14 Luck, or Cunning ? 
that desires to see out a literary three-score years and ten 
must offer something to future generations as well as to 
its own. It is a condition of its survival that it shall do this, 
and herein lies one of the author’s chief difficulties. If 
books only lived as long as men and women, we should 
know better how to grow them; as matters stand, how- 
ever, the author lives for one or two generations, whom he 
comes in the end to understand fairly well, while the book, 
if reasonable pains have been taken with it, should live 
more or less usefully for a dozen. About the greater 
number of these generations the author is in the dark ; 
but come what may, some of them are sure to have arrived 
at conclusions diametrically opposed to our own upon 
every subject connected with art, science, philosophy, and 
religion ; it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be 
pleased, it can only be at the cost of repelling some 
present readers. Unwilling as I am to do this, I still 
hold it the lesser of two evils; I will be as brief, how- 
ever, as the interests of the opinions I am supporting 
will allow. 
In ‘‘ Life and Habit” I contended that heredity was 
a mode of memory. I endeavoured to show that all 
hereditary traits, whether of mind or body, are inherited 
in virtue of, and as a manifestation of, the same power 
whereby we are able to remember intelligently what we 
did half an hour, yesterday, or a twelvemonth since, and 
this in no figurative but in a perfectly real sense. If life be 
compared to an equation of a hundred unknown quantities, 
I followed Professor Hering of Prague in reducing it to one 
of ninety-nine only, by showing two of the supposed 
unknown quantities to be so closely allied that they should 
count as one. I maintained that instinct was inherited 
memory, and this without admitting more exceptions and 
qualifying clauses than arise, as it were, by way of 
harmonics from every proposition, and must be neglected 
if thought and language are to be possible. 
