Mr. Herbert Spencer 39 
thing ; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one 
against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer’s pages, only to 
find that they had fallen asunder before we had turned over 
to the next, so we put down his book resentfully, as written 
by one who did not know what to do with his meaning 
even if he had one, or bore it meekly while he chastised us 
with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, 
according to our temperaments. 
I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent 
ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species and 
genera of animals and plants, are one in principle—the 
sterility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to 
fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent 
whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself 
ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of 
ideas—that is to say, into inability to think at all, or at any 
rate to think as their neighbours do. 
If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of 
any race are bond fide united by a common personality, 
and that in virtue of being so united each generation 
remembers (within, of course, the limits to which all 
memory is subject) what happened to it while still in the 
persons of its progenitors—then his order to Professor 
Hering and myself should be immediately obeyed; but 
this was just what was at once most wanted, and least 
done by Mr. Spencer. Even in the passages given above— 
passages collected by Mr. Spencer himself—this point is 
altogether ignored ; make it clear as Professor Hering made 
it—put continued personality and memory in the fore- 
ground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them 
to be discovered ‘“‘ by implications,” and then such expres- 
sions as “‘ accumulated experiences’ and ‘‘ experience of 
the race” become luminous ; till this had been done they 
were Vox et preterea nihil. 
To sum up briefly. The passages quoted by Mr. Spencer 
from his “ Principles of Psychology ” can hardly be called 
