curity
which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same
cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin's work--I
mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with
whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement. He
adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid
appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.

Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes' definition of instinct:--

"Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of
consciousness. The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all
those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive
action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary
knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained,
but similarly performed under similar and frequently recurring
circumstances by all the individuals of the same species." {240}

If Mr, Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor
Hering's foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly
admitted, he might have said--

"Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations--the new
generation remembering what happened to it before it parted company with
the old." Then he might have added as a rider--

"If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime, it is
not an instinct. If having been acquired in one lifetime it is
transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring though it
was not an instinct in the parent. If the habit is transmitted
partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly
acquired."

This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know
what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such
debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose,
knowledge of purpose, &c.; it both introduces the feature of inheritance
which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from so-called
intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pass into
the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition;
finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked
upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said {241}) as
"a branch or elongation" of the one immediately preceding it.

But then to have said this would have made it too plain that Mr. Romanes