He uses the very fact upon which the argument in my earlier paper was based to get more support for the inheritance of habits. The fact is this, that intelligence may perform the same acts that instinct does. So granting, he argues, that the intelligent performance of these acts comes first in the species history, this intelligent performance of the actions serves all the purposes of utility which are claimed for the instinctive doing of the same actions. If this be true. By the Lamarckian theory, however, he concludes, the habits of intelligent action give rise to instincts for the performance of the same actions which are already intelligently performed, the two kinds of function existing side by side in the same creature.
Several things come to mind in the way of comment.
Romanes now assumes that intelligence prevents the operation of natural selection on further variations, and so rules out the origin of instinct through that agency, or, put differently, that actions which are of selective value when performed intelligently are not of selective value when performed also instinctively. Assuming the existence side by side in the same creature of the ability to do intelligently certain things that he also does instinctively, it is extraordinary that Romanes should then say that the instinctive reflexes have no utility additional to that of the intelligent performance. On the contrary, the two sorts of performance of the same action are of very different and each of extreme utility. Reflex actions are quicker, more direct, less variable, less subject to inhibition, more deep-seated organically, and so less liable to derangement. Then there is the remarkable difference that intelligent actions are centrally stimulated. while reflex actions are peripherally stimulated.