Books: Luck or Cunning?

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CHAPTER IV {52a}--Mr. Romanes' "Mental Evolution in Animals"

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.

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