Mr. Herbert Spencer 47 
Here the ball has fallen into his hands, but if he had 
got firm hold of it he could not have written, “ Instinct 
may be regarded as a kind of, &c.;’’ to us there is neither 
“may be regarded as” nor “kind of” about it; we 
require, “ Instinct is inherited memory,” with an explana- 
tion making it intelligible how memory can come to be 
inherited at all. I do not like, again, calling memory “a 
kind of incipient instinct ;” as Mr. Spencer puts them the 
words have a pleasant antithesis, but “ instinct is inherited 
memory ”’ covers all the ground, and to say that memory 
is inherited instinct is surplusage. 
Nor does he stick to it long when he says that “ instinct 
is a kind of organised memory,” for two pages later he says 
that memory, to be memory at all, must be tolerably 
conscious or deliberate; he, therefore (vol. i. p. 447), 
denies that there can be such a thing as unconscious 
memory ; but without this it is impossible for us to see 
-instinct as the ‘‘ kind of organised memory ”’ which he has 
just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct is notably un- 
deliberate and unreflecting. 
A few pages farther on (vol. i. p. 452) he finds himself 
driven to unconscious memory after all, and says that 
“conscious memory passes into unconscious or organic 
memory.” Having admitted unconscious memory, he 
declares (vol. i. p. 450) that “ as fast as those connections 
among psychical states, which we form in memory, grow 
by constant repetition automatic—they cease to be part of 
memory,’ or, in other words, he again denies that there can 
be an unconscious memory. 
Mr. Spencer doubtless saw that he was involved in 
contradiction in terms, and having always understood that 
contradictions in terms were very dreadful things—which, 
of course, under some circumstances they are—thought it 
well so to express himself that his readers should be more 
likely to push on than dwell on what was before them at 
the moment. I should be the last to complain of him 
