Each step of normal development will lead the impregnate ovum up to, and
remind it of, its next ordinary course of action, in the same way as we,
when we recite a well-known passage, are led up to each successive
sentence by the sentence which has immediately preceded it.
And for this reason, namely, that as it takes two people "to tell" a
thing--a speaker and a comprehending listener, without which last, though
much may have been said, there has been nothing told--so also it takes
two people, as it were, to "remember" a thing--the creature remembering,
and the surroundings of the creature at the time it last remembered.
Hence, though the ovum immediately after impregnation is instinct with
all the memories of both parents, not one of these memories can normally
become active till both the ovum itself, and its surroundings, are
sufficiently like what they respectively were, when the occurrence now to
be remembered last took place. The memory will then immediately return,
and the creature will do as it did on the last occasion that it was in
like case as now. This ensures that similarity of order shall be
preserved in all the stages of development in successive generations.
Life then is the being possessed of memory. We are all the same stuff to
start with; plants and animals only differ from one another because they
remember different things; they grow up in the shapes they bear because
these shapes are the embodiments of their ideas concerning their own past
history; they are forms of faith or faiths of form whichever the reader
chooses.
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