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

now go on to Mr. Spencer.
CHAPTER II--MR.
HERBERT SPENCER

Mr. Herbert Spencer wrote to the Athenaeum (April 5, 1884), and
quoted certain passages from the 1855 edition of his "Principles of

Psychology," "the meanings and implications" from which he
contended were sufficiently clear. The passages he quoted were as
follows:-
Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive 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