Life and Habit

sition which we left at the

ut rhyme or reason)-the manner in which it prepares structures of the most surpassing intricacy and delicacy, for which it has no use at the time when it prepares them-and the

of years old, and as imbued with an intense though unconscious memory of all that it has done sufficiently often to have made a permanent impression; if this be so, we can answer the above questions perfectly well. The creature goes through so many intermediate stages between its earliest state as life at all, and its latest development, for the simplest of all reasons, namely, because this is the road by which it has always hitherto travelled to its present differenti

our own. If we could see some of our forefathers a million years back, we should find them unlike anything we could call man; if we were to go back

hich he has grown; and that the fish has lived himself into manhood, not as we live out our little life, living, and living, and living till we die, but living by pulsations, so to speak; living so far, and after a certain time going into a new body, and throwing off the old; making his body much as we make anything that we want, and have often made already, that is to say, as nearly as may be in the same way as he made i

fishes; all these descendants, whether human or otherwise, being but the way in which the creature (which was a pair of fishes when we first took it in hand though it was a hundred thousand other things as well, and had been all manner of other things before any part of it became fishlike) continues to exist-its manner, in fact, of growing. As the manner in which the human body grows is by the

gain, always the same men and women, if he could see them at all, and if the whole human race did not appear to him as a sort of spreading and lichen-like growth over the earth, not differentiated at all into individuals? With the help of a microscope and the intelligent exercise of his reason, he would in time conceive the truth. He would put Covent Garden Market on the field of his microscope, and would perhaps write a great deal of nonsense about the unerring "instinct" which taught each costermonger to recognise his own basket or his own donkey-cart; and this, mutatis mutandis, is what we are getting to do as regards our own bodies. What I wish is, to make the same sort of step in an upward direction which has already been taken in a downward one, and to show reason for thinking that we are only component atoms of a single compound creature, LIFE, which has probably a distinct conception of its own

d with faith that it must be considered as the beginning of LIFE, or as to what such fa

hat earlier date when it was the very beginning of life at all, which same creature it still is, whether as man or ovum, and hence imbued, so far as time and circumstance allow, with all its memories. Surely this is no strained hypothesis; for the mere fact that the germ, from the earliest moment that we are able to detect it, appears to b

of willing; we feel continually without knowing that we feel, and our attention is hourly arrested without our attention being arrested by the arresting of our attention. Memory is no less capable of unconscious exercise, and on becoming intense through frequent repetition, vanishes no less completely as a conscious action of the mind than knowledge and volition. We must all be aware of instances in which it is plain we must have remembered, without being in the smallest degree conscious of remembering. Is it then absurd to suppose that our past existences have been repeated on such a vast number of occasions

ess something happens to it which has not usually happened to its

ch it would therefore remember, if it was possessed of the kind of memory which we are her

affle that memory, or which have rarely or never been included in the category of its recollections, it acts precisely as

t in that state; we cannot now remember having grown the eyes which we undoubtedly did grow, much less can we remember whether or not we then remembered having grown them before; but it is probable that our memory was then, in respect of our previous existences as embryos, as much more intense than it is now in respect of our childhood, as our power of acquiring a new language wa

e of its continuity with, and therefore of its identity with, the two impregnate ova from which it has sprung, than in the fact that we have no sense of our continuity with ourselves as infants. If then, there is no à priori objection to this view, and if the impregnate ovum acts in such a manner as to carry the

d when hens began to sit upon them. The inference would seem almost irresistible,-that the second egg remembers the course pursued by the eggs from which it has sprung, and of w

lie beyond the power of philosophic explanation, but are perhaps most answerable by considering the conceit of man, and his habit, persisted in during many ages, of ignoring all that does not remind him of himself, or hurt him, or profit him; also by considering the use of language, which, if it is to serve at all, can only do so by ignoring a vast number of facts which gradually drop out of mind from being out of sight. But, perhaps, after all, the real reason is, that the egg does not cackle when

ously developed as to be part of the present form of their identity. A's meaning is seen to be precisely the same as B and C's meaning; A's personal appearance is, to all intents and purposes, B and C's personal appearance; it would seem,

at we are compelled irresistibly to do so, unless, that is to say, we would think very differently concerning personal identity than we do at present. We found it impossible to hold the ordinary common sense opinions concerning personal identity, without admitting that we are personally identical wit

n of outside matter by living orga

forefathers, nothing can harm it. As long as the organism is familiar with the position, and remembers its antecedents, nothing can assimilate it. It must be fi

any living organism be kept for but a very short time in a position wholly different from what it has been accustomed to in its own life, and in the lives of its forefathers, it commonly loses its memories completely, once a

in a few seconds, it discovers the environment to be unfamiliar; it therefore gets frightened, loses its head, is carried into the gizzard, and comminuted among the gizzard stones. The hen succeeded in putting it into a position with which it was unfamiliar; from this it was an easy stage to assimilating it entirely. Once a

customed to eat, and let us have no less liberty than we are accustomed to have, and last, but not least, let us not be disturbed in thinking as we have been accustomed to think, and the vast majority of mankind will be very fairly contented-all plants and animals will certainly be so. This would seem

oublesome as it can, till it is in some way comforted. Indeed, the law against cruelty to animals is but an example of the hatred we feel on seeing even dumb creatures put into positions with which they are not familiar. We hate this so much for ourselves, that we will not tolerate it for other creatures if we can possibly avoid it. So again, it is said, that when Andromeda and Perseus had travelled but a li

when it was beaten-it might have stuck in the hen's stomach and begun to grow; in this case it would have assimilated a good part of the hen before many days were over; for hens are not familiar with grains that grow in their stomachs, and unless the one in question was as strongminded for a hen, as the grain that could avoid being assimilated would be for a grai

like what it had often been in before. That is to say, it would be in a damp, dark, quiet place, not too far from light, and with decaying matter around it. It woul

ur forefathers have been unfamiliar, or are you to put me into one about which my own have been in like manner ignorant?

iness, or is not in such a false position as to be compelled to be aware of being so. It was, doubtless, owing to the recognition of this fact, that some Eastern nations, as we are told by Herodotus

continuity without sudden break as the underlying principle of identity, we forget that this involves personal identity between all the beings who are in one chain of descent, the numbers of such beings, whether in succession, or contemporaneous, going for nothi

sonality of all the worms and grain which the fowls have assimilated from their leaving the eggshell; but the personalities of these last do not coun

it is only with a mental reserve-and with no greater mental reserve-that we predicate absolute identity concerning any living being for two consecutive moments; and it is certainly as free from quibble to say to two fowls and a dozen eggs, "you are the two eggs I had on my kitchen shelf twelve months ago," as to say to a man, "you are the

oes both unite with other identities, so that a single new identity is the result, and does also split itself up into several identities, so that the one becomes many. This is plain from the manner in which the male and female sexual elements unite to form a single ovum, which we observe to be instinct with the memories of both the individuals from which it has been derived; and there is the additional consideration, that each of the element

these consisting of cells separated from the body" (i.e., separated from the bodies of each parent) "containing the germs of every part" (i.e., consisting of the seeds or germs from which each individual cell of the coming organism will be developed-these seeds or germs having been shed by each individual cell of the parent forms), "and capable of being fused completely together" (i.e., so at least I gather, capable of being fused completely, in the same way as the cells of our own bodies ar

f the young with the female parent is in many respects so complete, as to need no enforcing, in spite of the entrance into the offspring of all the elements derived from the

o," it follows that we mean, "you are now those two eggs;" just as when we say to a person, "you were such and such a boy twenty years ago," we mean, "you are now that boy, or all that represents him;" it would seem, then, that in like manner we should say to the two fowls, "you are the four fowls who between them laid the two eggs from which

ns, from the eggs which they in due course have laid. The original eggs being out of sight are out of mind, and it is without an effort that we acquiesce in the assertion,-that the doze

dentity," i.e., either of the two eggs or the four fowls, as the case may be; this will put the eggs and the fowls, as it

ickens, or eggs, or fowls; in fact, that anything is part of the present phase of any past identity in the line of its ancestry. But as regards the actual memory of such identity (unconscious memory, but still clearly memory), we observe that the egg, as long as it is an egg, appears to have a

blunders which we made upon that occasion when we come to a corresponding age, proves most incontestably that we remember our past existences, though too utterly to be capable of introspection in the matter. So, when we grow wisdom teeth, at the age it may be of one or two and twenty, it is plain we remember our past existences at that age, however completely we may have forgotten th

itself into a chrysalis before; for when the time comes for it to do this, it is at no loss, as it would certainly be if the position was unfamiliar, but it immediately begins doing what it did when last it was in a like case, repeating the process as nearly as th

e some sort of dim power of recollecting what happened to them yesterday, or the day before; yet it is plain their main memory goes back to the corresponding day of their last existence in their present form, the chrysalis remembering what happened to it on such a day far more practically, though less consciously, than what happened to it yesterday; and naturally, for yesterday is but once, and its past existences have be

ey advance in the scale of life), and being able to foresee about as much as they could foresee in their past existences, sometimes more and sometimes less. As with memory, so with prescience. The higher they advance in the scale of life the more prescient they are. It must, of course, be remembered, and will later on be more fully dwelt upon, that no offspring can remember anything which ha

osing it capable of overleaping a long time of abeyance, and thus of enabling each impregnate ovum, or each grain, to remember what it did when last in a like condition, and to go on remembering the corresponding period of its prior deve