Now, if words have any meaning at all, it must follow from the pa.s.sages quoted above, that each cell in the human body is a person with an intelligent soul, of a low cla.s.s, perhaps, but still differing from our own more complex soul in degree, and not in kind; and, like ourselves, being born, living, and dying. So that each single creature, whether man or beast, proves to be as a ray of white light, which, though single, is compounded of the red, blue, and yellow rays. It would appear, then, as though "we," "our souls," or "selves," or "personalities," or by whatever name we may prefer to be called, are but the CONSENSUS and full flowing stream of countless sensations and impulses on the part of our tributary souls or "selves," who probably know no more that we exist, and that they exist as part of us, than a microscopic water-flea knows the results of spectrum a.n.a.lysis, or than an agricultural labourer knows the working of the British const.i.tution: and of whom we know no more, until some misconduct on our part, or some confusion of ideas on theirs, has driven them into insurrection, than we do of the habits and feelings of some cla.s.s widely separated from our own.
These component souls are of many and very different natures, living in territories which are to them vast continents, and rivers, and seas, but which are yet only the bodies of our other component souls; coral reefs and sponge-beds within us; the animal itself being a kind of mean proportional between its house and its soul, and none being able to say where house ends and animal begins, more than they can say where animal ends and soul begins. For our bones within us are but inside walls and b.u.t.tresses, that is to say, houses constructed of lime and stone, as it were, by coral insects; and our houses without us are but outside bones, a kind of exterior skeleton or sh.e.l.l, so that we perish of cold if permanently and suddenly deprived of the coverings which warm us and cherish us, as the wing of a hen cherishes her chickens. If we consider the sh.e.l.ls of many living creatures, we shall find it hard to say whether they are rather houses, or part of the animal itself, being, as they are, inseparable from the animal, without the destruction of its personality.
Is it possible, then, to avoid imagining that if we have within us so many tributary souls, so utterly different from the soul which they unite to form, that they neither can perceive us, nor we them, though it is in us that they live and move and have their being, and though we are what we are, solely as the result of their co-operation--is it possible to avoid imagining that we may be ourselves atoms, undesignedly combining to form some vaster being, though we are utterly incapable of perceiving that any such being exists, or of realising the scheme or scope of our own combination? And this, too, not a spiritual being, which, without matter, or what we think matter of some sort, is as complete nonsense to us as though men bade us love and lean upon an intelligent vacuum, but a being with what is virtually flesh and blood and bones; with organs, senses, dimensions, in some way a.n.a.logous to our own, into some other part of which being, at the time of our great change we must infallibly re-enter, starting clean anew, with bygones bygones, and no more ache for ever from either age or antecedents. Truly, sufficient for the life is the evil thereof. Any speculations of ours concerning the nature of such a being, must be as futile and little valuable as those of a blood corpuscle might be expected to be concerning the nature of man; but if I were myself a blood corpuscle, I should be amused at making the discovery that I was not only enjoying life in my own sphere, but was bona fide part of an animal which would not die with myself, and in which I might thus think of myself as continuing to live to all eternity, or to what, as far as my power of thought would carry me, must seem practically eternal. But, after all, the amus.e.m.e.nt would be of a rather dreary nature.
On the other hand, if I were the being of whom such an introspective blood corpuscle was a component item, I should conceive he served me better by attending to my blood and making himself a successful corpuscle, than by speculating about my nature. He would serve me best by serving himself best, without being over curious. I should expect that my blood might suffer if his brain were to become too active. If, therefore, I could discover the vein in which he was, I should let him out to begin life anew in some other and, qua me, more profitable capacity.
With the units of our bodies it is as with the stars of heaven: there is neither speech nor language, but their voices are heard among them. Our will is the fiat of their collective wisdom, as sanctioned in their parliament, the brain; it is they who make us do whatever we do--it is they who should be rewarded if they have done well, or hanged if they have committed murder. When the balance of power is well preserved among them, when they respect each other"s rights and work harmoniously together, then we thrive and are well; if we are ill, it is because they are quarrelling with themselves, or are gone on strike for this or that addition to their environment, and our doctor must pacify or chastise them as best he may. They are we and we are they; and when we die it is but a redistribution of the balance of power among them or a change of dynasty, the result, it may be, of heroic struggle, with more epics and love romances than we could read from now to the Millennium, if they were so written down that we could comprehend them.
It is plain, then, that the more we examine the question of personality the more it baffles us, the only safeguard against utter confusion and idleness of thought being to fall back upon the superficial and common sense view, and refuse to tolerate discussions which seem to hold out little prospect of commercial value, and which would compel us, if logically followed, to be at the inconvenience of altering our opinions upon matters which we have come to consider as settled.
And we observe that this is what is practically done by some of our ablest philosophers, who seem unwilling, if one may say so without presumption, to accept the conclusions to which their own experiments and observations would seem to point.
Dr. Carpenter, for example, quotes the well-known experiments upon headless frogs. If we cut off a frog"s head and pinch any part of its skin, the animal at once begins to move away with the same regularity as though the brain had not been removed. Flourens took guinea-pigs, deprived them of the cerebral lobes, and then irritated their skin; the animals immediately walked, leaped, and trotted about, but when the irritation was discontinued they ceased to move.
Headless birds, under excitation, can still perform with their wings the rhythmic movements of flying. But here are some facts more curious still, and more difficult of explanation. If we take a frog or a strong and healthy triton, and subject it to various experiments; if we touch, pinch, or burn it with acetic acid, and if then, after decapitating the animal, we subject it to the same experiments, it will be seen that the reactions are exactly the same; it will strive to be free of the pain, and to shake off the acetic acid that is burning it; it will bring its foot up to the part of its body that is irritated, and this movement of the member will follow the irritation wherever it may be produced.
The above is mainly taken from M. Ribot"s work on heredity rather than Dr. Carpenter"s, because M. Ribot tells us that the head of the frog was actually cut off, a fact which does not appear so plainly in Dr. Carpenter"s allusion to the same experiments. But Dr. Carpenter tells us that AFTER THE BRAIN OF A FROG HAS BEEN REMOVED--which would seem to be much the same thing as though its head were cut off--"if acetic acid be applied over the upper and under part of the thigh, the foot of the same side will wipe it away; BUT IF THAT FOOT BE CUT OFF, AFTER SOME INEFFECTUAL EFFORTS AND A SHORT PERIOD OF INACTION,"
during which it is hard not to surmise that the headless body is considering what it had better do under the circ.u.mstances, "THE SAME MOVEMENT WILL BE MADE BY THE FOOT OF THE OPPOSITE SIDE," which, to ordinary people, would convey the impression that the headless body was capable of feeling the impressions it had received, and of reasoning upon them by a psychological act; and this of course involves the possession of a soul of some sort.
Here is a frog whose right thigh you burn with acetic acid. Very naturally it tries to get at the place with its right foot to remove the acid. You then cut off the frog"s head, and put more acetic acid on the some place: the headless frog, or rather the body of the late frog, does just what the frog did before its head was cut off--it tries to get at the place with its right foot. You now cut off its right foot: the headless body deliberates, and after a while tries to do with its left foot what it can no longer do with its right.
Plain matter-of-fact people will draw their own inference. They will not be seduced from the superficial view of the matter. They will say that the headless body can still, to some extent, feel, think, and act, and if so, that it must have a living soul.
Dr. Carpenter writes as follows:- "Now the performance of these, as well as of many other movements, that show a most remarkable adaptation to a purpose, might be supposed to indicate that sensations are called up by the IMPRESSIONS, and that the animal can not only FEEL, but can voluntarily direct its movements so as to get rid of the irritation which annoys it. But such an inference would be inconsistent with other facts. In the first place, the motions performed under such circ.u.mstances are never spontaneous, but are always excited by a stimulus of some kind."
Here we pause to ask ourselves whether any action of any creature under any circ.u.mstances is ever excited without "stimulus of some kind," and unless we can answer this question in the affirmative, it is not easy to see how Dr. Carpenter"s objection is valid.
"Thus," he continues, "a decapitated frog" (here then we have it that the frog"s head was actually cut off) "after the first violent convulsive moments occasioned by the operation have pa.s.sed away, remains at rest until it is touched; and then the leg, or its whole body may be thrown into sudden action, which suddenly subsides again." (How does this quiescence when it no longer feels anything show that the "leg or whole body" had not perceived something which made it feel when it was not quiescent?)--"Again we find that such movements may be performed not only when the brain has been removed, the spinal cord remaining entire, but also when the spinal cord has been itself cut across, so as to be divided into two or more portions, each of them completely isolated from each other, and from other parts of the nervous centres. Thus, if the head of a frog be cut off, and its spinal cord be divided in the middle of the back, so that its fore legs remain connected with the upper part, and its hind legs with the lower, each pair of members may be excited to movements by stimulants applied to itself; but the two pairs will not exhibit any consentaneous motions, as they will do when the spinal cord is undivided."
This may be put perhaps more plainly thus. If you take a frog and cut it into three pieces--say, the head for one piece, the fore legs and shoulder for another, and the hind legs for a third--and then irritate any one of these pieces, you will find it move much as it would have moved under like irritation if the animal had remained undivided, but you will no longer find any concert between the movements of the three pieces; that is to say, if you irritate the head, the other two pieces will remain quiet, and if you irritate the hind legs, you will excite no action in the fore legs or head.
Dr. Carpenter continues: "Or if the spinal cord be cut across without the removal of the brain, the lower limbs may be EXCITED to movement by an appropriate stimulant, though the animal has clearly no power over them, whilst the upper part remains under its control as completely as before."
Why are the head and shoulders "the animal" more than the hind legs under these circ.u.mstances? Neither half can exist long without the other; the two parts, therefore, being equally important to each other, we have surely as good a right to claim the t.i.tle of "the animal" for the hind legs, and to maintain that they have no power over the head and shoulders, as any one else has to claim the animalship for these last. What we say is, that the animal has ceased to exist as a frog on being cut in half, and that the two halves are no longer, either of them, the frog, but are simply pieces of still living organism, each of which has a soul of its own, being capable of sensation, and of intelligent psychological action as the consequence of sensations, though the one part has probably a much higher and more intelligent soul than the other, and neither part has a soul for a moment comparable in power and durability to that of the original frog.
"Now it is scarcely conceivable," continues Dr Carpenter, "that in this last case sensations should be felt and volition exercised through the instrumentality of that portion of the spinal cord which remains connected with the nerves of the posterior extremities, but which is cut off from the brain. For if it were so, there must be two distinct centres of sensation and will in the same animal, the attributes of the brain not being affected; and by dividing the spinal cord into two or more segments we might thus create in the body of one animal two or more such independent centres in addition to that which holds its proper place in the head."
In the face of the facts before us, it does not seen far-fetched to suppose that there ARE two, or indeed an infinite number of centres of sensation and will in an animal, the attributes of whose brain are not affected but that these centres, while the brain is intact, habitually act in connection with and in subordination to that central authority; as in the ordinary state of the fish trade, fish is caught, we will say, at Yarmouth, sent up to London, and then sent down to Yarmouth again to be eaten, instead of being eaten at Yarmouth when caught. But from the phenomena exhibited by three pieces of an animal, it is impossible to argue that the causes of the phenomena were present in the quondam animal itself; the memory of an infinite series of generations having so habituated the local centres of sensation and will, to act in concert with the central government, that as long as they can get at that government, they are absolutely incapable of acting independently. When thrown on their own resources, they are so demoralised by ages of dependence on the brain, that they die after a few efforts at self-a.s.sertion, from sheer unfamiliarity with the position, and inability to recognise themselves when disjointed rudely from their habitual a.s.sociations.
In conclusion, Dr. Carpenter says, "To say that two or more distinct centres of sensation and will are present in such a case, would really be the same as saying that we have the power of const.i.tuting two or more distinct egos in one body, WHICH IS MANIFESTLY ABSURD."
One sees the absurdity of maintaining that we can make one frog into two frogs by cutting a frog into two pieces, but there is no absurdity in believing that the two pieces have minor centres of sensation and intelligence within themselves, which, when the animal is entire, act in much concert with the brain, and with each other, that it is not easy to detect their originally autonomous character, but which, when deprived of their power of acting in concert, are thrown back upon earlier habit, now too long forgotten to be capable of permanent resumption.
Ill.u.s.trations are apt to mislead, nevertheless they may perhaps be sometimes tolerated. Suppose, for example, that London to the extent, say, of a circle with a six-mile radius from Charing Cross, were utterly annihilated in the s.p.a.ce of five minutes during the Session of Parliament. Suppose, also, that two entirely impa.s.sable barriers, say of five miles in width, half a mile high, and red hot, were thrown across England; one from Gloucester to Harwich, and another from Liverpool to Hull, and at the same time the sea were to become a ma.s.s of molten lava, so no water communication should be possible; the political, mercantile, social, and intellectual life of the country would be convulsed in a manner which it is hardly possible to realise. Hundreds of thousands would die through the dislocation of existing arrangements. Nevertheless, each of the three parts into which England was divided would show signs of provincial life for which it would find certain imperfect organisms ready to hand. Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, accustomed though they are to act in subordination to London, would probably take up the reins of government in their several sections; they would make their town councils into local governments, appoint judges from the ablest of their magistrates, organise relief committees, and endeavour as well as they could to remove any acetic acid that might be now poured on Wiltshire, Warwickshire, or Northumberland, but no concert between the three divisions of the country would be any longer possible. Should we be justified, under these circ.u.mstances, in calling any of the three parts of England, England? Or, again, when we observed the provincial action to be as nearly like that of the original undivided nation as circ.u.mstances would allow, should we be justified in saying that the action, such as it was, was not political? And, lastly, should we for a moment think that an admission that the provincial action was of a bona fide political character would involve the supposition that England, undivided, had more than one "ego" as England, no matter how many subordinate "egos" might go to the making of it, each one of which proved, on emergency, to be capable of a feeble autonomy?
M. Ribot would seem to take a juster view of the phenomenon when he says (p. 222 of the English translation) -
"We can hardly say that here the movements are co-ordinated like those of a machine; the acts of the animal are adapted to a special end; we find in them the characters of intelligence and will, a knowledge and choice of means, since they are as variable as the cause which provokes them.
"If these, then, and similar acts, were such that both the impressions which produced them and the acts themselves were perceived by the animal, would they not be called psychological? Is there not in them all that const.i.tutes an intelligent act--adaptation of means to ends; not a general and vague adaptation, but a determinate adaptation to a determinate end? In the reflex action we find all that const.i.tutes in some sort the very groundwork of an intelligent act--that is to say, the same series of stages, in the same order, with the same relations between them. We have thus, in the reflex act, all that const.i.tutes the psychological act except consciousness. The reflex act, which is physiological, differs in nothing from the psychological act, save only in this--that it is without consciousness."
The only remark which suggests itself upon this, is that we have no right to say that the part of the animal which moves does not also perceive its own act of motion, as much as it has perceived the impression which has caused it to move. It is plain "the animal"
cannot do so, for the animal cannot be said to be any longer in existence. Half a frog is not a frog; nevertheless, if the hind legs are capable, as M. Ribot appears to admit, of "perceiving the impression" which produces their action, and if in that action there is (and there would certainly appear to be so) "all that const.i.tutes an intelligent act, . . . a determinate adaptation to a determinate end," one fails to see on what ground they should be supposed to be incapable of perceiving their own action, in which case the action of the hind legs becomes distinctly psychological.
Secondly, M. Ribot appears to forget that it is the tendency of all psychological action to become unconscious on being frequently repeated, and that no line can be drawn between psychological acts and those reflex acts which he calls physiological. All we can say is, that there are acts which we do without knowing that we do them; but the a.n.a.logy of many habits which we have been able to watch in their pa.s.sage from laborious consciousness to perfect unconsciousness, would suggest that all action is really psychological, only that the soul"s action becomes invisible to ourselves after it has been repeated sufficiently often--that there is, in fact, a law as simple as in the case of optics or gravitation, whereby conscious perception of any action shall vary inversely as the square, say, of its being repeated.
It is easy to understand the advantage to the individual of this power of doing things rightly without thinking about them; for were there no such power, the attention would be incapable of following the mult.i.tude of matters which would be continually arresting it; those animals which had developed a power of working automatically, and without a recurrence to first principles when they had once mastered any particular process, would, in the common course of events, stand a better chance of continuing their species, and thus of transmitting their new power to their descendants.
M. Ribot declines to pursue the subject further, and has only cursorily alluded to it. He writes, however, that, on the "obscure problem" of the difference between reflex and psychological actions, some say, "when there can be no consciousness, because the brain is wanting, there is, in spite of appearances, only mechanism," whilst others maintain, that "when there is selection, reflection, psychical action, there must also be consciousness in spite of appearances." A little later (p. 223), he says, "It is quite possible that if a headless animal could live a sufficient length of time" (that is to say, if THE HIND LEGS OF AN ANIMAL could live a sufficient length of time without the brain), "there would be found in it" (THEM) "a consciousness like that of the lower species, which would consist merely in the faculty of apprehending the external world." (Why merely? It is more than apprehending the outside world to be able to try to do a thing with one"s left foot, when one finds that one cannot do it with one"s right.) "It would not be correct to say that the amphioxus, the only one among fishes and vertebrata which has a spinal cord without a brain, has no consciousness because it has no brain; and if it be admitted that the little ganglia of the invertebrata can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for the spinal cord."
We conclude, therefore, that it is within the common scope and meaning of the words "personal ident.i.ty," not only that one creature can become many as the moth becomes manifold in her eggs, but that each individual may be manifold in the sense of being compounded of a vast number of subordinate individualities which have their separate lives within him, with their hopes, and fears, and intrigues, being born and dying within us, many generations, of them during our single lifetime.
"An organic being," writes Mr. Darwin, "is a microcosm, a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute, and numerous as the stars in heaven."
As these myriads of smaller organisms are parts and processes of us, so are we but parts and processes of life at large.
CHAPTER VIII--APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS--THE a.s.sIMILATION 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 pa.s.ses (as it would appear, at first sight, without rhyme or reason)--the manner in which it prepares structures of the most surpa.s.sing 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 ident.i.ty 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. .h.i.therto 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 circ.u.mstances 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 repet.i.tion 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 a.n.a.logy between the embryological development of the individual, and the various phases or conditions of life through which his forefathers have pa.s.sed. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 bona 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 circ.u.mstance 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 repet.i.tion 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 repet.i.tion, 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 ident.i.ty, 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 ident.i.ty 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 a 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 circ.u.mstances, there would seem to be little doubt what conclusion we ought to come to.