1 64 LIFE AND HABIT. 



We observe it then as a matter of the commonest 

 daily occurrence within our own experience, that 

 memory does fade completely away, and recur with the 

 recurrence of surroundings like those which made any 

 particular impression in the first instance. We ob- 

 serve that there is hardly any limit to the completeness 

 and the length of time during which our memory may 

 remain in abeyance. A smell may remind an old 

 man of eighty of some incident of his childhood, for- 

 gotten for nearly as many years as he has lived. In 

 other words, we observe that when an impression has 

 been repeatedly made in a certain sequence on any 

 living organism — that impression not having been pre- 

 judicial to the creature itself — the organism will have 

 a tendency, on reassuming the shape and conditions in 

 which it was when the impression was last made, to 

 remember the impression, and therefore to do again 

 now what it did then ; all intermediate memories drop- 

 ping clean out of mind, so far as they have any effect 

 upon action. 



6. Finally, we should note the suddenness and 

 apparent caprice with which memory will assert itself 

 at odd times ; we have been saying or doing this or 

 that, when suddenly a memory of something which 

 happened to us, perhaps in infancy, comes into our head; 

 nor can we in the least connect this recollection with 

 the subject of which we have just been thinking, though 

 doubtless there has been a connection, too rapid and 

 subtle for our apprehension. 



The foregoing phenomena of memory, so far as we can 

 judge, would appear to be present themselves through- 



