Luck or Cunning

rbert

rom the 1855 edition of his "Principles of Psychology," "the meanings and implications"

ing them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are determined by the experiences of the race of organisms forming its anc

produced by such new habits of l

ertain combinations of psychical ch

cy, be extended not only to all the connections established by the accumulated experiences of eve

ct which, under the requisite conditions, must necessa

, in correspondence with outer relations, results from

f organised memory; on the other hand, Memory may be

responded to at first irregularly and uncertainly; and there is then a weak remembrance of the relations. By multiplication of experiences this remembrance becomes stronger, and the response more certain. By further multiplication of experiences the internal relations are at last automatically organised in correspondence with the external ones; an

relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into correspondence with outer relations; so the establishment of those consolidated, those

ld this view, except "by implications;" nor yet, though in the course of the six or seven years that had elapsed since "Life and Habit" was published I had brought out more than one book to support my earlier one, had he said anything during those years to lead me to suppose that I was trespassing upon ground already taken by himself. Nor, again, had he said anything which en

all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit that this conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer's writings, and that even the pas

individual has had experience; we mean that he is the same person now (in the common use of the words), on the occasion of some present action, as the one who performed a like action at some past time or times, and that he remembers how he acted before, so as to be able to turn h

in the very limited number of cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, was possible. The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between each successive generation, and the importance of the physical and psychical connection between parents and offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost sight of. It seems strange how this could ever have been allowed to come about, but it should be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise troublesome questions as to who in a future state

send out for it, and so hard to come by even then, that people left off selling it at all, and if any one wanted it he must think it out at home as best he could; this was troublesome, so by common consent the world decided no longer to busy itself with the continued personality of successive generations-which was all very well until

st supply these, and make personal identity continue between successive generations before talking about inherited (as opposed to post-natal and educational) experience, than others had done before him; the race with him, as with every one else till recently, was not one long individual living indeed in pulsations, so t

d vexed me as an attempt to make me take stones instead of bread, and to palm off an illustration upon me as though it were an explanation. When I had worked the matter out in my own way, I saw that the illustration, with certain additions, would become an explana

man could profit another who knows nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner it nourishes him and not his n

gh the father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eat

hat way it may, or does, become the experience of the individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, who repeats o

, as it were, of my cu de sac, I saw the path which led straight to the point I had despaired of reaching-I mean I saw that personality could not be broken as between generations, without also breaking it between the years, days, and moments of a man'

ously. Words are to ideas what the fairy invisible cloak was to the prince who wore it-only that the prince was seen till he put on the cloak, whereas ideas are unseen until they don the robe of words which reveals them to us; the words, however, and the ideas, should be such as fit each other and stick to one another in our minds as soon as they are brought together, or the ideas will fly off, and leave the words voi

rveless down; if, come what may, we must do or die, we are more likely to die than to succeed in doing. If we are required to believe them-which only means to fuse them with our other ideas-we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to ceas

rtial corresponding discontinuity; on a small scale-too small, indeed, for us to cognise-these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our understanding goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out. Creations, then, there must be, but they must be so small that practically they are no creations. We must have a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no conceivable subjec

end in an impalpable dew. Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into the seen again-pr

in our own system is mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross-that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale. Granted that no one can draw a clear line and define the limits within which a miracle is healthy working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he can prescribe the exact degree of fi

sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the result that his words were barren. They were barren because they were incoherent; they were incoherent because they were approached and quitted too suddenly. While we were realising "experience" our minds excluded "race," inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea "race," for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded experience. We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien to one another, without having had those other ideas presented to us wh

terility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolv

rs-then his order to Professor Hering and myself should be immediately obeyed; but this was just what was at once most wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the passages given above-passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself-this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering m

ous brain of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and in that of the designer of Jesse tree windows, but it had kindled no fire; it now turns out that Canon Kingsley had once called instinct inherited memory, [40a] but the idea, if born alive at all, died on the page on which it saw light: Professor Ray Lankester, again called attention to Professor Hering's address (Nature, July 13, 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