VII. We should also expect that the memory of animals, as regards their
earlier existences, was solely stimulated by association. For we find,
from Prof. Bain, that “actions, sensations, and states of feeling
occurring together, or in close succession, tend to grow together or
cohere in such a way that when any one of them is afterwards presented to
the mind, the others are apt to be brought up in idea” (“The Senses and
the Intellect,” 2d ed. 1864, p. 332). And Prof. Huxley says (“Elementary
Lessons in Physiology,” 5th ed. 1872, p. 306), “It may be laid down as a
rule that if any two mental states be called up together, or in
succession, with due frequency and vividness, the subsequent production
of the one of them will suffice to call up the other, _and that whether
we desire it or not_.” I would go one step further, and would say not
only whether we desire it or not, but _whether we are aware that the idea
has ever before been called up in our minds or not_. I should say that I
have quoted both the above passages from Mr. Darwin’s “Expression of the
Emotions” (p. 30, ed. 1872).
We should, therefore, expect that when the offspring found itself in the
presence of objects which had called up such and such ideas for a
sufficient number of generations, that is to say, “with due frequency and
vividness”—it being of the same age as its parents were, and generally in
like case as when the ideas were called up in the minds of the
parents—the same ideas should also be called up in the minds of the
offspring “_whether they desire it or not_;” and, I would say also,
“whether they recognise the ideas as having ever before been present to
them or not.”
I think we might also expect that no other force, save that of
association, should have power to kindle, so to speak, into the flame of
action the atomic spark of memory, which we can alone suppose to be
transmitted from one generation to another.
That both plants and animals do as we should expect of them in this
respect is plain, not only from the performance of the most intricate and
difficult actions—difficult both physically and intellectually—at an age,
and under circumstances which preclude all possibility of what we call
instruction, but from the fact that deviations from the parental
instinct, or rather the recurrence of a memory, unless in connection with
the accustomed train of associations, is of comparatively rare
occurrence; the result, commonly, of some one of the many memories about
which we know no more than we do of the memory which enables a cat to
find her way home after a hundred-mile journey by train, and shut up in a
hamper, or, perhaps even more commonly, of abnormal treatment.
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