REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES’ MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS.

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,”  and Mr. G. H. Lewes attributes many instincts to what he calls the “lapsing of intelligence.”  So does Mr. Herbert Spencer,  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,”  “hereditary experience,”  and “hereditary memory and instinct,”  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.”  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.

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.”

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,  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.

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,” &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.”

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 ) the ‘lapsing of intelligence.’”

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.”

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 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.”

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.”

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,  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.”  It is heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual.  “In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity,” &c. ; 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.