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."-The Crayfish, p. 127.

Surely the theory which I have indicated above makes the reason plain why no organism can permanently outlive its experience of past lives. The death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is the necessary end of all living beings, and who consider even the gentlest death from old age as violent and abnormal; so Professor Huxley seems to find a difficulty in seeing that though a city commonly outlives many generations of its citizens, yet cities and states are in the end no less mortal than individuals. “A city," he says, "remains." Yes, but not for ever. When Professor Huxley can find a city that will last for ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does not last for ever.

I have already here and elsewhere said all that I can yet bring forward in support of Professor Hering's theory; it now remains for me to meet the most troublesome objection to it that I have been able to think ofan objection which I had before me when I wrote Life and Habit, but which then as now I believe to be unsound. Seeing, however, as I have pointed out at the end of the preceding chapter, that Von Hartmann

has touched upon it, and being aware 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 inference1-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. On the contrary, we are assured that molecules in some distant part of the world, which had never entered into such and such a known combination themselves, nor held

1 I have put these words into the mouth of my supposed objector, and shall put others like them, because they are characteristic; but nothing can become so well known as to escape being an inference.

concert with other molecules that had been so combined, and which, therefore, could have had no experience and no memory, would none the less act upon one another in that one way in which other like combinations of atoms have acted under like circumstances, as readily as though they had been combined and separated and recombined again a hundred or a hundred thousand times. It is this assumption, tacitly made by every man, beast, and plant in the universe, throughout all time and in every action of their lives, that has made any improvement in action possible-for it is this which lies at the root of the power to profit by experience. I do not exactly know why we make this assumption, and I cannot find out that anyone else knows much better than myself, but I do not recommend anyone to dispute it.

As we admit of no doubt concerning the main result, so we do not suppose an alternative to lie before any atom of any molecule at any moment during the process of their combination. This process is, in all probability, an exceedingly complicated one, involving a multitude of actions and subordinate processes, which follow one upon the other, and each one of which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, though they all come to pass in what appears to be an instant of time. Yet at no point do we conceive of any atom as swerving ever such a little to right or left of a determined course, but invest each one of them with so much of the divine attributes as that with it there shall be no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

We attribute this regularity of action to what we call the necessity of things, as determined by the nature of the atoms and the circumstances in which they are placed. We say that only one proximate result can ever arise from any given combination. If, then, so great uniformity of action as nothing can exceed is

manifested by atoms to which no one will impute memory, why this desire for memory, as though it were the only way of accounting for regularity of action in living beings? Sameness of action may be seen abundantly where there is no room for anything that we can consistently call memory. In these cases we say that it is due to sameness of substance in same circumstances.

The most cursory reflection upon our actions will show us that it is no more possible for living action to have more than one set of proximate consequents at any given time than for oxygen and hydrogen when mixed in the proportions proper for the formation of water. Why, then, not recognize this fact, and ascribe repeated similarity of living action to the reproduction of the necessary antecedents, with no more sense of connection between the steps in the action, or memory of similar action taken before, than we suppose on the part of oxygen and hydrogen molecules between the several occasions on which they may have been disunited and reunited?

A boy catches the measles not because he remembers having caught them in the persons of his father and mother, but because he is a fit soil for a certain kind of seed to grow upon. In like manner he should be said to grow his nose because he is a fit combination for a nose to spring from. Dr. X-'s father died of angina pectoris at the age of forty-nine; so did Dr. X"Can it be pretended that Dr. X- remembered having died of angina pectoris at the age of forty-nine when in the person of his father, and accordingly, when he came to be forty-nine years old himself, died also? For this to hold, Dr. X's father must have begotten him after he was dead; for the son could not remember the father's death before it happened.

As for the diseases of old age, so very commonly inherited, they are developed for the most part not only long after the average age of reproduction, but at a time when no appreciable amount of memory of any previous existence can remain; for a man will not have many male ancestors who become parents at over sixty years old, nor female ancestors who did so at over forty. By our own showing, therefore, recollection can have nothing to do with the matter. Yet who can doubt that gout is due to inheritance as much as eyes and noses? In what respects do the two things differ so that we should refer the inheritance of eyes and noses to memory, while denying any connection between memory and gout? We may have a ghost of a pretence for saying that a man grew a nose by rote, or even that he catches the measles or whooping-cough by rote; but do we mean to say that he develops the gout by rote in his old age if he comes of a gouty family? If, then, rote and red-tape have nothing to do with the one, why should they with the other?

Remember also the cases in which aged females develop male characteristics. Here are growths, often of not inconsiderable extent, which make their appearance during the decay of the body, and grow with greater and greater vigour in the extreme of old age, and even for days after death itself. It can hardly be doubted that an especial tendency to develop these characteristics runs as an inheritance in certain families; here then is perhaps the best case that can be found of a development strictly inherited, but having clearly nothing whatever to do with memory. Why should not all development stand upon the same footing?

A friend who had been arguing with me for some time as above, concluded with the following words: you cannot be content with the similar action of

"If