Luck or Cunning

t Spencer

to have gone or n

ring's address, he did not understand Mr. Spencer to be intending this. "Professor Hering," he wrote (Nature, July 13, 1876), "helps us to a comprehensive view of the nature of heredity and adaptation, by giving us the word 'memory,' c

preceded me "in treating all manifestations of heredity as a form of memory." Professor Lankester's words could have no force if he hel

n words, was still so new to him that he declared it "simply absurd" to suppose that it could "possibly be fraught with

the first to advance the theory that instinct is inherited memory; he could not have said this

must have done if it had followed easily by implication from Mr. Spencer's works. He called it "an ingenious and paradoxical explanation" wh

only perfectly logical and consistent in the startling consequences he deduces from his principles, but," &c. Professor Mivart could not

l saw no Mr. Spencer in me. He said-"Mr Butler's own particular contribution to the terminology of Evolution is the phrase two or three times repeated with some emphasis" (I repeated it not two or three times only, but whenever and wherever I could venture to do so without wearying the reader beyond endurance) "

some time was one which referred all life to memory; [44a] he doubtless intended "which referred all the phenomena of heredity to memory." He then mentioned Profess

can be mentioned as now before the public; it is curious that Mr Spencer should be the only one of them to see any

hen?um (March 8, 1884), took a different view of the value o

cance;" in 1884 he said of the same theory, that "it formed the backbone of all the previous literature upon instinct" by Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Fis

ore than a very few, and as for having been "elaborately stated," it had been stated by Professor Hering as elaborately as it could be stated within the limits of an address of only twenty-two pages, but with this exception it had never been stated at all. I

f kindred character) I was in my proper sphere. It would be doing too little credit to Mr. Romanes' intelligence to suppose him not to have known when he said this that "Life and Habit" was written as seriously as my subsequent books on evolution, but it suited him at the m

d, "I would ask your reviewer to be kind enough to refer your readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer's "Principles of Psychology" which in any direct intelligible way refer the phenomena of instinct and heredity genera

we had been accustomed, as I am afraid I must have said usque ad nauseam already, to lose sight of the physical connection existing between parents and offspring; we understood from the marriage service that husband and wife were in a sense one flesh, but not that parents and children were so also; and without this conception of the matter, which in its way is just as true as the more commonly received one, we could not extend the experience of parents to offspring. It was not in the bond or nexus o

ball has fallen into his hands, but if he had got firm hold of it he could not have written, "Instinct may be regarded as a kind of, &c.;" to us there is neither "may be regarded as" nor "kind of" about it; we require, "Instinct is inherited memory," with an explanation making it intelligibl

tolerably conscious or deliberate; he, therefore (vol. i. p. 447), denies that there can be such a thing as unconscious memory; but without this it is imposs

organic memory." Having admitted unconscious memory, he declares (vol. i. p. 450) that "as fast as those connections among psychical states, which we form i

t a physical obstacle is the basis of physical sensation. No opposition, no sensation, applies as much to the psychical as to the physical kingdom, as soon as these two have got well above the horizon of our thoughts and can be seen as two. No contradiction, no consciousness; no cross, no crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without which there is no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger, kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said in "Life and Habit," hates that any principle sho

, when he is dealing with the phenomena of old age (vol. i. p. 538, ed. 2) he does not ascribe them to lapse and failure of memory, nor surmise the principle underlying longevity. He never mentions memory in connection with heredity without presently saying something which makes us involuntarily think of a man missing an easy catch at cricket; it is only rarely, however, that he connects the two at all. I have only been able to find the word "inherited" or any derivative of the ver

e and willing to understand him did not take him to mean what he now appears anxious to have it supposed that he meant. Surely, moreover, if he had meant it he would have spoken sooner, when he sa

the letter to the Athen?um already referred to, in which he tells us to stand aside. He writes "I still hold that inheritance of functionally produced modifications is the chief factor throughout the higher stages of organic e

will live longer and more happily than a square organism which happens to get into a round one; he declares "the survival of the fittest"-and this is nothing but the fact that those who "fit" best into their surroundings will live longest and most comfortably-to have more to do with the development of the am?ba into, we will

tionally produced modifications," is indeed very important in connection with the development of the higher forms of life, yet heredity itself has little or nothing to do with that of the lower? Variations, whether produced functionally or not, can only be perpetuated and accumulated because they can be inherited;-and this applies just as much to the lower as to the higher forms of life; the question which Professor Hering and I have tried to answer is, "How comes it that anything can be inherited at all? In virtue of what power is it that offspring can repeat and improve upon the performances of their parents?" Our answer was, "Because in a very valid sense, though not perhaps in the mo