406 THE EVOLUTION OF MEMORY 



imagination, imitativeness, and reason, all of which depend on 

 memory but which he treats as independent faculties. Spencer 

 regarded instinct as compound reflex action and the precursor of 

 intelligence, which he thought resulted from still further compound- 

 ing. On the other hand, Lewes, thinking, like Spencer, in terms of 

 the Lamarckian doctrine but arriving at an opposite conclusion, 

 believed that the intelligence of ancestors becomes the instincts of 

 descendants. That is, he believed that mental characters which 

 developed in the ancestors under the stimulus of experience were 

 * inherited ' by descendants i.e. were transmuted into characters 

 that developed under the stimulus of nutriment. He failed to 

 note the fact, fatal to his hypothesis, that the human being, the 

 latest product of evolution, is of all animals the most equipped 

 by acquirements and the least by instinct. Richet insisted that 

 "without memory no conscious sensation, without memory no 

 consciousness." Romanes declared : " The most fundamental 

 principle of mental operation is that of memory, for this is the 

 conditio sine qua non of all mental life." l " The power of learning 

 by individual experience is therefore the criterion of mind." He 

 adds, however, " But it is not an absolute or infallible criterion 

 ... it serves to fix the upper limit of non-mental action more 

 precisely than it does the lower limit of mental; for it is probable 

 that the power of feeling is prior to that of consciously learning." 2 

 671. When a particle of food goes the wrong way I cough. 

 That particular reflex is quickly abolished by chloroform or even 

 a local anaesthetic. Therefore it is initiated by sensation, by mind. 

 But a newly born infant coughs just as well as a man. Here it 

 has nothing to learn. The act is quite involuntary and has no 

 connection with memory. But it is highly useful. Therefore 



1 Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 35, Romanes proceeds : " But memory 

 on its obverse side, or the side of physiology, can only mean that a nervous 

 discharge, having once taken place along a certain route, leaves behind it a 

 molecular change, more or less permanent, such that when another discharge 

 afterwards proceeds along the same route, it finds, as it were, the footprints of 

 its predecessor. And this, as we have seen, is no more than we find to be the case 

 with ganglionic action in general." This notion of nervous discharges making 

 paths which render more easy the passage of subsequent similar discharges is 

 found in almost all psychological works, and furnishes an easy but as we have 

 already noted a fundamentally deceptive illustration. In low animals, in which 

 only reflexes and instincts occur, nothing is added to the mental and nervous 

 equipment by experience. In higher animals, in which memory is present, 

 the stimulus of experience, so far from opening a path, adds a growth. 

 Hence the increase in volume and complexity both of the child's mind and of 

 his brain. 



^ Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 60. 



