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I have already here and elsewhere said all that I can yet bring forward in support of Professor Hering's theory; it now remains for me to meet the most troublesome objection to it that I have been able to think of an objection which I had before me when I wrote "Life and Habit," but which then as now I believe to be unsound.
Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering's address, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen him lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and organ has an individual memory.
Introduction to Professor Hering's lecture. After I had finished "Evolution, Old and New," I wrote some articles for the Examiner, in which I carried out the idea put forward in "Life and Habit," that we are one person with our ancestors.
I am exceedingly glad now that I knew nothing of Professor Hering's lecture, for it is much better that two people should think a thing out as far as they can independently before they become aware of each other's works but if I had seen it, I should either, as is most likely, not have written at all, or I should have pitched my book in another key.
As far as the ideas are concerned this is certainly the case, and considering that Professor Hering wrote between seven and eight years before I did, I think it due to him, and to my readers as well as to myself, to explain the steps which led me to my conclusions, and, while putting Professor Hering's lecture before them, to show cause for thinking that I arrived at an almost identical conclusion, as it would appear, by an almost identical road, yet, nevertheless, quite independently, I must ask the reader, therefore, to regard these earlier chapters as in some measure a personal explanation, as well as a contribution to the history of an important feature in the developments of the last twenty years.
If it is objected that Professor Hering's theory as to continuity of vibrations being the key to memory and heredity involves the action of more wheels within wheels than our imagination can come near to comprehending, and also that it supposes this complexity of action as going on within a compass which no unaided eye can detect by reason of its littleness, so that we are carried into a fairy land with which sober people should have nothing to do, it may be answered that the case of light affords us an example of our being truly aware of a multitude of minute actions, the hundred million millionth part of which we should have declared to be beyond our ken, could we not incontestably prove that we notice and count them all with a very sufficient and creditable accuracy.
I hope that it will thus be seen that neither Professor Hering nor I have fallen into the fallacy of Von Hartmann, but that rather Von Hartmann has fallen into his fallacy through failure to grasp the principle which Professor Hering has insisted upon, and to connect heredity with memory. Professor Hering's philosophy of the unconscious is of extreme simplicity.
Charles Darwin, came out, and having been compelled, as I have shown above, by Dr. Krause's work to look a little into the German language, the opportunity seemed favourable for going on with it and becoming acquainted with Professor Hering's lecture.
Romanes is upholding the same opinions as Professor Hering's and my own, but their effect and tendency is more plain here than in Mr Romanes' own book, where they are overlaid by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always easy of comprehension. Moreover, at the same time that I claim the weight of Mr. Romanes' authority, I am bound to admit that I do not find his support satisfactory.
Sully has erred, if at all, in making him more intelligible than he actually is. Von Hartmann has not got a meaning. Give him Professor Hering's key and he might get one, but it would be at the expense of seeing what approach he had made to a system fallen to pieces.
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