142 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



being recollects his birth. And even most of the 

 phenomena of life we forget. " How many things 

 are afterwards forgotten over which we have spent 

 much time at school, but of which we make no 

 practical use in after life ! " It would seem, in the 

 main, this is the order of things : the brain-cells have 

 the power of reproducing their kind, or their arrange- 

 ment, but they more often fail to reproduce. If they 

 reproduce we have memory, if they fail we have loss of 

 memory. 1 What individual could describe that which 

 he had for dinner on a certain day a few years ago, 

 unless some special incident fixed the fact in his mind ? 

 Yet probably a full half-hour of his life was allotted to 

 this Avork of eating ! 



" A young artist may spend hours, even days, over 

 a picture, and then forget all about it to such a degree 

 as to make the sight of it, after a long lapse of time, 

 perfectly new to him ; that is to say, he will not 

 recognize it as anything he has previously seen. Such, 

 however, is the fact ; and it is no less true that artists 



1 " The brain matter undergoes, no doubt, a constant change, but 

 the mode of its combination which determines individual conscious- 

 ness ever remains the same. That this modification is both inexplic- 

 able and incomprehensible, proves nothing against the fact itself. 

 Who can explain why certain morbid conditions are transmitted to 

 the third instead of the second generation ? Is not such a pheno- 

 menon more wonderful than the connection of brain and memory ? 

 Yet no rational physician doubts that it can only be the result of 

 material conditions, the laws of which are, and probably will ever 

 remain, unknown to us." (" Force -and Matter," Dr. Louis Biichner, 

 1864, p. 131.) 



" It would seem as if the brain were like a very delicate photo- 

 graph plate, which takes accurate impressions of all perceptions, 

 whether we notice them or not, and stores them up ready to be 

 reproduced whenever stronger impressions are dormant and memory 

 by some strange caprice breathes on the plate." (" A Modern Zoroas- 

 trian," S. Laing, 1895, p. 135.) 



