I have said on page 96 of this book that the word "heredity" may be a
very good way of stating the difficulty which meets us when we observe
the reappearance of like characteristics, whether of body or mind, in
successive generations, but that it does nothing whatever towards
removing it.
It is here that Mr. Herbert Spencer, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, and Mr.
Romanes fail. Mr. Herbert Spencer does indeed go so far in one place as
to call instinct "organised memory," {228b} and Mr. G. H. Lewes
attributes many instincts to what he calls the "lapsing of intelligence."
{228c} So does Mr. Herbert Spencer, {228d} whom Mr. Romanes should have
known that Mr. Lewis was following. Mr. Romanes, in his recent work,
Mental Evolution in Animals (November, 1883), endorses this, and
frequently uses such expressions as "the lifetime of the species," {228e}
"hereditary experience," {228f} and "hereditary memory and instinct,"
{228g} but none of these writers (and indeed no writer that I know of
except Professor Hering of Prague, for a translation of whose address on
this subject I must refer the reader to my book Unconscious Memory) has
shown a comprehension of the fact that these expressions are unexplained
so long as "heredity," whereby they explain them, is unexplained; and
none of them sees the importance of emphasizing Memory, and making it as
it were the keystone of the system.
Mr. Spencer may very well call instinct "organised memory" if he means
that offspring can remember--within the limitations to which all memory
is subject--what happened to it while it was yet in the person or persons
of its parent or parents; but if he does not mean this, his use of the
word "memory," his talk about "the experience of the race," and other
expressions of kindred nature, are delusive. If he does mean this, it is
a pity he has nowhere said so.
Professor Hering does mean this, and makes it clear that he does so. He
does not catch the ball and let it slip through his fingers again, but
holds it firmly. "It is to memory," he says, "that we owe almost all
that we have or are; our ideas and conceptions are its work; our every
thought and movement are derived from this source. Memory connects the
countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole, and as our
bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they
were not held together by the cohesion of matter, so our consciousness
would be broken up into as many moments as we had lived seconds, but for
the binding and unifying force of Memory." {229} And he proceeds to show
that Memory persists between generations exactly as it does between the
various stages in the life of the individual. If I could find any such
passage as the one I have just quoted, in Mr. Herbert Spencer's, Mr.
Lewes's, or Mr. Romanes' works, I should be only too glad to quote it,
but I know of nothing comparable to it for definiteness of idea,
thoroughness and consistency.
No reader indeed can rise from a perusal of Mr. Herbert Spencer's, or Mr.
G. H. Lewes', work with an adequate--if indeed with any--impression that
the phenomena of heredity are in fact phenomena of memory; that heredity,
whether as regards body or mind, is only possible because each generation
is linked on to and made one with its predecessor by the possession of a
common and abiding memory, in as far as bodily existence was common--that
is to say, until the substance of the one left the substance of the
other; and that this memory is exactly of the same general character as
that which enables us to remember what we did half an hour ago--strong
under the same circumstances as those under which this familiar kind of
memory is strong, and weak under those under which it is weak. Mr.
Spencer and Mr. Lewes have even less conception of the connection between
heredity and memory than Dr. Erasmus Darwin had at the close of the last
century. {230}
Mr. Lewes' position was briefly this. He denied that there could be any
knowledge independent of experience, but he could not help seeing that
young animals come into the world furnished with many organs which they
use with great dexterity at a very early age. This looks as if they are
acting on knowledge acquired independently of experience. "No," says Mr.
Lewes, "not so. They are born with the organs--I cannot tell how or why,
but heredity explains all that, and having once got the organs, the
objects that come into contact with them in daily life naturally produce
the same effect as on the parents, just as oxygen coming into contact
with the right quantity of hydrogen will make water; hence even the first
time the offspring come into contact with any given object they act as
their parents did." The idea of the young having got their experience in
a past generation does not seem to have even crossed his mind.
"What marvel is there," he asks, "that constant conditions acting upon
structures which are similar should produce similar results? It is in
this sense that the paradox of Leibnitz is true, and we can be said 'to
acquire an innate idea;' only the idea is not acquired independently of
experience, but through the process of experience similar to that which
originally produced it." {231a}
The impression left upon me is that he is all at sea for want of the clue
with which Professor Hering would have furnished him, and that had that
clue been presented to him a dozen years or so earlier than it was he
would have adopted it.
As regards Mr. Romanes the case is different. His recent work, Mental
Evolution in Animals, {231b} shows that he is well aware of the direction
which modern opinion is taking, and in several places he so writes as to
warrant me in claiming his authority in support of the views which I have
been insisting on for several years past.
Thus Mr. Romanes 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. {232a}
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. {232b}
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. {232c} For it makes no essential difference whether the
nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the lifetime of the
individual or during that of the species, and afterwards impressed by
heredity on the individual."