It is not surprising, then, that a son who has
inherited his father's tastes and constitution, and who lives much as his
father had done, should make the same mistakes as his father did when he
reaches his father's age--we will say of seventy--though he cannot
possibly remember his father's having made the mistakes. It were to be
wished we could, for then we might know better how to avoid gout, cancer,
or what not. And it is to be noticed that the developments of old age
are generally things we should be glad enough to avoid if we knew how to
do so.
CONCLUSION. (CHAPTER XIII. OF UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY.)
If we observed the resemblance between successive generations to be as
close as that between distilled water and distilled water through all
time, and if we observed that perfect unchangeableness in the action of
living beings which we see in what we call chemical and mechanical
combinations, we might indeed suspect that memory had as little place
among the causes of their action as it can have in anything, and that
each repetition, whether of a habit or the practice of art, or of an
embryonic process in successive generations, was as original as the
"Origin of Species" itself, for all that memory had to do with it. I
submit, however, that in the case of the reproductive forms of life we
see just so much variety, in spite of uniformity, as is consistent with a
repetition involving not only a nearly perfect similarity in the agents
and their circumstances, but also the little departure therefrom that is
inevitably involved in the supposition that a memory of like presents as
well as of like antecedents (as distinguished from a memory of like
antecedents only) has played a part in their development--a cyclical
memory, if the expression may be pardoned.
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