Romanes himself. He knows perfectly well what others have written about
the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well
that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that
they have taken. If he had begun by saying what they had said and had
then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be
improved upon.
Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned
method of procedure was not good enough for him. One-half the obscurity
which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same
cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin's work--I
mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with
whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement. He
adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid
appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.
Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes' definition of instinct:--
"Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of
consciousness. The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all
those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive
action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary
knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained,
but similarly performed under similar and frequently recurring
circumstances by all the individuals of the same species.
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