Mr. Spencer may very well call instinct "organised memory" if he means
that offspring can remember--within the limitations to which all memory
is subject--what happened to it while it was yet in the person or persons
of its parent or parents; but if he does not mean this, his use of the
word "memory," his talk about "the experience of the race," and other
expressions of kindred nature, are delusive. If he does mean this, it is
a pity he has nowhere said so.
Professor Hering does mean this, and makes it clear that he does so. He
does not catch the ball and let it slip through his fingers again, but
holds it firmly. "It is to memory," he says, "that we owe almost all
that we have or are; our ideas and conceptions are its work; our every
thought and movement are derived from this source. Memory connects the
countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole, and as our
bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they
were not held together by the cohesion of matter, so our consciousness
would be broken up into as many moments as we had lived seconds, but for
the binding and unifying force of Memory." {229} And he proceeds to show
that Memory persists between generations exactly as it does between the
various stages in the life of the individual. If I could find any such
passage as the one I have just quoted, in Mr.
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