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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.2

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.

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.* 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," etc.

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."

1

This chapter is taken almost entirely from my book, Selections from Previous Works and Remarks on Romanes' "Mental Evolution in Animals." Trübner, 1884. [Now out of print.]

2 Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 113. Kegan Paul, November 1883.

3

Ibid., p. 115.

4

• Ibid., p. 116.

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 readyformed 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.” î

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, etc., etc...

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) the lapsing of intelligence.'

I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid

1 Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 131.

3

2 Vol. i, 3rd. ed., 1874, p. 141, and Problem I, 21.

Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 177, 178.

by Mr. Romanes both in his Mental Evolution in Animals and in his letters to the Athenaeum 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, 10th April 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." 1

From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show " that automatic actions and conscious habits may be inherited," 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 par1 Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 192. 2 Ibid., p. 195.

ticular 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."

"1

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."

" 2

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 1 Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 296.

2

Ibid.

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.

"1

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." It is heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual.2 In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity," etc.; 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 tight 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 qua non of all mental life" (p. 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 1 Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 33.

2

Ibid., p. 116.

" Ibid., p. 178.