“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.