to Professor Hering's address (Nature, 13th July 1876), but no discussion followed, and the matter dropped without having produced visible effect. As for offspring remembering in any legitimate sense of the words what it had done, and what had happened to it, before it was born, no such notion was understood to have been gravely mooted till very recently. I doubt whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes would accept this even now, when it is put thus undisguisedly; but this is what Professor Hering and I mean, and it is the only thing that should be meant by those who speak of instinct as inherited memory. Mr. Spencer cannot maintain that these two startling novelties went without saying "by implication" from the use of such expressions as "accumulated experiences experiences " or " experience of the race."

CHAPTER THREE: MR. HERBERT SPENCER (continued)

HETHER 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, 13th July 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 Athenaeum (29th March 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 (27th January 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 (27th March 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," etc. 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 (31st March 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;1 he doubtless intended" which referred all the phenomena of heredity to memory." He then mentioned Professor Ray Lankester's 1 26th September 1877. Unconscious Memory, ch. 2.

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 Athenaeum (8th March 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," etc., and ought to have been "elaborately stated," etc., 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, 27th January 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, 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 (2nd December 1880). I challenged him in a letter which appeared (8th December 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 bona 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," etc. 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