It is right to say either that heredity and memory are one and the same
thing, or that heredity is a mode of memory, or that heredity is due to
memory, if it is thereby intended that animals can only grow in virtue of
being able to recollect. Memory and heredity are the means of preserving
experiences, of building them together, of uniting a mass of often
confused detail into homogeneous and consistent mind and matter, but they
do not originate. The increment in each generation, at the moment of its
being an increment, has nothing to do with memory or heredity, it is due
to the chances and changes of this mortal state. Design comes in at the
moment that a living being either feels a want and forecasts for its
gratification, or utilises some waif or stray of accident on the
principle, which underlies all development, that enough is a little more
than what one has. It is the business of memory and heredity to conserve
and to transmit from one generation to another that which has been
furnished by design, or by accident designedly turned to account.
It is therefore not right to say, as some have supposed me to mean, that
we can do nothing which we do not remember to have done before. We can
do nothing very difficult or complicated which we have not done before,
unless as by a tour de force, once in a way, under exceptionally
favourable circumstances, but our whole conscious life is the performance
of acts either imperfectly remembered or not remembered at all. There
are rain-drops of new experiences in every life which are not within the
hold of our memory or past experience, and, as each one of these
rain-drops came originally from something outside, the whole river of our
life has in its inception nothing to do with memory, though it is only
through memory that the rain-drops of new experience can ever unite to
form a full flowing river of variously organised life and intelligence.