Our answer was, “Because in a very valid sense, though not perhaps in the most usually understood, there is continued personality and an abiding memory between successive generations.”  How does Mr. Spencer’s confession of faith touch this?  If any meaning can be extracted from his words, he is no more supporting this view now than he was when he wrote the passages he has adduced to show that he was supporting it thirty years ago; but after all no coherent meaning can be got out of Mr. Spencer’s letter—­except, of course, that Professor Hering and myself are to stand aside.  I have abundantly shown that I am very ready to do this in favour of Professor Hering, but see no reason for admitting Mr. Spencer’s claim to have been among the forestallers of “Life and Habit.”

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}