Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification Part 3

"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 repet.i.tion become automatic, so in the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 a.s.sumptions, 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages which suggest, though less obviously, the same inference.

The pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages 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 repet.i.tion 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 quant.i.ties to one of 99 only by showing that heredity and memory, two of the original 100 unknown quant.i.ties, 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.n.a.logies 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 a.n.a.logies between them are so numerous and precise.

Consciousness is but an adjunct which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency of repet.i.tion, 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 a.s.sociations 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 pa.s.sages 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- fas.h.i.+oned 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 circ.u.mstances 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng instinctive from so-called intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pa.s.s into the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repet.i.tion; 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 Ma.s.s 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.