This looks as if they are
acting on knowledge acquired independently of experience. "No," says Mr.
Lewes, "not so. They are born with the organs--I cannot tell how or why,
but heredity explains all that, and having once got the organs, the
objects that come into contact with them in daily life naturally produce
the same effect as on the parents, just as oxygen coming into contact
with the right quantity of hydrogen will make water; hence even the first
time the offspring come into contact with any given object they act as
their parents did." The idea of the young having got their experience in
a past generation does not seem to have even crossed his mind.

"What marvel is there," he asks, "that constant conditions acting upon
structures which are similar should produce similar results? It is in
this sense that the paradox of Leibnitz is true, and we can be said 'to
acquire an innate idea;' only the idea is not acquired independently of
experience, but through the process of experience similar to that which
originally produced it." {231a}

The impression left upon me is that he is all at sea for want of the clue
with which Professor Hering would have furnished him, and that had that
clue been presented to him a dozen years or so earlier than it was he
would have adopted it.

As regards Mr. Romanes the case is different. His recent work, Mental
Evolution in Animals, {231b} shows that he is well aware of the direction
which modern opinion is taking, and in several places he so writes as to
warrant me in claiming his authority in support of the views which I have
been insisting on for several years past.

Thus Mr. Romanes says that the analogies between the memory with which we
are familiar in daily life and hereditary memory "are so numerous and
precise" as to justify us in considering them to be of essentially the
same kind. {232a}

Again he says that although the memory of milk shown by new-born infants
is "at all events in large part hereditary, it is none the less memory"
of a certain kind. {232b}

Two lines lower down he writes of "hereditary memory or instinct,"
thereby implying that instinct is "hereditary memory." "It makes no
essential difference," he says, "whether the past sensation was actually
experienced by the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by
its ancestors. {232c} For it makes no essential difference whether the
nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the lifetime of t