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I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid by Mr. Romanes both in his "Mental Evolution in Animals" and in his letters to the Athenaeum in March 1884, on Natural Selection as an originator and developer of instinct, he very soon afterwards let the Natural Selection part of the story go as completely without saying as I do myself, or as Mr.
Therefore I will leave this staffe, and observe, concerning the Romanes, the swoorde for to hurte, and for defense the Targaet, with the other armours aforesaide.
Says Romanes, in an admirable and impartial article on the mental differences of men and women, "She is pre-eminent for affection, sympathy, devotion, self-denial, modesty, long-suffering or patience under pain, disappointment, and adversity, for reverence, veneration, religious feeling, and general morality."
He thus reduces life from an equation of say 100 unknown quantities to one of 99 only by showing that heredity and memory, two of the original 100 unknown quantities, are in reality part of one and the same thing. That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very unsatisfactory way. I will give examples of my meaning. Mr. I do not understand Mr.
Agnosticism and materialism were in the air, and remained the dominant features for quite a number of years. There were those who deplored the loss of their faith such as it had been. Huxley obviously did; and Romanes, who afterwards returned to the Church of England, confessedly did. Such persons, and there were many of them, honestly were unable to believe, and said so.
Perhaps they were, but they did not say so, and others conspicuously Mr. Romanes himself did not understand them to be meaning what he now discovers that they meant. When Mr. Considering how recently Mr. Romanes wrote the words just quoted, he has soon forgotten them. I do not, as I have said already, and never did, claim to have originated the theory I put forward in "Life and Habit."
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
The old people of Rome were gone; their characteristic dress even was gone; for already in the time of Augustus they had laid aside the toga, and assumed the cheaper and scantier paenula, so that the eye sought in vain for Virgil's "Romanes rerum dominos gentemque togatam."
And we merely stultify ourselves if we suppose that the problem is brought any nearer to a solution by asserting that a future individual while still in the germ has already participated, say in the cerebral alterations of its parents," &c. Mr. Romanes could find no measure of abuse strong enough for me, as any reader may see who feels curious enough to turn to Mr.
Philip of Macedon, not the father of Alexander the Great, but he that was vanquished by Titus Quintius, had not much State in regard of the greatnesse of the Romanes and of Greece that assail'd him; neverthelesse in that he was a warlike man and knew how to entertaine the people, and assure himself of the Nobles, for many yeares he made the warre good against them: and though at last some town perhaps were taken from him, yet the Kingdome remaind in his hands still.
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