The Humour of Homer and Other EssaysButler, Samuel
History
The Humour of Homer and Other Essays
Butler, Samuel
Essays; Greek wit and humor -- History and criticism; Homer -- Humor
If the Heringian view is accepted, that heredity is only a mode of
memory, and an extension of memory from one generation to another,
then the repetition of its development by any embryo thus becomes
only the repetition of a lesson learned by rote; and, as I have
elsewhere said, our view of life is simplified by finding that it is
no longer an equation of, say, a hundred unknown quantities, but of
ninety-nine only, inasmuch as two of the unknown quantities prove to
be substantially identical. In this case the inheritance of
acquired characteristics cannot be disputed, for it is postulated in
the theory that each embryo takes note of, remembers and is guided
by the profounder impressions made upon it while in the persons of
its parents, between its present and last preceding development. To
maintain this is to maintain use and disuse to be the main factors
throughout organic development; to deny it is to deny that use and
disuse can have any conceivable effect. For the detailed reasons
which led me to my own conclusions I must refer the reader to my
books Life and Habit and Unconscious Memory, the conclusions of
which have been often adopted, but never, that I have seen,
disputed. A brief resume of the leading points in the argument is
all that space will here allow me to give.
We have seen that it is a first requirement of heredity that there
shall be physical continuity between parents and offspring. This
holds good with memory. There must be continued identity between
the person remembering and the person to whom the thing that is
remembered happened. We cannot remember things that happened to
someone else, and in our absence. We can only remember having heard
of them. We have seen, however, that there is as much bona-fide
sameness of personality between parents and offspring up to the time
at which the offspring quits the parent's body, as there is between
the different states of the parent himself at any two consecutive
moments; the offspring therefore, being one and the same person with
its progenitors until it quits them, can be held to remember what
happened to them within, of course, the limitations to which all
memory is subject, as much as the progenitors can remember what
happened earlier to themselves. Whether it does so remember can
only be settled by observing whether it acts as living beings
commonly do when they are acting under guidance of memory. I will
endeavour to show that, though heredity and habit based on memory go
about in different dresses, yet if we catch them separately--for
they are never seen together--and strip them there is not a mole nor
strawberry-mark nor trick nor leer of the one, but we find it in the
other also.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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