But this brain, while human life employed and profited by it, was in vital and structural continuity with the first life-jelly that appeared upon the earth. You may trace, in the pictorial scientific way, all its many cells to the germ-cell or egg from which the whole body sprang. Again, and in the same manner, you may trace this germ-cell, this egg, to another from which it was derived. Some scientific men will tell you that in every developing egg, during the very first stages of its division, cells are set apart as germ-cells to continue the race in the next generation. There runs, they will say, through the generations of men a continuous underground river-system of protoplasm, a continuous streaming of cells from which are thrown up at intervals jets, as it were, of living material which become individual lives. Or we may put it that as in certain plants there is a creeping root-stock hidden underground and giving origin here and there to new specimens of the plant, so there is (according to this opinion) a root-stock of germinative material passing on and giving rise to body after body, through all mankind. The source of this branching, interlacing germ-structure is in the beginnings of the world, and the beginnings of the world are—where? In the ether, the physicist may say. In the place and state from whence my elements have come, the chemist says. At present we, studying in these pages, are content to say that whatever the scientific details may be, the pathway of life that we see is one, from wherever the chemist and the physicist allow of a beginning to the place where both must own themselves confounded, the brain of man.
It is well to study that brain more carefully and try to relate it with the germ-cells of the protoplasmic streams from which it arose. We have to consider how it is that the brain of a son comes to resemble the brains of his parents, when the carrier of his parents' lives to him was only that fertilized germ-cell, a jelly with a nucleus, to all appearances no more. Here we must confine our study to one problem, that of memory, partly because we have no space for more, but chiefly because memory is an 'Open Sesame' to many wonders. We may if we please link it with heredity, with that passing on of characters and habits from parents to child through the comparative, but only comparative and very misleading, simplicity of the germ-cell.
'The man who could penetrate into a brain,' it is said, 'and watch what happens there would very likely see it full of sketched-out movements, there is no evidence that he would see anything else. He would have no more knowledge of what was going on in the corresponding consciousness than we should have of a play were we watching the comings and goings of the actors on the stage without hearing a word of it. If the play were no more than a pantomime the movements of the players would tell us nearly everything about it; if it were a comedy of life and manners they would give us next to nothing.' It has been said, too—and the simile is illuminating—that the brain is like a sort of central telephone exchange, permitting, delaying, or arresting communication. It is an instrument of analysis, of hesitation and of choice; but its office is said to be limited to the transmission and division of movement, movement started by things outside the body and movement started from within the body. The body is the conductor of these movements to and fro between objects acting upon it and objects upon which it acts.
Only in the form of motor contrivances do brain and body, we are told, store up the action of the past. This is a point of great importance in regard to both our own lives and our inheritance from our forerunners. We may distinguish two kinds of memory; one graven as it were in the living stuff of our body; another enshrined and active in the fluent personal history we ourselves most really are. Let us see what the evolutionist philosopher has to tell us about this. Let us illustrate our subject after his fashion.
In the matter of learning by heart, for example, there are two facts to be noted and two memories to be distinguished. When I know a poem by heart and can repeat it I say that I remember it. But I say also, perhaps, that I remember the stages by which I came to learn it. I remember, or may remember, occasion after occasion of my more or less successful repetition of the poem while I was learning it. I can recall, or may recall, step after step of my advance towards perfectly 'remembering' it. When it is learnt I say that it is imprinted on my memory; but I may also say that the steps of my progress towards knowing the poem are in like manner imprinted on my memory. Yet a very little thought shows that these are two kinds of memory, not one; and that there are two kinds of imprinting, not one. The memory of the poem itself has every mark of an acquired habit, even that of the disastrous effect of an interruption. When I have repeated a poem for the twentieth time without mistake I may be thrown out of my declamatory stride by the banging of a door, and become unable either to tell myself how far I had gone in the poem or to pick up its broken thread. About a memory like this there is the mechanical look of an ingrained and almost unconscious habit. It is bodily, like the memory of a sonata for the pianist as he is playing, a memory which seems to him rather in his fingers than in his mind. But the memory of the steps and process by which I gradually learnt my poem is quite different. That is a history, not a habit. Each stage occurred only once; no one was graven into permanence by repetition, indeed no one was, or could be, ever repeated. Each was unique and had its own date in the history of the process and of my enduring life.
Here is a difference indeed to be reckoned with. There is a kind of memory that represents our past to us; and there is another kind (if it is memory at all) that acts it. I say, emphatically, if it is memory at all, this latter; for it does not really preserve the past, it only continues into the present an effect or a result of happenings of the past. In true memory history is preserved; the history of our whole lives is preserved in our true memory. But only the effects or results, only indeed certain effects and results, of the living real happenings in our living and real duration are graven in the body stuff as habits, as, if we like to call them so, habit-memories. The establishing of these memories is an affair of training and practice. The brain and body have to be forced into them; structure has to be shaped and taught, that it may carry on automatically, or all but automatically, some particular mode of action. And we note that the more nearly automatic these habit-memories are the better they work. When the nerve-paths in the structure of the brain and body are beaten smooth by treading and retreading the work goes easily and well.
There is nothing whatever of this kind about the true and unlearnt memory of events in our history, the memory which represents them. But just because the habit-memory is more immediately and constantly useful to us we notice it more. Indeed we frame on it our familiar conception of what memory really is, and come to regard the true memory of spontaneously arising recollections as only a bad example of the other. 'We ignore the fundamental difference,' so we are told, 'between that which has to be built up by repetition and that which is essentially incapable of being repeated.'
No doubt the two intermingle in every-day life and are therefore the more easily confused, not only by our every-day and usually careless selves but even by some careful thinkers. The confusion is dangerous for the thinker and the thinker in consequence becomes dangerous for us. Out of it has come in great part the unreasonable belief that a material brain is the storehouse of immaterial recollections, and that these after becoming either material or, in the physical sense, 'energetic' (as they must be to be stored in a material or 'energetic' way), in some altogether miraculous fashion at times take on consciousness and, as once more immaterial recollections, carry us into our own past. To say that motor-habits, with which when they are established consciousness may have little to do, can be registered in a flexible motor instrument and acted over and over again, is reasonable enough; but that conscious recollections can thus be registered is not only a gratuitous assumption unsupported by the facts of matter or energy or life, but is strictly incredible by any man who really knows and faces those facts. It is better to know and face them with the philosopher, and confess the reality of a spiritual life in which history endures, as well as the reality of a living instrument in which habits are established. No doubt an effort is required if we are to distinguish between the spontaneous and the habitual memories, between the memory of spirit and the habit-memory of its living instrument, the brain and body which together with the spirit are the man; but the effort is well worth making. It gives us a key to unlock many close-shut doors. When we try to learn something (as we are now about to do) concerning the problem of the transmission, through the succession of germ-cells, of the characters that mark out men—the problem of heredity—we find a conspicuous and very interesting use for it. But it has many uses besides that. We can use it with advantage in dealing with all the problems concerning the relations of spirit with matter.
Before we go on to deal with heredity we should note the value for our own lives of our ability to establish habits at all, to inscribe records of action in our instruments of body and brain which shall be capable of an almost automatic repetition. That is the way in which intellectual and bodily skill makes progress. We build a stairway too for our minds and spirits as well as for our bodies, when we lay down step after step of habitual action, handing over to it the carrying-on of what at first we had to think out, and then by degrees learnt to do skilfully and well almost without thought at all. That is the stairway by which the pianist advances towards a perfect execution of his music and the skater mounts towards perfect execution of a figure which at first was beyond his power. Throughout our lives we are handing actions over to be conducted by our bodies and brains as effects of work done consciously before, to be acted over and over again and pass beyond the need of conscious intervention, and in the end to be carried on the better without that aid. A man skates, or plays his violin, or writes a poem, or rides a horse, or walks, or dances, all the better when and if he does not have to think about the appropriate movements of his hands or feet or legs, or the necessary letters of his words, to all of which he once had to give minute attention. Perceptive and creative consciousness is thus set free. His mind, in its originality of creation and perceiving, is enabled to pour itself into the instrumental habit it has laid down and infuse it with his spirit, his poetic, musical, or athletic spirit. He may endow his motor instrument with his graces now that it works without his conscious aid.