Introduction to Hering's Lecture 53 



inexhaustible, and found myself well rewarded for my 

 trouble. 



Professor Hering and I, to use a metaphor of his own, 

 are as men who have observed the action of living beings 

 upon the stage of the world, he from the point of view at 

 once of a spectator and of one who has free access to much 

 of what goes on behind the scenes, I from that of a spectator 

 only, with none but the vaguest notion of the actual 

 manner in which the stage machinery is worked. If two 

 men so placed, after years of reflection, arrive indepen- 

 dently of one another at an identical conclusion as regards 

 the manner in which this machinery must have been 

 invented and perfected, it is natural that each should 

 take a deep interest in the arguments of the other, and 

 be anxious to put them forward with the utmost possible 

 prominence. It seems to me that the theory which Pro- 

 fessor Hering and I are supporting in common, is one 

 the importance of which is hardly inferior to that of the 

 theory of evolution itself — for it puts the backbone, as it 

 were, into the theory of evolution. I shall therefore make 

 no apology for laying my translation of Professor Hering's 

 work before my reader. 



Concerning the identity of the main idea put forward 

 in " Life and Habit " with that of Professor Hering's 

 lecture, there can hardly, I think, be two opinions. We 

 both of us maintain that we grow our limbs as we do, 

 and possess the instincts we possess, because we remember 

 having grown our limbs in this way, and having had these 

 instincts in past generations when we were in the persons 

 of our forefathers — each individual life adding a small 

 (but so small, in any one lifetime, as to be hardly appreci- 

 able) amount of new experience to the general store of 

 memory ; that we have thus got into certain habits which 

 we can now rarely break ; and that we do much of what 

 we do unconsciously on the same principle as that (what- 

 ever it is) on which we do all other habitual actions, with 

 the greater ease and unconsciousness the more often we 



