Part 17

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."

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." {233a}

Again:--

"Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or other of 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 {233b}) the 'lapsing of intelligence.'" {233c}

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." {234a}

From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show "that automatic actions and conscious habits may be inherited," {234b} 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." {234c}

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." {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.

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." {240}

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." Then he might have added as 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 {241}) as "a branch or elongation" of the one immediately preceding it.

But then to have said this would have made it too plain that Mr. Romanes was following some one else. Mr. Romanes should remember that no one would mind how much he took if he would only take it well. But this is what those who take without due acknowledgment never do.

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," {242a} or of "the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result," {242b} 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.

REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS--(_concluded_).

I gather that in the end the late Mr. Darwin himself admitted the soundness of the view which the reader will have found insisted upon in the extracts from my earlier books given in this volume. 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_." {243a}

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." {243b} And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.

1876. "It would be _a serious error_ to suppose" &c., as before. {243c}

1881. "We should remember _what a mass of inherited knowledge_ is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant." {243d}

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_. {244a}

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 Muller's Fertilisation of Flowers, {244b} 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.