ASSIMILA TION OF O UTS IDE MA TTER. 1 3 1 



memory in our own persons, and beyond the one great 

 proof of memory given by the actual repetition of the 

 performance — and of some of the latest deviations 

 from the ordinary performance (and this proof ought 

 in itself, one would have thought, to outweigh any 

 save the directest evidence to the contrary) we can 

 detect no symptom of any such mental operation as 

 recollection on the part of the embryo. £ On the other 

 hand, we have seen that we know most intensely those 

 things that we are least conscious of knowing; we 

 will most intensely what we are least conscious of 

 willing ; we feel continually without knowing that we 

 feel, and our attention is hourly arrested without our 

 attention being arrested by the arresting of our 

 attention. Memory is no less capable of unconscious 

 exercise, and on becoming intense through frequent 

 repetition, vanishes no less completely as a conscious 

 action of the mind than knowledge and volition?) 

 We must all be aware of instances in which it is plam 

 we must have remembered, without being in the 

 smallest degree conscious of remembering. Is it then I 

 absurd to suppose that our past existences have been / 

 repeated on such a vast number of occasions that the 

 germ, linked on to all preceding germs, and, by once 

 having become part of their identity, imbued with all 

 their memories, remembers too intensely to be con- 

 scious of remembering, and works on with the same 

 kind of unconsciousness with which we play, 01 

 walk, or read, until something unfamiliar happens 

 to us ? and is it not singularly in accordance with this 

 view that consciousness should begin with that part 



