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;