Leaving the explanation of memory on one side, and confining ourselves to
the fact of memory only, a caterpillar on being just hatched is supposed,
according to this theory, to lose its memory of the time it was in the
egg, and to be stimulated by an intense but unconscious recollection of
the action taken by its ancestors when they were first hatched. It is
guided in the course it takes by the experience it can thus command.
Each step it takes recalls a new recollection, and thus it goes through
its development as a performer performs a piece of music, each bar
leading his recollection to the bar that should next follow.
In “Life and Habit” will be found examples of the manner in which this
view solves a number of difficulties for the explanation of which the
leading men of science express themselves at a loss. The following from
Professor Huxley’s recent work upon the crayfish may serve for an
example. Professor Huxley writes:—
“It is a widely received notion that the energies of living matter
have a tendency to decline and finally disappear, and that the death
of the body as a whole is a necessary correlate of its life. That
all living beings sooner or later perish needs no demonstration, but
it would be difficult to find satisfactory grounds for the belief
that they needs must do so. The analogy of a machine, that sooner or
later must be brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its
parts, does not hold, inasmuch as the animal mechanism is continually
renewed and repaired; and though it is true that individual
components of the body are constantly dying, yet their places are
taken by vigorous successors. A city remains notwithstanding the
constant death-rate of its inhabitants; and such an organism as a
crayfish is only a corporate unity, made up of innumerable partially
independent individualities.”—_The Crayfish_, p. 127.
Surely the theory which I have indicated above makes the reason plain why
no organism can permanently outlive its experience of past lives. The
death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social
condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience
to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The
crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die
sooner or later. There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the
conception that death is the necessary end of all living beings, and who
consider even the gentlest death from old age as violent and abnormal; so
Professor Huxley seems to find a difficulty in seeing that though a city
commonly outlives many generations of its citizens, yet cities and states
are in the end no less mortal than individuals. “The city,” he says,
“remains.” Yes, but not for ever. When Professor Huxley can find a city
that will last for ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does not last for
ever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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