APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS—THE ASSIMILATION OF OUTSIDE MATTER.
LET us now return to the position which we left at the end of the fourth
chapter. We had then concluded that the self-development of each new
life in succeeding generations—the various stages through which it passes
(as it would appear, at first sight, without 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 many elaborate instincts which it exhibits immediately on, and indeed
before, birth—all point in the direction of habit and memory, as the only
causes which could produce them.
Why should the embryo of any animal go through so many
stages—embryological allusions to forefathers of a widely different type?
And why, again, should the germs of the same kind of creature always go
through the same stages? If the germ of any animal now living is, in its
simplest state, but part of the personal identity of one of the original
germs of all life whatsoever, and hence, if any now living organism must
be considered without quibble as being itself millions 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 differentiation; this is the road it knows, and into every turn
and up or down of which, it has been guided by the force of circumstances
and the balance of considerations. These, acting in such a manner for
such and such a time, caused it to travel in such and such fashion, which
fashion having been once sufficiently established, becomes a matter of
trick or routine to which the creature is still a slave, and in which it
confirms itself by repetition in each succeeding generation.
Thus I suppose, as almost every one else, so far as I can gather,
supposes, that we are descended from ancestors of widely different
characters to 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 fifty million years, we should find them, it may be,
fishes pure and simple, breathing through gills, and unable to exist for
many minutes in air.
It is admitted on all hands that there is more or less analogy between
the embryological development of the individual, and the various phases
or conditions of life through which his forefathers have passed. I
suppose, then, that the fish of fifty million years back and the man of
to-day are one single living being, in the same sense, or very nearly so,
as the octogenarian is one single living being with the infant from which
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 it last time;
also that he is as unable as we ourselves are, to make what he wants
without going through the usual processes with which he is familiar, even
though there may be other better ways of doing the same thing, which
might not be far to seek, if the creature thought them better, and had
not got so accustomed to such and such a method, that he would only be
baffled and put out by any attempt to teach him otherwise.
And this oneness of personality between ourselves and our supposed
fishlike ancestors of many millions of years ago, must hold also between
each individual one of us and the single pair of fishes from which we are
each (on the present momentary hypothesis) descended; and it must also
hold between such pair of fishes and all their descendants besides man,
it may be some of them birds, and others 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 continued birth and death, in our single lifetime, of many
generations of cells which we know nothing about, but say that we have
had only one hand or foot all our lives, when we have really had many,
one after another; so this huge compound creature, LIFE, probably thinks
itself but one single animal whose component cells, as it may imagine,
grow, and it may be waste and repair, but do not die.
It may be that the cells of which we are built up, and which we have
already seen must be considered as separate persons, each one of them
with a life and memory of its own—it may be that these cells reckon time
in a manner inconceivable by us, so that no word can convey any idea of
it whatever. What may to them appear a long and painful process may to
us be so instantaneous as to escape us altogether, we wanting some
microscope to show us the details of time. If, in like manner, we were
to allow our imagination to conceive the existence of a being as much in
need of a microscope for our time and affairs as we for those of our own
component cells, the years would be to such a being but as the winkings
or the twinklings of an eye. Would he think, then, that all the ants and
flies of one wink were different from those of the next? or would he not
rather believe that they were always the same flies, and, again, 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 personality though
none whatever of ours, more than we of our own units. I wish also to
show reason for thinking that this creature, LIFE, has only come to be
what it is, by the same sort of process as that by which any human art or
manufacture is developed, _i.e._, through constantly doing the same thing
over and over again, beginning from something which is barely
recognisable as faith, or as the desire to know, or do, or live at all,
and as to the origin of which we are in utter darkness,—and growing till
it is first conscious of effort, then conscious of power, then powerful
with but little consciousness, and finally, so powerful and so charged
with memory as to be absolutely without all self-consciousness whatever,
except as regards its latest phases in each of its many differentiations,
or when placed in such new circumstances as compel it to choose between
death and a reconsideration of its position.
No conjecture can be hazarded as to how the smallest particle of matter
became so imbued with faith that it must be considered as the beginning
of LIFE, or as to what such faith is, except that it is the very essence
of all things, and that it has no foundation.
In this way, then, I conceive we can fairly transfer the experience of
the race to the individual, without any other meaning to our words than
what they would naturally suggest; that is to say, that there is in every
impregnate ovum a _bonâ fide_ memory, which carries it back not only to
the time when it was last an impregnate ovum, but to that 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 be so perfectly familiar with
its business, acts with so little hesitation and so little introspection
or reference to principles, this alone should incline us to suspect that
it must be armed with that which, so far as we observe in daily life, can
alone ensure such a result—to wit, long practice, and the memory of many
similar performances.
The difficulty is, that we are conscious of no such memory in our own
persons, and beyond the one great proof of memory given by the actual
repetition of the performance—and of some of the latest deviations from
the ordinary performance (and this proof ought in itself, one would have
thought, to outweigh any save the directest evidence to the contrary) we
can detect no symptom of any such mental operation as recollection on the
part of the embryo. On the other hand, we have seen that we know most
intensely those things that we are least conscious of knowing; we will
most intensely what we are least conscious 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 that the germ, linked on to all preceding
germs, and, by once having become part of their identity, imbued with all
their memories, remembers too intensely to be conscious of remembering,
and works on with the same kind of unconsciousness with which we play, or
walk, or read, until something unfamiliar happens to us? and is it not
singularly in accordance with this view that consciousness should begin
with that part of the creature’s performance with which it is least
familiar, as having repeated it least often—that is to say, in our own
case, with the commencement of our human life—at birth, or thereabouts?
It is certainly noteworthy that the embryo is never at a loss, unless
something happens to it which has not usually happened to its
forefathers, and which in the nature of things it cannot remember.
When events are happening to it which have ordinarily happened to its
forefathers, and which it would therefore remember, if it was possessed
of the kind of memory which we are here attributing to it, _it acts
precisely as it would act if it were possessed of such memory_.
When, on the other hand, events are happening to it which, if it has the
kind of memory we are attributing to it, would baffle that memory, or
which have rarely or never been included in the category of its
recollections, _it acts precisely as a creature acts when its
recollection is disturbed_, _or when it is required to do something which
it has never done before_.
We cannot remember having been in the embryonic stage, but we do not on
that account deny that we ever were in such a stage at all. On a little
reflection it will appear no more reasonable to maintain that, when we
were in the embryonic stage, we did not remember our past existences,
than to say that we never were embryos at all. We cannot remember what
we did or did not recollect 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 was greater when we
were one or two years old, than when we were twenty. And why should this
power of acquiring languages be greater at two years than at twenty, but
that for many generations we have learnt to speak at about this age, and
hence look to learn to do so again on reaching it, just as we looked to
making eyes, when the time came at which we were accustomed to make them.
If we once had the memory of having been infants (which we had from day
to day during infancy), and have lost it, we may well have had other and
more intense memories which we have lost no less completely. Indeed,
there is nothing more extraordinary in the supposition that the
impregnate ovum has an intense sense 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
strongest conviction that it must have already on many occasions done
what it is doing now, and that it has a vivid though unconscious
recollection of what all, and more especially its nearer, ancestral ova
did under similar circumstances, there would seem to be little doubt what
conclusion we ought to come to.
A hen’s egg, for example, as soon as the hen begins to sit, sets to work
immediately to do as nearly as may be what the two eggs from which its
father and mother were hatched did 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 whose
present identity it is unquestionably a part-phase; it also seems
irresistibly forced upon us to believe that the intensity of this memory
is the secret of its easy action.
It has, I believe, been often remarked, that a hen is only an egg’s way
of making another egg. Every creature must be allowed to “run” its own
development in its own way; the egg’s way may seem a very roundabout
manner of doing things; but it _is_ its way, and it is one of which man,
upon the whole, has no great reason to complain. Why the fowl should be
considered more alive than the egg, and why it should be said that the
hen lays the egg, and not that the egg lays the hen, these are questions
which 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 it has laid the hen, and that it works towards the hen
with gradual and noiseless steps, which we can watch if we be so minded;
whereas, we can less easily watch the steps which lead from the hen to
the egg, but hear a noise, and see an egg where there was no egg.
Therefore, we say, the development of the fowl from the egg bears no sort
of resemblance to that of the egg from the fowl, whereas, in truth, a
hen, or any other living creature, is only the primordial cell’s way of
going back upon itself.
But to return. We see an egg, A, which evidently knows its own meaning
perfectly well, and we know that a twelvemonth ago there were two other
such eggs, B and C, which have now disappeared, but from which we know A
to have been so continuously 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, then, unreasonable to deny
that A is only B and C come back, with such modification as they may have
incurred since their disappearance; and that, in spite of any such
modification, they remember in A perfectly well what they did as B and C.
We have considered the question of personal identity so as to see
whether, without abuse of terms, we can claim it as existing between any
two generations of living agents (and if between two, then between any
number up to infinity), and we found that we were not only at liberty to
claim this, but that 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 with all our forefathers, who have
successfully assimilated outside matter to themselves, and by
assimilation imbued it with all their own memories; we being nothing else
than this outside matter so assimilated and imbued with such memories.
This, at least, will, I believe, balance the account correctly.
A few remarks upon the assimilation of outside matter by living organisms
may perhaps be hazarded here.
As long as any living organism can maintain itself in a position to which
it has been accustomed, more or less nearly, both in its own life and in
those of its 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 first dislodged from the position with which
it is familiar, as being able to remember it, before mischief can happen
to it. Nothing can assimilate living organism.
On the other hand, the moment living organism loses sight of its own
position and antecedents, it is liable to immediate assimilation, and to
be thus familiarised with the position and antecedents of some other
creature. If 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 and for ever; but it must immediately acquire new ones,
for nothing can know nothing; everything must remember either its own
antecedents, or some one else’s. And as nothing can know nothing, so
nothing can believe in nothing.
A grain of corn, for example, has never been accustomed to find itself in
a hen’s stomach—neither it nor its forefathers. For a grain so placed
leaves no offspring, and hence cannot transmit its experience. The first
minute or so after being eaten, it may think it has just been sown, and
begin to prepare for sprouting, but 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 assimilated, the grain ceases to remember any more as a
grain, but becomes initiated into all that happens to, and has happened
to, fowls for countless ages. Then it will attack all other grains
whenever it sees them; there is no such persecutor of grain, as another
grain when it has once fairly identified itself with a hen.
We may remark in passing, that if anything be once familiarised with
anything, it is content. The only things we really care for in life are
familiar things; let us have the means of doing what we have been
accustomed to do, of dressing as we have been accustomed to dress, of
eating as we have been accustomed 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 to suggest a possible doctrine of
a future state; concerning which we may reflect that though, after we
die, we cease to be familiar with ourselves, we shall nevertheless become
immediately familiar with many other histories compared with which our
present life must then seem intolerably uninteresting.
This is the reason why a very heavy and sudden shock to the nervous
system does not pain, but kills outright at once; while one with which
the system can, at any rate, try to familiarise itself is exceedingly
painful. We cannot bear unfamiliarity. The part that is treated in a
manner with which it is not familiar cries immediately to the brain—its
central government—for help, and makes itself generally as troublesome 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 little way from the rock where
Andromeda had so long been chained, she began upbraiding him with the
loss of her dragon, who, on the whole, she said, had been very good to
her. The only things we really hate are unfamiliar things, and though
nature would not be nature if she did not cross our love of the familiar
with a love also of the unfamiliar, yet there can be no doubt which of
the two principles is master.
Let us return, however, to the grain of corn. If the grain had had
presence of mind to avoid being carried into the gizzard stones, as many
seeds do which are carried for hundreds of miles in birds’ stomachs, and
if it had persuaded itself that the novelty of the position was not
greater than it could very well manage to put up with—if, in fact, it had
not known 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 grain, the hen would soon cease to take an interest in her
antecedents. It is to be doubted, however, whether a grain has ever been
grown which has had strength of mind enough to avoid being set off its
balance on finding itself inside a hen’s gizzard. For living organism is
the creature of habit and routine, and the inside of a gizzard is not in
the grain’s programme.
Suppose, then, that the grain, instead of being carried into the gizzard,
had stuck in the hen’s throat and choked her. It would now find itself
in a position very 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 would therefore know perfectly
well what to do, and would begin to grow until disturbed, and again put
into a position with which it might, very possibly, be unfamiliar.
The great question between vast masses of living organism is simply this:
“Am I to put you into a position with which your forefathers have been
unfamiliar, or are you to put me into one about which my own have been in
like manner ignorant?” Man is only the dominant animal on the earth,
because he can, as a general rule, settle this question in his own
favour.
The only manner in which an organism, which has once forgotten its
antecedents, can ever recover its memory, is by being assimilated by a
creature of its own kind; one, moreover, which knows its business, 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, were in the habit of eating
their deceased parents—for matter which has once been assimilated by any
identity or personality, becomes for all practical purposes part of the
assimilating personality.
The bearing of the above will become obvious when we return, as we will
now do, to the question of personal identity. The only difficulty would
seem to lie in our unfamiliarity with the real meanings which we attach
to words in daily use. Hence, while recognising 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 nothing at all. Thus we take two eggs, one
male and one female, and hatch them; after some months the pair of fowls
so hatched, having succeeded in putting a vast quantity of grain and
worms into false positions, become full-grown, breed, and produce a dozen
new eggs.
Two live fowls and a dozen eggs are the present phase of the personality
of the two original eggs. They are also part of the present phase of the
personality of all the worms and grain which the fowls have assimilated
from their leaving the eggshell; but the personalities of these last do
not count; they have lost their grain and worm memories, and are instinct
with the memorises of the whole ancestry of the creature which has
assimilated them.
We cannot, perhaps, strictly say that the two fowls and the dozen new
eggs actually _are_ the two original eggs; these two eggs are no longer
in existence, and we see the two birds themselves which were hatched from
them. A bird cannot be called an egg without an abuse of terms.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful how far we should not say this, for 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 child whom I
remember thirty years ago in your mother’s arms.” In either case we
mean, “you have been continually putting other organisms into a false
position, and then assimilating them, ever since I last saw you, while
nothing has yet occurred to put _you_ into such a false position as to
have made you lose the memory of your antecedents.”
It would seem perfectly fair, therefore, to say to any egg of the twelve,
or to the two fowls and the whole twelve eggs together, “you were a
couple of eggs twelve months ago; twelve months before that you were four
eggs;” and so on, _ad infinitum_, the number neither of the ancestors nor
of the descendants counting for anything, and continuity being the sole
thing looked to. From daily observation we are familiar with the fact
that identity does 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 elements whose fusion goes to make up the
impregnate ovum, is held by some to be itself composed of a fused mass of
germs, which stand very much in the same relation to the spermatozoon and
ovum, as the living cellular units of which we are composed do to
ourselves—that is to say, are living independent organisms, which
probably have no conception of the existence of the spermatozoon nor of
the ovum, more than the spermatozoon or ovum have of theirs.
This, at least, is what I gather from Mr. Darwin’s provisional theory of
Pangenesis; and, again, from one of the concluding sentences in his
“Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation,” where, asking the question why
two sexes have been developed, he replies that the answer seems to lie
“in the great good which is derived from the fusion of two somewhat
differentiated individuals. With the exception,” he continues, “or the
lowest organisms this is possible only by means of the sexual
elements—_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 are fused, and thus, of forming a single living
personality in the case of both the male and female element; which
elements are themselves capable of a second fusion so as to form the
impregnate ovum). This single impregnate ovum, then, is a single
identity that has taken the place of and come up in the room of two
distinct personalities, each of whose characteristics it, to a certain
extent, partakes, and which consist, each one of them, of the fused germs
of a vast mass of other personalities.
As regards the dispersion of one identity into many, this also is a
matter of daily observation in the case of all female creatures that are
with egg or young; the identity of 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 male
parent, and of the gradual separation of the two identities, which
becomes more and more complete, till in time it is hard to conceive that
they can ever have been united.
Numbers, therefore, go for nothing; and, as far as identity or continued
personality goes, it is as fair to say to the two fowls, above referred
to, “you were four fowls twelve months ago,” as it is to say to a dozen
eggs, “you were two eggs twelve months ago.” But here a difficulty meets
us; for if we say, “you were two eggs twelve months ago,” 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 you sprung.” But it may be
that all these four fowls are still to be seen running about; we should
be therefore saying, “you two fowls are really not yourselves only, but
you are also the other four fowls into the bargain;” and this might be
philosophically true, and might, perhaps, be considered so, but for the
convenience of the law courts.
The difficulty would seem to arise from the fact that the eggs must
disappear before fowls can be hatched from them, whereas, the hens so
hatched may outlive the development of other hens, 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 dozen new eggs actually are the two original ones.
But the original four fowls being still in sight, cannot be ignored, we
only, therefore, see the new ones as growths from the original ones.
The strict rendering of the facts should be, “you are part of the present
phase of the identity of such and such a past identity,” _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 were, into the same box, and will meet both the
philosophical and legal requirement of the case, only it is a little
long.
So far then, as regards actual identity of personality; which, we find,
will allow us to say, that eggs are part of the present phase of a
certain past identity, whether of other eggs, or of fowls, or chickens,
and in like, manner that chickens are part of the present phase of
certain other chickens, 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 very distinct recollection of having been an egg
before, and the fowl of having been a fowl before, but that neither egg
nor fowl appear to have any recollection of any other stage of their past
existences, than the one corresponding to that in which they are
themselves at the moment existing.
So we, at six or seven years old, have no recollection of ever having
been infants, much less of having been embryos; but the manner in which
we shed our teeth and make new ones, and the way in which we grow
generally, making ourselves for the most part exceedingly like what we
made ourselves, in the person of some one of our nearer ancestors, and
not unfrequently repeating the very 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 the
earlier stages of our present existence. It may be said that it is the
jaw which remembers, and not we, but it seems hard to deny the jaw a
right of citizenship in our personality; and in the case of a growing
boy, every part of him seems to remember equally well, and if every part
of him combined does not make _him_, there would seem but little use in
continuing the argument further.
In like manner, a caterpillar appears not to remember having been an egg,
either in its present or any past existence. It has no concern with eggs
as soon as it is hatched, but it clearly remembers not only having been a
caterpillar before, but also having turned 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 the environment will allow, taking every step in the
same order as last time, and doing its work with that ease and perfection
which we observe to belong to the force of habit, and to be utterly
incompatible with any other supposition than that of long long practice.
Once having become a chrysalis, its memory of its caterpillarhood appears
to leave it for good and all, not to return until it again assumes the
shape of a caterpillar by process of descent. Its memory now overleaps
all past modifications, and reverts to the time when it was last what it
is now, and though it is probable that both caterpillar and chrysalis, on
any given day of their existence in either of these forms, have 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 been
legion. Hence, it prepares its wings in due time, doing each day what it
did on the corresponding day of its last chrysalishood and at length
becoming a moth; whereon its circumstances are so changed that it loses
all sense of its identity as a chrysalis (as completely as we, for
precisely the same reason, lose all sense of our identity with ourselves
as infants), and remembers nothing but its past existences as a moth.
We observe this to hold throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms. In
any one phase of the existence of the lower animals, we observe that they
remember the corresponding stage, and a little on either side of it, of
all their past existences for a very great length of time. In their
present existence they remember a little behind the present moment
(remembering more and more the higher they 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
happens to its parents after it and its parents have parted company; and
this is why there is, perhaps, more irregularity as regards our
wisdom-teeth than about anything else that we grow; inasmuch as it must
not uncommonly have happened in a long series of generations, that the
offspring has been born before the parents have grown their wisdom-teeth,
and thus there will be faults in the memory.
Is there, then, anything in memory, as we observe it in ourselves and
others, under circumstances in which we shall agree in calling it memory
pure and simple without ambiguity of terms—is there anything in memory
which bars us from supposing 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 developments throughout
the whole period of its present growth, though such memory has entirely
failed as regards the interim between any two corresponding periods, and
is not consciously recognised by the individual as being exercised at
all?