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REPUTATION--MEMORY AT ONCE A PROMOTER AND A DISTURBER OF UNIFORMITY OF
ACTION AND STRUCTURE. (CHAPTER XII. OF UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY.)
To meet the objections in the two foregoing chapters, I need do little
more than show that the fact of certain often inherited diseases and
developments, whether of youth or old age, being obviously not due to a
memory on the part of offspring of like diseases and developments in the
parents, does not militate against supposing that embryonic and youthful
development generally is due to memory.
This is the main part of the objection; the rest resolves itself into an
assertion that there is no evidence in support of instinct and embryonic
development being due to memory, and a contention that the necessity of
each particular moment in each particular case is sufficient to account
for the facts without the introduction of memory.
I will deal with these two last points briefly first. As regards the
evidence in support of the theory that instinct and growth are due to a
rapid unconscious memory of past experiences and developments in the
persons of the ancestors of the living form in which they appear, I must
refer my readers to Life and Habit, and to the translation of Professor
Hering's lecture given in Chapter VI. of Unconscious Memory. I will only
repeat here that a chrysalis, we will say, is as much one and the same
person with the chrysalis of its preceding generation, as this last is
one and the same person with the egg or caterpillar from which it sprang.
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