22 8 LIFE AND HABIT. 



An objection suggests itself that if such a habit as the 

 flight of birds, which seems to require a little personal 

 supervision and instruction before it is acquired per- 

 fectly, were really due to memory, the need of instruc- 

 tion would after a time cease, inasmuch as the creature 

 would remember its past method of procedure, and 

 would thus come to need no more teaching. The 

 answer lies in the fact, that if a creature gets to depend 

 upon teaching and personal help for any matter, its 

 memory will make it look for such help on each repeti- 

 tion of the action; so we see that no man's memory 

 will exert itself much until he is thrown upon memory 

 as his only resource. We may read a page of a book a 

 hundred times, but we do not remember it by heart 

 unless we have either cultivated our powers of learning 

 to repeat, or have taken pains to learn this particular 

 page. 



And whether we read from a book, or whether we 

 repeat by heart, the repetition is still due to memory ; 

 only in the one case the memory is exerted to recall 

 something which one saw only half a second ago, and 

 in the other, to recall something not seen for a much 

 longer period. So I imagine an instinct or habit may 

 be called an inherited habit, and assigned to memory, 

 even though the memory dates, not from the perform- 

 ance of the action by the learner when he was actually 

 part of the personality of the teacher, but rather from 

 a performance witnessed by, or explained by the 

 teacher to, the pupil at a period subsequent to birth. 

 In either case the habit is inherited in the sense of being 

 acquired in one generation, and transmitted with such 



