was formerly the case, it is not on
that account rendered less interesting.” This is mused forth as a
general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing: the writer of the
letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore’s Almanac could not be more
guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.
I cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I
should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design in
organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr.
Darwin’s. This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and,
moreover, it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin think it
worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It has no fitness in
its connection with Hermann Müller’s book, for what little Hermann Müller
says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why, then, should Mr.
Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest attaching
to design in organism? Neither has the passage any connection with the
rest of the preface. There is not another word about design, and even
here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as
it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which
could be disputed.
The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin wanted to hedge. He
saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in
pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a
burglar’s jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again,
and that though, as I insisted in “Evolution Old and New,” and
“Unconscious Memory,” it must now be placed within the organism instead
of outside it, as “was formerly the case,” it was not on that account any
the less—design, as well as interesting.
I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly. Indeed I
should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the
meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting
himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner.
In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin’s manner when he did
not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he
wrote to Professor Weismann’s “Studies in the Theory of Descent,”
published in 1881.
“Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, “maintain with much
confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale,
independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have
been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such
exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite
unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of
more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and
the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole
subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the
existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility”—or towards _being able
to be perfected_.
I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor
Weismann’s book. There was a little something here and there, but not
much.
It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr. Romanes’
latest contribution to biology—I mean his theory of physiological
selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in _Nature_
just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since the
foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written. I admit to
feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not appear earlier;
as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable of further embryonic
change, and this must be my excuse for saying less about Mr. Romanes’
theory than I might perhaps otherwise do. I cordially, however, agree
with the _Times_, which says that “Mr. George Romanes appears to be the
biological investigator on whom the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most
conspicuously descended” (August 16, 1886). Mr. Romanes is just the
person whom the late Mr. Darwin would select to carry on his work, and
Mr. Darwin was just the kind of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would
find himself instinctively attracted.
The _Times_ continues—“The position which Mr. Romanes takes up is the
result of his perception shared by many evolutionists, that the theory of
natural selection is not really a theory of the origin of species. . . .”
What, then, becomes of Mr. Darwin’s most famous work, which was written
expressly to establish natural selection as the main means of organic
modification? “The new factor which Mr. Romanes suggests,” continues the
_Times_, “is that at a certain stage of development of varieties in a
state of nature a change takes place in their reproductive systems,
rendering those which differ in some particulars mutually infertile, and
thus the formation of new permanent species takes place without the
swamping effect of free intercrossing. . . . How his theory can be
properly termed one of selection he fails to make clear. If correct, it
is a law or principle of operation rather than a process of selection.
It has been objected to Mr. Romanes’ theory that it is the re-statement
of a fact. This objection is less important than the lack of facts in
support of the theory.” The _Times_, however, implies it as its opinion
that the required facts will be forthcoming by and by, and that when they
have been found Mr. Romanes’ suggestion will constitute “the most
important addition to the theory of evolution since the publication of
the ‘Origin of Species.’” Considering that the _Times_ has just implied
the main thesis of the “Origin of Species” to be one which does not stand
examination, this is rather a doubtful compliment.
Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the _Times_ appears to perceive
that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice
depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do not
appear to see that though the expression natural selection must be always
more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for
purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which is
open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical
character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of
error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly
fortuitous is chimerical as well as metaphorical. Both writers speak of
natural selection as though there could not possibly be any selection in
the course of nature, or natural survival, of any but accidental
variations. Thus Mr. Romanes says: {66a} “The swamping effect of free
inter-crossing upon an individual variation constitutes perhaps the most
formidable difficulty with which _the theory of natural selection_ is
beset.” And the writer of the article in the _Times_ above referred to
says: “In truth _the theory of natural selection_ presents many facts and
results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of accounting
for the existence of species.” The assertion made in each case is true
if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous variations is
intended, but it does not hold good if the selection is supposed to be
made from variations under which there lies a general principle of wide
and abiding application. It is not likely that a man of Mr. Romanes’
antecedents should not be perfectly awake to considerations so obvious as
the foregoing, and I am afraid I am inclined to consider his whole
suggestion as only an attempt upon the part of the wearer of Mr. Darwin’s
mantle to carry on Mr. Darwin’s work in Mr. Darwin’s spirit.
I have seen Professor Hering’s theory adopted recently more unreservedly
by Dr. Creighton in his “Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease.”
{67a} Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering’s
address, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen him
lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and organ
has an individual memory. In “Life and Habit” I expressed a hope that
the opinions it upheld would be found useful by medical men, and am
therefore the more glad to see that this has proved to be the case. I
may perhaps be pardoned if I quote the passage in “Life and Habit” to
which I am referring. It runs:—
“_Mutatis mutandis_, the above would seem to hold as truly about medicine
as about politics. We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so
much more” (of course I mean “about their own business”) “than we do,
that they cannot understand us;—but though we cannot reason with them, we
can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what, therefore,
they are most likely to expect; we can see that they get this as far as
it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest
to them, only bearing in mind that they will rebel equally against too
sudden a change of treatment and no change at all” (p. 305).
Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which—though I
did not notice his saying so—he would doubtless see as a mode of
cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same advantages as
this, and requiring the same precautions against abuse; he would not,
however, I am sure, deny that there could be no fertility of good results
if too wide a cross were attempted, so that I may claim the weight of his
authority as supporting both the theory of an unconscious memory in
general, and the particular application of it to medicine which I had
ventured to suggest.
“Has the word ‘memory,’” he asks, “a real application to unconscious
organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only in a
figure of speech?”
“If I had thought,” he continues later, “that unconscious memory was no
more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various
forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not
unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class of maladies in the
light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its
workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in
nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To say that
a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a
diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all
events to make comparisons with things that we all understand.
“For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that
retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty
throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or
unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain class of maladies
according to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description
and not a figurative.” (p. 2.)
As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards “alterative action”
as “habit-breaking action.”
As regards the organism’s being guided throughout its development to
maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that “Professor
Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication.” “I should
prefer to say,” he adds, “the acme of organic implication; for the reason
that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in
their form or structure to show for the marvellous potentialities within
them.
“I now come to the application of these considerations to the doctrine of
unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of organic implicitness,
what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic
explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness. Generation is
implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is
potential memory, consciousness is actual memory.”
I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as I
should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to
turn to Dr. Creighton’s book, I will proceed to the subject indicated in
my title.