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.