Seeing, however, that a plausible
case can be made out for it, I will state it and refute it here. When I
say refute it, I do not mean that I shall have done with it--for it is
plain that it opens up a vaster question in the relations between the so-
called organic and inorganic worlds--but that I will refute the
supposition that it any way militates against Professor Hering's theory.
"Why," it may be asked, "should we go out of our way to invent
unconscious memory--the existence of which must at the best remain an
inference {184}--when the observed fact that like antecedents are
invariably followed by like consequents should be sufficient for our
purpose? Why should the fact that a given kind of chrysalis in a given
condition will always become a butterfly within a certain time be
connected with memory when it is not pretended that memory has anything
to do with the invariableness with which oxygen and hydrogen when mixed
in certain proportions make water?"
We assume confidently that if a drop of water were decomposed into its
component parts, and if these were brought together again, and again
decomposed and again brought together any number of times over, the
results would be invariably the same, whether decomposition or
combination, yet no one will refer the invariableness of the action
during each repetition, to recollection by the gaseous molecules of the
course taken when the process was last repeated.
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