WHICH ADAPT the anatomical plan of the ganglia." {56a} It is
heredity which impresses nervous changes on the individual. {56b}
"In the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by
frequent repetition and heredity," &c.; {56c} but he nowhere tells
us what heredity is any more than Messrs. Herbert Spencer, Darwin,
and Lewes have done. This, however, is exactly what Professor
Hering, whom I have unwittingly followed, does. He resolves all
phenomena of heredity, whether in respect of body or mind, into
phenomena of memory. He says in effect, "A man grows his body as he
does, and a bird makes her nest as she does, because both man and
bird remember having grown body and made nest as they now do, or
very nearly so, on innumerable past occasions." He thus, as I have
said on an earlier page, reduces life from an equation of say 100
unknown quantities to one of 99 only by showing that heredity and
memory, two of the original 100 unknown quantities, are in reality
part of one and the same thing.

That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very
unsatisfactory way.

What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following?--
Mr. Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental
operation is that of memory, and that this "is the conditio sine qua
non of all mental life" (page 35).

I do not understand Mr. Romanes to hold that there is any living
being which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to admit
that development of body and mind are closely interdependent.

If, then, "the most fundamental principle" of mind is memory, it