In 1881 he said it was “simply absurd” to suppose it could “possibly be fraught with any benefit to science” or “reveal any truth of profound significance;” in 1884 he said of the same theory, that “it formed the backbone of all the previous literature upon instinct” by Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Fiske, and Spalding, “not to mention their numerous followers, and is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any theory can be stated in words.”
Few except Mr. Romanes will say this. I grant it ought to “have formed the backbone,” &c., and ought “to have been elaborately stated,” &c., but when I wrote “Life and Habit” neither Mr Romanes nor any one else understood it to have been even glanced at by more than a very few, and as for having been “elaborately stated,” it had been stated by Professor Hering as elaborately as it could be stated within the limits of an address of only twenty-two pages, but with this exception it had never been stated at all. It is not too much to say that “Life and Habit,” when it first came out, was considered so startling a paradox that people would not believe in my desire to be taken seriously, or at any rate were able to pretend that they thought I was not writing seriously.
Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who keep an eye on evolution; he himself, indeed, had said (_Nature_, January 27, 1881) that so long as I “aimed only at entertaining” my “readers by such works as ‘Erewhon’ and ‘Life and Habit’” (as though these books were of kindred character) I was in my proper sphere. It would be doing too little credit to Mr. Romanes’ intelligence to suppose him not to have known when he said this that “Life and Habit” was written as seriously as my subsequent books on evolution, but it suited him at the moment to join those who professed to consider it another book of paradoxes such as, I suppose, “Erewhon” had been, so he classed the two together. He could not have done this unless enough people thought, or said they thought, the books akin, to give colour to his doing so.
One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, brought Mr. Spencer against me. This was a writer in the _St. James’s Gazette_ (December 2, 1880). I challenged him in a letter which appeared (December 8, 1880), and said, “I would ask your reviewer to be kind enough to refer your readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer’s “Principles of Psychology” which in any direct intelligible way refer the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, to memory on the part of offspring of the action it _bonâ fide_ took in the persons of its forefathers.” The reviewer made no reply, and I concluded, as I have since found correctly, that he could not find the passages.