Leaving the explanation of memory on one side, and confining ourselves to the fact of memory only, a caterpillar on being just hatched is supposed, according to this theory, to lose its memory of the time it was in the egg, and to be stimulated by an intense but unconscious recollection of the action taken by its ancestors when they were first hatched. It is guided in the course it takes by the experience it can thus command. Each step it takes recalls a new recollection, and thus it goes through a development as a performer performs
a piece of music, each bar leading his recollection to the bar that should next follow.
In Life and Habit will be found examples of the manner in which this view solves a number of difficulties for the explanation of which the leading men of science express themselves at a loss. The following from Professor Huxley’s recent work upon the crayfish may serve for an example. Professor Huxley writes:—
“It is a widely received notion that the energies of living matter have a tendency to decline and finally disappear, and that the death of the body as a whole is a necessary correlate of its life. That all living beings sooner or later perish needs no demonstration, but it would be difficult to find satisfactory grounds for the belief that they needs must do so. The analogy of a machine, that sooner or later must be brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its parts, does not hold, inasmuch as the animal mechanism is continually renewed and repaired; and though it is true that individual components of the body are constantly dying, yet their places are taken by vigorous successors. A city remains notwithstanding the constant death-rate of its inhabitants; and such an organism as a crayfish is only a corporate unity, made up of innumerable partially independent individualities.”—The Crayfish, p. 127.
Surely the theory which I have indicated above makes the reason plain why no organism can permanently outlive its experience of past lives. The death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. There are some
savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is the necessary end of all living beings, and who consider even the gentlest death from old age as violent and abnormal; so Professor Huxley seems to find a difficulty in seeing that though a city commonly outlives many generations of its citizens, yet cities and states are in the end no less mortal than individuals. “The city,” he says, “remains.” Yes, but not for ever. When Professor Huxley can find a city that will last for ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does not last for ever.
I have already here and elsewhere said all that I can yet bring forward in support of Professor Hering’s theory; it now remains for me to meet the most troublesome objection to it that I have been able to think of—an objection which I had before me when I wrote Life and Habit, but which then as now I believe to be unsound. Seeing, however, that a plausible case can be made out for it, I will state it and refute it here. When I say refute it, I do not mean that I shall have done with it—for it is plain that it opens up a vaster question in the relations between the so-called organic and inorganic worlds—but that I will refute the supposition that it any way militates against Professor Hering’s theory.
“Why,” it may be asked, “should we go out of our way to invent unconscious memory—the existence of which must at the best remain an inference [184]—when the observed fact that like antecedents are invariably followed by like consequents should be sufficient for our purpose? Why should the fact that a given kind
of chrysalis in a given condition will always become a butterfly within a certain time be connected with memory when it is not pretended that memory has anything to do with the invariableness with which oxygen and hydrogen when mixed in certain proportions make water?”
We assume confidently that if a drop of water were decomposed into its component parts, and if these were brought together again, and again decomposed and again brought together any number of times over, the results would be invariably the same, whether decomposition or combination, yet no one will refer the invariableness of the action during each repetition, to recollection by the gaseous molecules of the course taken when the process was last repeated. On the contrary, we are assured that molecules in some distant part of the world which had never entered into such and such a known combination themselves, nor held concert with other molecules that had been so combined, and which, therefore, could have had no experience and no memory, would none the less act upon one another in that one way in which other like combinations of atoms have acted under like circumstances, as readily as though they had been combined and separated and recombined again a hundred or a hundred thousand times. It is this assumption, tacitly made by every man, beast, and plant in the universe, throughout all time and in every action of their lives, that has made any improvement in action possible—for it is this which lies at the root of the power to profit by experience. I do not exactly know why we make this assumption, and I cannot find out that any one else knows much better than myself, but I do not recommend any one to dispute it.