Note 40a — Chapter II · Mr. Herbert Spencer

I have given the passage in full on p. 254a of my “Selections,” &c. [Now out of print.] I observe that Canon Kingsley felt exactly the same difficulty that I had felt myself, and saw also how alone it could be met. He makes the wood-wren say, “Something told him his mother had done it before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had inherited her instinct (as we call hereditary memory, to avoid the trouble of finding out what it is and how it comes).”—Fraser, June, 1867. Canon Kingsley felt he must insist on the continued personality of the two generations before he could talk about inherited memory. On the other hand, though he does indeed speak of this as almost a synonym for instinct, he seems not to have realised how right he was, and implies that we should find some fuller and more satisfactory explanation behind this, only that we are too lazy to look for it.