Chapter III 
Mr. Herbert Spencer (continued) 
HETHER they ought to have gone or not, they did 
not go. 
When “ Life and Habit ’’ was first published no one 
considered Mr. Spencer to be maintaining the phenomena 
of heredity to be in reality phenomena of memory. When, 
for example, Professor Ray Lankester first called attention 
to Professor Hering’s address, he did not understand Mr. 
Spencer to be intending this. ‘‘ Professor Hering,’ he 
wrote (Nature, July 13, 1876), “‘ helps us to a comprehen- 
sive view of the nature of heredity and adaptation, by 
giving us the word ‘memory,’ conscious or unconscious, 
for the continuity of Mr. Spencer’s polar forces or polarities 
of physiological units.” He evidently found the prominence 
given to memory a help to him which he had not derived 
from reading Mr. Spencer’s works. 
When, again, he attacked me in the Atheneum (March 
29, 1884), he spoke of my “tardy recognition”’ of the 
fact that Professor Hering had preceded me “ in treat- 
ing all manifestations of heredity as a form of memory.” 
Professor Lankester’s words could have no force if he held 
that any other writer, and much less so well known a 
writer as Mr. Spencer, had preceded me in putting forward 
the theory in question. 
When Mr. Romanes reviewed “‘ Unconscious Memory ” 
in Nature (January 27, 1881) the notion of a “ race- 
memory,” to use his own words, was still so new to him that 
he declared it “simply absurd” to suppose that it could 
42 
