Luck or Cunning?

Without raising the unprofitable question how Mr. Romanes, in spite of the indifference with which he treated the theory of Inherited Memory in 1881, came, in 1883, to be sufficiently imbued with a sense of its importance, I still cannot afford to dispense with the weight of his authority, and in this chapter will show how closely he not infrequently approaches the Heringian position.

Thus, he says that the analogies 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. {52b}

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. {52c}

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. {52d} For it makes no essential difference whether the nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the life-time 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.” {53a}

Again:-

“Instincts probably owe their origin and development to one or other of the 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 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 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” {54a}) the ‘lapsing of intelligence.’” {54b}

I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid by Mr. Romanes both in his “Mental Evolution in Animals” and in his letters to the Athenaeum in March 1884, on Natural Selection as an originator and developer of instinct, he very soon afterwards let the Natural Selection part of the story go as completely without saying as I do myself, or 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 reservation, to “experience in successive generations,” and this is nonsense unless explained as Professor Hering and I explain it.  Mr. Romanes’ words, in fact, amount to an unqualified acceptance of the chapter “Instinct as Inherited Memory” given in “Life and Habit,” of which Mr. Romanes in March 1884 wrote in terms which it is not necessary to repeat.

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 illustrations 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.” {55a}

From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show “that automatic actions and conscious habits may be inherited,” {55b} and in the course of doing this contends that “instincts may be lost by disuse, and conversely that they may be acquired as instincts by the hereditary transmission of ancestral experience.”

On another page Mr. Romanes says:-

“Let us now turn to the second of these two assumptions, viz., that some at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued.  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 taken by its own parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct which aims at being complete.  Now upon our own theory it can only be met by taking it to be due to inherited memory.”

A little lower Mr. Romanes says:  “Of what kind, then, is the inherited memory on which the young cuckoo (if not also other migratory birds) depends?  We can only answer, of the same kind, whatever this may be, as that upon which the old bird depends.” {55c}

I have given above most of the more marked passages which I have been able to find in Mr. Romanes’ book which attribute instinct to memory, and which admit that there is no fundamental difference between the kind of memory with which we are all familiar and hereditary memory as transmitted from one generation to another.

But throughout his work there are passages which suggest, though less obviously, the same inference.

The passages I have quoted show that Mr. Romanes is upholding the same opinions as Professor Hering’s and my own, but their effect and tendency is more plain here than in Mr Romanes’ own book, where they are overlaid by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always easy of comprehension.

Moreover, at the same time that I claim the weight of Mr. Romanes’ authority, I am bound to admit that I do not find his support satisfactory.  The late Mr. Darwin himself—­whose mantle seems to have fallen more especially and particularly on Mr. 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 “heredity as playing an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences;” so that, whereas I want him to say that the phenomena of heredity are due to memory, he will have it that the memory is due to the heredity, which seems to me absurd.

Over and over again Mr. Romanes insists that it is heredity which does this or that.  Thus it is “HEREDITY with natural selection which ADAPT the anatomical plan of the ganglia.” {56a} It is heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual. {56b} “In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity,” &c.; {56c} but he nowhere 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, because both man and bird remember having grown body and made nest as they now do, or very nearly so, on innumerable past occasions.”  He thus, as I have said on an earlier page, reduces life from an equation of say 100 unknown quantities to one of 99 only by showing that heredity and memory, two of the original 100 unknown quantities, are in reality part of one and the same thing.

That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very unsatisfactory way.

What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following?—­ Mr. Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation is that of memory, and that this “is the conditio sine qua non of all mental life” (page 35).

I do not understand Mr. Romanes to hold that there is any living being which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to admit that development of body and mind are closely interdependent.

If, then, “the most fundamental principle” of mind is memory, it follows that memory enters also as a fundamental principle into development of body.  For mind and body are so closely connected that nothing can enter largely into the one without correspondingly affecting the other.

On a later page Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child as “EMBODYING the results of a great mass of hereditary experience” (p. 77), so that what he is driving at can be collected by those who take trouble, but is not seen until we call up 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 does in reality, like Professor Hering and myself, regard development, whether of mind or body, as due to memory, for it is now pretty generally seen to be nonsense to talk about “hereditary experience” or “hereditary memory” if anything else is intended.

I have said above that on page 113 of his recent work Mr. Romanes declares the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily life, and hereditary memory, to be “so numerous and precise” as to justify us in considering them as of one and the same kind.

This is certainly his meaning, but, with the exception of the words within inverted commas, it is not his language.  His own words are these:-

“Profound, however, as our ignorance unquestionably is concerning the physical substratum of memory, I think we are at least justified in regarding this substratum as the same 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 which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency of repetition, complexity of operation, or other causes, involve what I have before called ganglionic friction.”

I submit that I have correctly translated Mr. Romanes’ meaning, and also that we have a right to complain of his not saying what he has to say in words which will involve less “ganglionic friction” on the part of the reader.

Another example may be found on p. 43 of Mr. Romanes’ book.  “Lastly,” he writes, “just as innumerable special mechanisms of muscular co-ordinations 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 the organically imposed connection is found to bear a direct proportion to the frequency with which in the history of the species it has occurred.”

Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on on p. 51 of “Life and Habit;” but how difficult he has made what could have been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing but the reader’s comfort to be considered.  Unfortunately that seems to have been 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 doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck”?  The answer is not far to seek.  It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at one and the same time.

I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin “had told us what the earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed from them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would have taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and more likely to 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 connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that they have taken.  If he had begun by saying what they had said, and had then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be improved upon.

Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned method of procedure was not good enough for him.  One-half the obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend 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 whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement.  He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.

Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes’ definition of instinct:-

“Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of consciousness.  The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained, but similarly performed under similar and frequently recurring circumstances by all the individuals of the same species.” {60a}

If Mr. Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor Hering’s foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly admitted, he might have said —

“Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations—­the new generation remembering what happened to it before it parted company with the old.  More briefly, Instinct is inherited memory.”  Then he might have added a rider —

“If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime, it is not an instinct.  If having been acquired in one lifetime it is transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring, though it was not an instinct in the parent.  If the habit is transmitted partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly acquired.”

This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose, knowledge of purpose. &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 memory and habitual repetition; finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said {61a}) as “a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.

In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of time, money and trouble that has been caused, by his not having been content to appear as descending with modification like other people from those who went before him.  It will take years to get the evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it.  He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited 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 formation of a joint result,” {61c} is little likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with advantage either to himself or any one else.  Fortunately Mr. Romanes is not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s mantle, and got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’ shoulders hide a good deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin wore it.

I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory.  Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming “INSTINCTIVE, I.E., Memory transmitted from one generation to another.” {62a}

Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of hereditary memory are as follows:-

1859.  “It would be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” {62b} And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.

1876.  “It would be a serious error to suppose,” &c., as before. {62c}

1881.  “We should remember what A mass of inherited knowledge is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” {62d}

1881 or 1882.  Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes:  “It does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:”  i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another. {62e}

And yet in 1839, or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped the conception from which until the last year or two of his life he so fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account of the voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, he wrote:  “Nature by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country” (p. 237).

What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common-sense view of the matter which he took when he was a young man?  I imagine simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter, over-anxiety to appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck.

I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed.  For in the preface to Hermann Muller’s “Fertilisation of Flowers,” {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 the case, it is not on that account rendered less interesting.”  This is mused forth as a general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing:  the writer of the letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore’s Almanac could not be more guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.

I cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design in organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr. Darwin’s.  This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and, moreover, it is introduced for some reason 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 Muller’s book, for what little Hermann Muller 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 attaching to design in organism?  Neither has the passage any connection with the rest of the preface.  There is not another word about design, and even here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which could be disputed.

The explanation is sufficiently obvious.  Mr Darwin wanted to hedge.  He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of organisms no less 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 “Unconscious Memory,” it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it, as “was formerly the case,” it was not on that account any the less—­design, as well as interesting.

I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly.  Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner.

In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin’s manner when he did not quite dare even to hedge.  It is to be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann’s “Studies in the Theory of Descent,” published in 1881.

“Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, “maintain with much confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others 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 variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility”—­or towards being able to be perfected.

I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor Weismann’s book.  There was a little something here and there, but not much.

It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr. Romanes’ latest contribution to biology—­I mean his theory of physiological selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in Nature just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since the foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written.  I admit 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 Romanes appears to be the biological investigator on whom the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most conspicuously descended” (August 16, 1886).  Mr. Romanes is just the person whom the late Mr. Darwin would select to carry on his work, and Mr. Darwin was just the kind of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would find himself instinctively attracted.

The Times continues—­“The position which Mr. Romanes takes up is the result of his perception shared by many evolutionists, that the theory of natural selection is not really a theory of the origin of species. . . .”  What, then, becomes of Mr. Darwin’s most famous work, which was written expressly to establish natural selection as the main means of organic modification?  “The new factor which Mr. Romanes suggests,” continues the Times, “is that at a certain stage of development of varieties in a state of nature 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 less important than the lack of facts in support of the theory.”  The Times, however, implies it as its opinion that the required facts will be forthcoming by and by, and that when they have been found Mr. Romanes’ suggestion will constitute “the most important addition to the theory of evolution since the publication of the ‘Origin of Species.’” Considering that the Times has just implied the main thesis of the “Origin of Species” to be one which does not stand examination, this is rather a doubtful compliment.

Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the Times appears to perceive that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do not appear to see that though the expression natural selection must be always more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which is open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly fortuitous 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 accounting for the existence of species.”  The assertion made in each case is true if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous variations is intended, but it does not hold good if the selection is supposed to be made from variations under which there lies a general principle of wide and abiding application.  It is not likely that a man of Mr. Romanes’ antecedents should not be perfectly awake to considerations so obvious as the foregoing, and I am afraid I am inclined to consider his whole suggestion as only an attempt upon the part of the wearer of Mr. Darwin’s mantle to carry on Mr. Darwin’s work in Mr. Darwin’s spirit.

I have seen Professor Hering’s theory adopted recently more unreservedly by Dr. Creighton in his “Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease.” {67a} Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering’s address, 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 upheld would be found useful by medical men, and am therefore the more glad to see that this has proved to be the case.  I may perhaps be pardoned if I quote the passage in” Life and Habit” to which I am referring.  It runs:-

“Mutatis mutandis, the above would seem to hold as truly about medicine as about politics.  We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so much more” (of course I mean “about their own business”) “than we do, that 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 far as it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them, only bearing in mind that they will rebel equally against too sudden a change of treatment and no change at all” (p. 305).

Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which—­ though I did not notice his saying so—­he would doubtless see as a mode of cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same 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, so that I may claim the weight of his authority as supporting both the theory of an unconscious memory in general, and the particular application of it to medicine which I had ventured to suggest.

“Has the word ‘memory,’” he asks, “a real application to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only in a figure of speech?”

“If I had thought,” he continues later, “that unconscious memory was no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not unprofitable to represent 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 the force of habit.  To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things that we all understand.

“For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain class of maladies according to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description and not a figurative.” (p. 2.)

As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards “alterative action” as “habit-breaking action.”

As regards the organism’s being guided throughout its development to maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that “Professor Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication.”  “I should prefer to say,” he adds, “the acme of organic implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in their form or structure to show for the marvellous potentialities within them.

“I now come to the application of these considerations to the doctrine of unconscious memory.  If generation is the acme of organic implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness?  Obviously the fine flower of consciousness.  Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is potential memory, consciousness is actual memory.”

I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as I should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to turn to Dr. Creighton’s book, I will proceed to the subject indicated in my title.