"the experience of the race," and other
expressions of kindred nature, are delusive. If he does mean this, it is
a pity he has nowhere said so.

Professor Hering does mean this, and makes it clear that he does so. He
does not catch the ball and let it slip through his fingers again, but
holds it firmly. "It is to memory," he says, "that we owe almost all
that we have or are; our ideas and conceptions are its work; our every
thought and movement are derived from this source. Memory connects the
countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole, and as our
bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they
were not held together by the cohesion of matter, so our consciousness
would be broken up into as many moments as we had lived seconds, but for
the binding and unifying force of Memory." {229} And he proceeds to show
that Memory persists between generations exactly as it does between the
various stages in the life of the individual. If I could find any such
passage as the one I have just quoted, in Mr. Herbert Spencer's, Mr.
Lewes's, or Mr. Romanes' works, I should be only too glad to quote it,
but I know of nothing comparable to it for definiteness of idea,
thoroughness and consistency.

No reader indeed can rise from a perusal of Mr. Herbert Spencer's, or Mr.
G. H. Lewes', work with an adequate--if indeed with any--impression that
the phenomena of heredity are in fact phenomena of memory; that heredity,
whether as regards body or mind, is only possible because each generation
is linked on to and made one with its predecessor by the possession of a
common and abiding memory, in as far as bodily existence was common--that
is to say, until the substance of the one left the substance of the
other; and that this memory is exactly of the same general character as
that which enables us to remember what we did half an hour ago--strong
under the same circumstances as those under which this familiar kind of
memory is strong, and weak under those under which it is weak. Mr.
Spencer and Mr. Lewes have even less conception of the connection between
heredity and memory than Dr. Erasmus Darwin had at the close of the last
century. {230}

Mr. Lewes' position was briefly this. He denied that there could be any
knowledge independent of experience, but he could not help seeing that
young animals come into the world furnished with many organs which they
use with great dexterity at a very early age.