30 Luck, or Cunning ? 
passing upon ground already taken by himself. Nor, 
again, had he said anything which enabled me to appeal to 
his authority—which I should have been only too glad to 
do; at last, however, he wrote, as I have said, to the 
Atheneum a letter which, indeed, made no express claim, 
and nowhere mentioned myself, but “ the meanings and 
implications ” from which were this time as clear as could 
be desired, and amount to an order to Professor Hering 
and myself to stand aside. 
The question is, whether the passages quoted by Mr. 
Spencer, or any others that can be found in his works, show 
that he regarded heredity in all its manifestations as a mode 
of memory. I submit that this conception is not derivable 
from Mr. Spencer’s writings, and that even the passages 
in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible 
till read by the light of Professor Hering’s address and of 
“ Life and Habit.” 
True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expres- 
sions as “ the experience of the race,’ “‘ accumulated 
experiences,” and others like them, but he did not explain 
—and it was here the difficulty lay—how a race could 
have any experience at all. We know what we mean when 
we say that an individual has had experience ; we mean 
that he is the same person now (in the common use of the 
words), on the occasion of some present action, as the one 
who performed a like action at some past time or times, and 
that he remembers how he acted before, so as to be able to 
turn his past action to account, gaining in proficiency 
through practice. Continued personality and memory 
are the elements that constitute experience ; where these 
are present there may, and commonly will, be experience ; 
where they are absent the word “‘ experience”? cannot 
properly be used. 
Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race 
as many. We now see that though this is true as far as it 
goes, it is by no means the whole truth, and that in certain 
