Unconscious Memory

o Professor He

his and the manner in which the component cells of our bodies unite to form our single individuality, of which it is not likely they have a conception, and with which they have probably only the same partial and imperfect sympathy as we, the body corporate, have with them. In the articles above alluded to I separated the organic from the inorganic, and when I came to rewrite them, I found that this could not be done, and that I must reconstruct what I had written. I was at work on this-to which I hope to

tage machinery is worked. If two men so placed, after years of reflection, arrive independently of one another at an identical conclusion as regards the manner in which this machinery must have been invented and perfected, it is natural that each should take a deep interest in the arguments of the other, and be anxious to put them forward with the utmost possibl

ts in past generations when we were in the persons of our forefathers-each individual life adding a small (but so small, in any one lifetime, as to be hardly appreciable) amount of new experience to the general store of memory; that we have thus got into certain habits which we can now rarely break; and that we do much of what we do u

memory is, and this I did not venture to do. I confined myself to saying that whatever memory was, heredity was also. Professor Hering adds that memory is

physics of memory which has been most generally ado

on has been originally attached to the motion of certain fibres. Its reproduction or reco

ag

the action of objects. I have, therefore, admitted as probable that the state of the fibres on which an object has acted is not precisely the same after this action as

one out of the other, "in what we see as a continuous, though it may be at times a very troubled, stream" [55] but I maintained that the identity between two successive generations was of essentially the same kind as that existing between an infant and an octogenarian. I thus left personal identity unexplained, though insisting that it wa

ich have been communicated from molecule to molecule of the nerve fibres, and which go on communicating each one of them its own peculiar characteristic elements to the new matter which we introduce into the body by way of nutrition. These vibrations may be so gentle as to be imper

see the following remarkable passage in Mind for the

ely overwhelmed, it stopped, an immovable projection stagnated to death-like rigidity. Thus for hours, perhaps, it remained stationary, one of many such rays of some of the many kinds of protoplasmic stars. By degrees, then, or perhaps quite suddenly, help would come to it from foreign but congruous sources. I

milated substance, to the effacement of the vibrations or rhythms heretofore existing in this last; and suitability for food will depend upon whether the rhythms of the substance eaten are such as to flow harmoniously into and chime in with those of the body which has eaten it, or whether they will refuse to act in concert with the new rhythms with which they have become associated, and w

e, so Professor Hering resolves the phenomena of personal identity into the phenomena of a living mechanism whose equilibriu

e accession of vibration from exterior objects. On the occurrence of such stimulus, that is to say, when a vibration of a suitable rhythm from without concurs with one within the body so as to augment it, the agitation may gather such strength that the touch, as it were, is given to a house of cards, and the whole comes toppling over. This toppling over is what we call action; and when it is the result of the disturbance of certain usual arrangements in certain usual ways, we call it the habitual development and instinctive characteristics of the race. In either case, then, whether we consider the continued identity of the individual in what we call his single life, or those features in his offspring which we refer to heredity, the

ose who have read "Life and Habit" may remember, I suggested that the food prepared in the stomachs of the nurse-bees, with which the neuter working bees are fed, might thus acquire a quasi-seminal character, and be made a means of co

of action as going on within a compass which no unaided eye can detect by reason of its littleness, so that we are carried into a fairy land with which sober people should have nothing to do, it may be answered that the case of light affords us an example of

ed with a succession of periodical movements, recurring regularly at equal intervals, no less than five hundred millions of millions of times in a second; that it is by such movements communicated to the nerves of our eyes that we see; nay, more, that it is the difference in the frequency of their recurrence which affects us with the sense of the diversity of colour; that, for instance, in acquiring the sensation of redness, our eyes are affected four hundred and eighty-two mill

ot know. He knows whether his eye is being struck five hundred millions of millions of times, or only four hundred and eighty-two millions of millions of times. He thus shows that he estimates or counts each set of vibrations, and registers them according to his results. If a man writes upon the back of a British Museum blotting-pad of the common nonpareil pattern, on which there are some thousands of small spaces each differing in colour from that which is immediately next to it, his eye will, nevertheless, without an effort assign its true colour to each one of these spaces. This implies that he is all the time counting and taking tally of the difference in the numbers of the vibrations from each one of the small spaces in question. Yet the mind that is capable of such stupendous computations as these so long as it knows not

ries, it may be replied that the vibrations of the light proceeding from the objects that surround us traverse one another by the millions of millions every second yet in no way interfere with one another.

memory, want of vigour was due to want of memory. Thus I was led to connect memory with the phenomena of hybridism and of old age; to show that the sterility of certain animals under domestication is only a phase of, and of a piece with, the very common sterility of hybrids-phenomena which at first sight have no connection either with each other or with memory, but the connection between which will never be lost sight of by those who have once laid hold of it. I also

. It is plain he accepts evolution, but it does not appear that he sees how fatal his theory is to any view of evolution except a teleological

will not affect the position I took up in "Life and Habit." In that book I have maintained nothing more than that whatever memory is heredity is also. I am not committed to the vibration theory of memor

and a few hints in the extracts from Mr. Patrick Mathew which I have quoted in "Evolution, Old and New," are all that