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 Athenæum, 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 Athenæum 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 as to be able to turn his past action to account, gaining in proficiency through practice.  Continued personality and memory are the elements that constitute experience; where these are present there may, and commonly will, be experience; where they are absent the word “experience” cannot properly be used.

Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many.  We now see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no means the whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is the race that is one, and the individual many.  We all admit and understand this readily enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the Athenæum above referred to.  In the then state of our ideas a race was only a succession of individuals, each one of them new persons, and as such incapable of profiting by the experience of its predecessors except in the very limited number of cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, was possible.  The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between each successive generation, and the importance of the physical and psychical connection between parents and offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost sight of.  It seems strange how this could ever have been allowed to come about, but it should be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise troublesome questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible for what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody else is on many grounds the most convenient.  Every now and then, however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued personality side of the connection between successive generations is as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes—some of which are not unimportant—are obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which the more commonly needed conception has overgrown the other.

Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted every hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to speak, in stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our mental storehouse, while the other was so seldom asked for that it became not worth while to keep it.  By-and-by it was found so troublesome to send out for it, and so hard to come by even then, that people left off selling it at all, and if any one wanted it he must think it out at home as best he could; this was troublesome, so by common consent the world decided no longer to busy itself with the continued personality of successive generations—which was all very well until it also decided to busy itself with the theory of descent with modification.  On the introduction of a foe so inimical to many of our pre-existing ideas the balance of power among them was upset, and a readjustment became necessary, which is still far from having attained the next settlement that seems likely to be reasonably permanent.

To change the illustration, the ordinary view is true for seven places of decimals, and this commonly is enough; occasions, however, have now arisen when the error caused by neglect of the omitted places is appreciably disturbing, and we must have three or four more.  Mr. Spencer showed no more signs of seeing that he must supply these, and make personal identity continue between successive generations before talking about inherited (as opposed to post-natal and educational) experience, than others had done before him; the race with him, as with every one else till recently, was not one long individual living indeed in pulsations, so to speak, but no more losing continued personality by living in successive generations, than an individual loses it by living in consecutive days; a race was simply a succession of individuals, each one of which was held to be an entirely new person, and was regarded exclusively, or very nearly so, from this point of view.

When I wrote “Life and Habit” I knew that the words “experience of the race” sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines and newspapers, but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I should have given their source.  To me they conveyed no meaning, and vexed me as an attempt to make me take stones instead of bread, and to palm off an illustration upon me as though it were an explanation.  When I had worked the matter out in my own way, I saw that the illustration, with certain additions, would become an explanation, but I saw also that neither he who had adduced it nor any one else could have seen how right he was, till much had been said which had not, so far as I knew, been said yet, and which undoubtedly would have been said if people had seen their way to saying it.

“What is this talk,” I wrote, “which is made about the experience of the race, as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows nothing about him?  If a man eats his dinner it nourishes him and not his neighbour; if he learns a difficult art it is he that can do it and not his neighbour” (“Life and Habit,” p. 49).

When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the son was fed when the father ate before he begot him.

“Is there any way,” I continued, “of showing that this experience of the race about which so much is said without the least attempt to show in what way it may, or does, become the experience of the individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, who repeats on a great many different occasions, and in slightly different ways, certain performances with which he has already become exceedingly familiar?”

I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected upon the expression in question, that it was fallacious till this was done.  When I first began to