An objection suggests itself that if such a habit as the flight of birds,
which seems to require a little personal supervision and instruction
before it is acquired perfectly, were really due to memory, the need of
instruction would after a time cease, inasmuch as the creature would
remember its past method of procedure, and would thus come to need no
more teaching. The answer lies in the fact, that if a creature gets to
depend upon teaching and personal help for any matter, its memory will
make it look for such help on each repetition of the action; so we see
that no man’s memory will exert itself much until he is thrown upon
memory as his only resource. We may read a page of a book a hundred
times, but we do not remember it by heart unless we have either
cultivated our powers of learning to repeat, or have taken pains to learn
this particular page.
And whether we read from a book, or whether we repeat by heart, the
repetition is still due to memory; only in the one case the memory is
exerted to recall something which one saw only half a second ago, and in
the other, to recall something not seen for a much longer period. So I
imagine an instinct or habit may be called an inherited habit, and
assigned to memory, even though the memory dates, not from the
performance of the action by the learner when he was actually part of the
personality of the teacher, but rather from a performance witnessed by,
or explained by the teacher to, the pupil at a period subsequent to
birth. In either case the habit is inherited in the sense of being
acquired in one generation, and transmitted with such modifications as
genius and experience may have suggested.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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