much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas
into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed,
resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than
barrenness of ideas--that is to say, into inability to think at all,
or at any rate to think as their neighbours do.

If Mr. Spencer had made it clear that the generations of any race
are bona fide united by a common personality, and that in virtue of
being so united each generation remembers (within, of course, the
limits to which all memory is subject) what happened to it while
still in the persons of its progenitors--then his order to Professor
Hering and myself should be immediately obeyed; but this was just
what was at once most wanted, and least done by Mr. Spencer. Even
in the passages given above--passages collected by Mr. Spencer
himself--this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as
Professor Hering made it--put continued personality and memory in
the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to
be discovered "by implications," and then such expressions as
"accumulated experiences" and "experience of the race" become
luminous; till this had been done they were Vox et praeterea nihil.

To sum up briefly. The passages quoted by Mr. Spencer from his
"Principles of Psychology" can hardly be called clear, even now that
Professor Hering and others have thrown light upon them. If,
indeed, they had been clear Mr. Spencer would probably have seen
what they necesitated, and found the way of meeting the difficulties
of the case which occurred to Professor Hering and myself. Till we
wrote, very few writers had even suggested this. The idea that
offspring was only "an elongation or branch proceeding from its
parents" had scintillated in the ingenious brain of Dr. Erasmus