WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT. 167 



ideas, and are capable of understanding and making 

 use of them ; if, on the other hand, they are too new, 

 and too little led up to, so that we find them too 

 strange and hard to be a"ble to understand them and 

 adopt them, then they put us out, with every degree of 

 completeness — from simply causing us to fail in this or 

 that particular part, to rendering us incapable of even 

 trying to do our work at all, from pure despair of suc- 

 ceeding. 



It requires many repetitions to fix an impression 

 firmly ; but when it is fixed, we cease to have much 

 recollection of the manner in which it came to be so, 

 or of any single and particular recurrence. 



Our memory is mainly called into action by force of 

 association and similarity in the surroundings. We want 

 to go on doing what we did when we were last as we are 

 now, and we forget what we did in the meantime. 



These rules, however, are liable to many exceptions ; 

 as for example, that a single and apparently not very 

 extraordinary occurrence may sometimes produce a 

 lasting impression, and be liable to return with sudden 

 force at some distant time, and then to go on returning 

 to us at intervals. Some incidents, in fact, we know 

 not how nor why, dwell with us much longer than 

 others which were apparently quite as noteworthy or 

 perhaps more so. 



Now I submit that if the above observations are just, 

 and if, also, the offspring, after having become a new 

 and separate personality, yet retains so much of the old 

 identity of which it was once indisputably part, that it 

 remembers what it did when it was part of that identity 



M 



