"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." {234d}
Mr. Romanes says in a note that this theory was first advanced by Canon
Kingsley in _Nature_, January 18, 1867, a piece of information which I
learn for the first time; otherwise, as I need hardly say, I should have
called attention to it in my own books on evolution. _Nature_ did not
begin to appear till the end of 1869, and I can find no communication
from Canon Kingsley bearing upon hereditary memory in any number of
_Nature_ prior to the date of Canon Kingsley's death; but no doubt Mr.
Romanes has only made a slip in his reference. Mr. Romanes also says
that the theory connecting instinct with inherited memory "has since been
independently 'suggested' by many writers."
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." {235}
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.
The late Mr. Darwin himself, indeed--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, {236a} 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." {236b} It is heredity which
impresses nervous changes on the individual. {236c} "In the lifetime of
species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition _and
heredity_," &c. {236d}; 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
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.
REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS--(_continued_).
I will give examples of my meaning. Mr. Romanes says on an early page,
"The most fundamental principle of mental operation is that of memory,
for this is the _conditio sine qua 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, indeed, 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 nonsense indeed 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 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.
98 of the present volume; 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." {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.