There was a little something here and there, but not
much.
Mr Herbert Spencer has not in his more recent works said anything which
enables me to appeal to his authority.
I imagine that if he had got hold of the idea that heredity was only a
mode of memory before 1870, when he published the second edition of his
Principles of Psychology, he would have gladly adopted it, for he seems
continually groping after it, and aware of it as near him, though he is
never able to grasp it. He probably failed to grasp it because Lamarck
had failed. He could not adopt it in his edition of 1880, for this is
evidently printed from stereos taken from the 1870 edition, and no
considerable alteration was therefore possible.
The late Mr. G. H. Lewes did not get hold of the memory theory, probably
because neither Mr. Spencer nor any of the well-known German philosophers
had done so. Mr. Romanes, as I think I have shown, actually has adopted
it, but he does not say where he got it from. I suppose from reading
Canon Kingsley in _Nature_ some years before _Nature_ began to exist, or
(for has not the mantle of Mr. Darwin fallen upon him?) he has thought it
all out independently; but however Mr. Romanes may have reached his
conclusion, he must have done so comparatively recently, for when he
reviewed my book, Unconscious Memory, {247} he scoffed at the very theory
which he is now adopting.
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