Part 12 (2/2)

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 circ.u.mstances 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 quant.i.ty 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 a.n.a.logies 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 repet.i.tion become automatic, so in the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repet.i.tion 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 ill.u.s.trations 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}

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