Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification | Page 9

sequences are not determined by the experiences of the INDIVIDUAL organism manifesting them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are determined by the experiences of the RACE of organisms forming its ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless successive generations have established these sequences as organic relations (p. 526).
The modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life are also bequeathed (p. 526).
That is to say, the tendencies to certain combinations of psychical changes have become organic (p. 527).
The doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by experience must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the connections established by the accumulated experiences of every individual, but to all those established by the accumulated experiences of every race (p. 529).
Here, then, we have one of the simpler forms of instinct which, under the requisite conditions, must necessarily be established by accumulated experiences (p. 547).
And manifestly, if the organisation of inner relations, in correspondence with outer relations, results from a continual registration of experiences, &c. (p. 551).
On the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organised memory; on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of incipient instinct (pp. 555-6).
Memory, then, pertains to all that class of psychical states which are in process of being organised. It continues so long as the organising of them continues; and disappears when the organisation of them is complete. In the advance of the correspondence, each more complex class of phenomena which the organism acquires the power of recognising is responded to at first irregularly and uncertainly; and there is then a weak remembrance of the relations. By multiplication of experiences this remembrance becomes stronger, and the response more certain. By further multiplication of experiences the internal relations are at last automatically organised in correspondence with the external ones; and so conscious memory passes into unconscious or organic memory. At the same time, a new and still more complex order of experiences is thus rendered appreciable; the relations they present occupy the memory in place of the simpler one; they become gradually organised; and, like the previous ones, are succeeded by others more complex still (p. 563).
Just as we saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions which we call instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organised into correspondence with outer relations; so the establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the same principle (p. 579).
In a book published a few weeks before Mr. Spencer's letter appeared {29a} I had said that though Mr. Spencer at times closely approached Professor Hering and "Life and Habit," he had nevertheless nowhere shown that he considered memory and heredity to be parts of the same story and parcel of one another. In his letter to the Athenaeum, indeed, he does not profess to have upheld this view, except "by implications;" nor yet, though in the course of the six or seven years that had elapsed since "Life and Habit" was published I had brought out more than one book to support my earlier one, had he said anything during those years to lead me to suppose that I was trespassing upon ground already taken by himself. Nor, again, had he said anything which enabled me to appeal to his authority--which I should have been only too glad to do; at last, however, he wrote, as I have said, to the Athenaeum a letter which, indeed, made no express claim, and nowhere mentioned myself, but "the meanings and implications" from which were this time as clear as could be desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering and myself to stand aside.
The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. Spencer, or any others that can be found in his works, show that he regarded heredity in all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit that this conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer's writings, and that even the passages in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible till read by the light of Professor Hering's address and of "Life and Habit."
True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as "the experience of the race," "accumulated experiences," and others like them, but he did not explain--and it was here the difficulty lay-- how a race could have any experience at all. We know what we mean when we say that an individual has had experience; we mean that he is the same person now (in the common use of the words), on the occasion of some present action, as the one who performed a like action at some past time or times, and that he remembers how he acted before, so