Luck or Cunning

Mental Evoluti

ited Memory in 1881, came, in 1883, to be sufficiently imbued with a sense of its importance, I still cannot afford to dispense w

liar in daily life and hereditary memory "are so numerous and precise" as

new-born infants is "at all events in large part heredi

ther the past sensation was actually experienced by the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by its ancestors. [52d] For it makes no essential difference whet

the same pag

connection between heredita

e followi

those of individual memory: at this stage . . . it is practically impossible

ai

art 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 read

ai

origin and development to one

atural selection or survival of the fittes

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 individua

r as Mr. Darwin did during the later years of his life. Writing to Nature, April 10, 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 reserva

er

rd-player, a child learning his lesson or an actor his part by frequently repeating it, or a thousand other illustrations of the same process, w

," [55b] and in the course of doing this contends that "instincts may be lost by disuse, and conver

page Mr. Ro

ed. 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 ta

h the young cuckoo (if not also other migratory birds) depends? We can only answer, o

ch attribute instinct to memory, and which admit that there is no fundamental difference between the kind o

passages which suggest, though l

g's and my own, but their effect and tendency is more plain here than in Mr Romanes' own book, whe

. 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 "here

re 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, b

seems to me to admit, though

says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation is that of memo

g being which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to ad

lso as a fundamental principle into development of body. For mind and body are so closely con

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 do

etween the memory with which we are familiar in daily life, and hereditary memory, to be "

ception of the words within inverted commas, it

both in ganglionic or organic, and in the conscious or psychological memory, seeing that the analogies between them are so numerous and precise. Consciousness is but an adjunct

hat we have a right to complain of his not saying what he has to say in wo

s 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 t

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

remove misconception from his own mind and from those of his readers." [59a] 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 conne

prehend 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 who

is Mr. Romanes' def

f mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the relation between means

pon Professor Hering's foundation, the soundness of which

ion remembering what happened to it before it parted company with the old. M

one lifetime it is transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring, though it was not an instinct in t

ose, &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 mem

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," [61b] or of "the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formati

g heredity and memory. Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks

n's opinion upon the subject of

s have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succee

rious error to suppose,

f inherited knowledge is crowded into t

e at all incredible that this action [and why this more than any other habitual action?] sh

so fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account of the voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, he wrote: "Natu

e took when he was a young man? I imagine simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapte

wers," [63a] 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

ason which made Mr. Darwin think it worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It has no fitness in its connection with Hermann Müller's book, for what little Hermann Müller says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why, then, should Mr. Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest at

s manifestly designed than a burglar's jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again, and that though, as I insisted in "Evolution Old and New," and "Unconsciou

to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which there could be no

quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he wrote t

maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of va

subject in Professor Weismann's book. There was

dmit to feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not appear earlier; as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable of further embryonic change, and this must be my excuse for saying less about Mr. Romanes' theory than I might perhaps otherwise do. I cordially, however, agree with the Times, which says that "Mr. George

ure a change takes place in their reproductive systems, rendering those which differ in some particulars mutually infertile, and thus the formation of new permanent species takes place without the swamping effect of free intercrossing. . . . How his theory can be properly termed one of selection he fails to make clear. If correct, it is a law or principle of operation rather than a process of selection. It has been objected to Mr. Romanes' theory that it is the re-statement of a fact. This objection is les

ortuitous is chimerical as well as metaphorical. Both writers speak of natural selection as though there could not possibly be any selection in the course of nature, or natural survival, of any but accidental variations. Thus Mr. Romanes says: [66a] "The swamping effect of free inter-crossing upon an individual variation constitutes perhaps the most formidable difficulty with which the theory of natural selection is beset." And the writer of the article in the Times above referred to says: "In truth the theory of natural selection presents many facts and results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of accou

, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen him lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and organ has an individual memory. In "Life and Habit" I expressed a hope that the opinions it

hat they cannot understand us;-but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what, therefore, they are most likely to expect; we can see that they get this as

e advantages as this, and requiring the same precautions against abuse; he would not, however, I am sure, deny that there could be no fertility of good results if too wide a cross were attempted,

to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it ou

present a somewhat hackneyed class of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as t

lty throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious; and I claim the description of a ce

oregoing he regards "alterative a

calls reproduction the acme of organic complication." "I should prefer to say," he adds, "the acme of organic implication; for the reason that t

implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousne

ould wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to turn t