2 90 A Limit to Evolution 



order to feel hungry, or that we may raake a hearty meal. 

 We all of us have also the power of feehng special sensations, 

 as of some colour or musical tone, or of bitterness or warmth ; 

 and feelings which have been experienced may again be 

 reproduced in the imagination, wherein images arise which 

 are faint reproductions of before-felt sensations. 



We may next note our wonderful power of memory, 

 not that intellectual faculty which we exercise in seeking to 

 recall the past to mind, or by which the past flashes forth 

 uncalled into consciousness, but that lower kind of memory, 

 which we may distinguish as sensuoiis memory. This it is 

 which enables us to perform a multitude of actions not 

 only without the very intervention of our conscious in- 

 telligence, but so that the intervention of that intelli- 

 gence may actually impair its action. We have famihar 

 examples of this kind of memory in such acts as walking, 

 running upstairs, playing the piano, etc. Almost every one 

 who plays by heart knows that, if he happens to stumble in 

 playing a familiar melody, his best plan is to turn away his 

 mind from Avhat he is doing and try to play it automatically. 

 In other words, the melody is recalled by trusting entirely to 

 that retentive sensuous memory which has become, as it 

 were, imbedded in the nerves and muscles — the memory of 

 the imagination. 



We have, again (and this it is very important to note), a 

 power of associating together sensations and imaginations in 

 groups, and in groups of groups : so that when one or more 

 of the thus associated feelings is freshly experienced, all the 

 other feelings which have become associated therewith tend to 

 be aroused also. Examples of this habit abound. The sound 

 of a dinner-bell, the sight of an expanded umbrella, may 

 instantly arouse in our minds images of food or of rain. It 

 is not only that we intellectually know that the dinner-beU 

 calls us to dinner, and that the umbrella is probably ex- 



