True, in his “Principles of Psychology” (vol. ii. p. 195) Mr. Spencer says that we have only to expand the doctrine that all intelligence is acquired through experience “so as to make it include with the experience of each individual the experiences of all ancestral individuals,” &c. This is all very good, but it is much the same as saying, “We have only got to stand on our heads and we shall be able to do so and so.” We did not see our way to standing on our heads, and Mr. Spencer did not help us; we had been accustomed, as I am afraid I must have said _usque ad nauseam_ already, to lose sight of the physical connection existing between parents and offspring; we understood from the marriage service that husband and wife were in a sense one flesh, but not that parents and children were so also; and without this conception of the matter, which in its way is just as true as the more commonly received one, we could not extend the experience of parents to offspring. It was not in the bond or _nexus_ of our ideas to consider experience as appertaining to more than a single individual in the common acceptance of the term; these two ideas were so closely bound together that wherever the one went the other went perforce. Here, indeed, in the very passage of Mr. Spencer’s just referred to, the race is throughout regarded as “a series of individuals”—without an attempt to call attention to that other view, in virtue of which we are able to extend to many an idea we had been accustomed to confine to one.
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.