Luck or Cunning?

Whether they ought to have gone or not, they did not go.

When “Life and Habit” was first published no one considered Mr. Spencer to be maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be in reality phenomena of memory.  When, for example, Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to Professor Hering’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,’ conscious or unconscious, for the continuity of Mr. Spencer’s polar forces or polarities of physiological units.”  He evidently found the prominence given to memory a help to him which he had not derived from reading Mr. Spencer’s works.

When, again, he attacked me in the Athenaeum (March 29, 1884), he spoke of my “tardy recognition” of the fact that Professor Hering had preceded me “in treating all manifestations of heredity as a form of memory.”  Professor Lankester’s words could have no force if he held that any other writer, and much less so well known a writer as Mr. Spencer, had preceded me in putting forward the theory in question.

When Mr. Romanes reviewed “Unconscious Memory” in Nature (January 27, 1881) the notion of a “race-memory,” to use his own words, was still so new to him that he declared it “simply absurd” to suppose that it could “possibly be fraught with any benefit to science,” and with him too it was Professor Hering who had anticipated me in the matter, not Mr. Spencer.

In his “Mental Evolution in Animals” (p. 296) he said that Canon Kingsley, writing in 1867, was the first to advance the theory that instinct is inherited memory; he could not have said this if Mr. Spencer had been understood to have been upholding this view for the last thirty years.

Mr. A. R. Wallace reviewed “Life and Habit” in Nature (March 27, 1879), but he did not find the line I had taken a familiar one, as he surely must have done if it had followed easily by implication from Mr. Spencer’s works.  He called it “an ingenious and paradoxical explanation” which was evidently new to him.  He concluded by saying that “it might yet afford a clue to some of the deepest mysteries of the organic world.”

Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on Evolution in the American Catholic Quarterly Review (July 1881), said, “Mr Butler is not only perfectly logical and consistent in the startling consequences he deduces from his principles, but,” &c.  Professor Mivart could not have found my consequences startling if they had already been insisted upon for many years by one of the best-known writers of the day.

The reviewer of “Evolution Old and New” in the Saturday Review (March 31, 1879), of whom all I can venture to say is that he or she is a person whose name carries weight in matters connected with biology, though he (for brevity) was in the humour for seeing everything objectionable in me that could be seen, still 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) “oneness of personality between parents and offspring.”  The writer proceeded to reprobate this in language upon which a Huxley could hardly improve, but as he declares himself unable to discover what it means, it may be presumed that the idea of continued personality between successive generations was new to him.

When Dr. Francis Darwin called on me a day or two before “Life and Habit” went to the press, he said the theory which had pleased him more than any he had seen for 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 Professor Ray Lankester’s article in Nature, of which I had not heard, but he said nothing about Mr. Spencer, and spoke of the idea as one which had been quite new to him.

The above names comprise (excluding Mr. Spencer himself) perhaps those of the best-known writers on evolution that can be mentioned as now before the public; it is curious that Mr Spencer should be the only one of them to see any substantial resemblance between the “Principles of Psychology” and Professor Hering’s address and “Life and Habit.”

I ought, perhaps, to say that Mr. Romanes, writing to the Athenaeum (March 8, 1884), took a different view of the value of the theory of inherited memory to the one he took in 1881.

In 1881 he said it was “simply absurd” to suppose it could “possibly be fraught with any benefit to science” or “reveal any truth of profound significance;” in 1884 he said of the same theory, that “it formed the backbone of all the previous literature upon instinct” by Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Fiske, and Spalding, “not to mention their numerous followers, and is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any theory can be stated in words.”

Few except Mr. Romanes will say this.  I grant it ought to “have formed the backbone,” &c., and ought “to have been elaborately stated,” &c., but when I wrote “Life and Habit” neither Mr Romanes nor any one else understood it to have been even glanced at by more 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.  It is not too much to say that “Life and Habit,” when it first came out, was considered so startling a paradox that people would not believe in my desire to be taken seriously, or at any rate were able to pretend that they thought I was not writing seriously.

Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who keep an eye on evolution; he himself, indeed, had said (Nature, January 27, 1881) that so long as I “aimed only at entertaining” my “readers by such works as ‘Erewhon’ and ‘Life and Habit’” (as though these books were of 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 moment to join those who professed to consider it another book of paradoxes such as, I suppose, “Erewhon” had been, so he classed the two together.  He could not have done this unless enough people thought, or said they thought, the books akin, to give colour to his doing so.

One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, brought Mr. Spencer against me.  This was a writer in the St. James’s Gazette (December 2, 1880).  I challenged him in a letter which appeared (December 8, 1880), and said, “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 generally, to memory on the part of offspring of the action it bona fide took in the persons of its forefathers.”  The reviewer made no reply, and I concluded, as I have since found correctly, that he could not find the passages.

True, in his “Principles of Psychology” (vol. ii. p. 195) Mr. Spencer says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all intelligence is acquired through experience “so as to make it include with the experience of each individual the experiences of all ancestral individuals,” &c.  This is all very good, but it is much the same as saying, “We have only got to stand on our heads and we shall be able to do so and so.”  We did not see our way to standing on our heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help us; 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 of our ideas to consider experience as appertaining to more than a single individual in the common acceptance of the term; these two ideas were so closely bound together that wherever the one went the other went perforce.  Here, indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer’s just referred to, the race is throughout regarded as “a series of individuals”—­without an attempt to call attention to that other view, in virtue of which we are able to extend to many an idea we had been accustomed to confine to one.

In his chapter on Memory, Mr. Spencer certainly approaches the Heringian view.  He says, “On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised memory; on the other, Memory may be regarded as a kind of incipient instinct” (“Principles of Psychology,” ed. 2, vol. i. p. 445).  Here the 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 intelligible how memory can come to be inherited at all.  I do not like, again, calling memory “a kind of incipient instinct;” as Mr. Spencer puts them the words have a pleasant antithesis, but “instinct is inherited memory” covers all the ground, and to say that memory is inherited instinct is surplusage.

Nor does he stick to it long when he says that “instinct is a kind of organised memory,” for two pages later he says that memory, to be memory at all, must be 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 impossible for us to see instinct as the “kind of organised memory” which he has just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct is notably undeliberate and unreflecting.

A few pages farther on (vol. i. p. 452) he finds himself driven to unconscious memory after all, and says that “conscious memory passes into unconscious or organic memory.”  Having admitted unconscious memory, he declares (vol. i. p. 450) that “as fast as those connections among psychical states, which we form in memory, grow by constant repetition automatic—­they cease to be part of memory,” or, in other words, he again denies that there can be an unconscious memory.

Mr. Spencer doubtless saw that he was involved in contradiction in terms, and having always understood that contradictions in terms were very dreadful things—­which, of course, under some circumstances they are—­thought it well so to express himself that his readers should be more likely to push on than dwell on what was before them at the moment.  I should be the last to complain of him merely on the ground that he could not escape contradiction in terms:  who can?  When facts conflict, contradict one another, melt into one another as the colours of the spectrum so insensibly that none can say where one begins and the other ends, contradictions in terms become first fruits of thought and speech.  They are the basis of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that 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 should breed hermaphroditically, but will give to each an helpmeet for it which shall cross it and be the undoing of it; and in the undoing, do; and in the doing, undo, and so ad infinitum.  Cross-fertilisation is just as necessary for continued fertility of ideas as for that of organic life, and the attempt to frown this or that down merely on the ground that it involves contradiction in terms, without at the same time showing that the contradiction is on a larger scale than healthy thought can stomach, argues either small sense or small sincerity on the part of those who make it.  The contradictions employed by Mr. Spencer are objectionable, not on the ground of their being contradictions at all, but on the ground of their being blinked, and used unintelligently.

But though it is not possible for any one to get a clear conception of Mr. Spencer’s meaning, we may say with more confidence what it was that he did not mean.  He did not mean to make memory the keystone of his system; he has none of that sense of the unifying, binding force of memory which Professor Hering has so well expressed, nor does he show any signs of perceiving the far-reaching consequences that ensue if the phenomena of heredity are considered as phenomena of memory.  Thus, 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 verb “to inherit” in connection with memory once in all the 1300 long pages of the “Principles of Psychology.”  It occurs in vol ii. p. 200, 2d ed., where the words stand, “Memory, inherited or acquired.”  I submit that this was unintelligible when Mr. Spencer wrote it, for want of an explanation which he never gave; I submit, also, that he could not have left it unexplained, nor yet as an unrepeated expression not introduced till late in his work, if he had had any idea of its pregnancy.

At any rate, whether he intended to imply what he now implies that he intended to imply (for Mr. Spencer, like the late Mr. Darwin, is fond of qualifying phrases), I have shown that those most able 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 saw his meaning had been missed.  I can, however, have no hesitation in saying that if I had known the “Principles of Psychology” earlier, as well as I know the work now, I should have used it largely.

It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to see whether he even now assigns to continued personality and memory the place assigned to it by Professor Hering and myself.  I will therefore give the concluding words of the letter to the Athenaeum 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 evolution, bodily as well as mental (see ‘Principles of Biology,’ i. 166), while I recognise the truth that throughout the lower stages survival of the fittest is the chief factor, and in the lowest the almost exclusive factor.”

This is the same confused and confusing utterance which Mr. Spencer has been giving us any time this thirty years.  According to him the fact that variations can be inherited and accumulated has less to do with the first development of organic life, than the fact that if a square organism happens to get into a square hole, it 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 amoeba into, we will say, a mollusc than heredity itself.  True, “inheritance of functionally produced modifications” is allowed to be the chief factor throughout the “higher stages of organic evolution,” but it has very little to do in the lower; in these “the almost exclusive factor” is not heredity, or inheritance, but “survival of the fittest.”

Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe this; of course, also, all who are fairly well up in the history of the development theory will see why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this distinction between the “factors” of the development of the higher and lower forms of life; but no matter how or why Mr. Spencer has been led to say what he has, he has no business to have said it.  What can we think of a writer who, after so many years of writing upon his subject, in a passage in which he should make his meaning doubly clear, inasmuch as he is claiming ground taken by other writers, declares that though hereditary use and disuse, or, to use his own words, “the inheritance of functionally 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 most usually understood, there is continued personality and an abiding memory between successive generations.”  How does Mr. Spencer’s confession of faith touch this?  If any meaning can be extracted from his words, he is no more supporting this view now than he was when he wrote the passages he has adduced to show that he was supporting it thirty years ago; but after all no coherent meaning can be got out of Mr. Spencer’s letter—­except, of course, that Professor Hering and myself are to stand aside.  I have abundantly shown that I am very ready to do this in favour of Professor Hering, but see no reason for admitting Mr. Spencer’s claim to have been among the forestallers of “Life and Habit.”