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 a
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.
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