LIFE AND HABIT 101 



faithfulness to maintain a useful relation with other beings, 

 stands in no danger of being " pensioned off." It will not do to 

 set down race preservation to any other cause than " good " 

 custom, i.e., service and symbiotic integrity, which are the sole 

 guarantees of " good " memory. 



Whether or not an organism can maintain itself in a customary 

 position, may be said, in a sense, to depend upon memory, but 

 it must be understood to be a memory instinct with essential 

 knowledge, such as we have seen symbiotic knowledge to be. 

 It is the substance that is wanted and not the shadow, the 

 knowledge and the character rather than the mere remembrance 

 of the past. So in our national life it is the retention of the high 

 character of our forbears that is all-important and not merely 

 the recollection, and glorification of, their deeds of prowess. 

 To say that extinction of species is due to loss of ancestral 

 memory, conveys not much more than the idea that mind must 

 have had some share in the fate of the organism. Let us take a 

 concrete case : the extinction of the sabre-toothed tiger, which 

 had destroyed its customary prey, the giant armadillo, and had 

 become too fastidious to live on any other. Are we to set the 

 fatality down merely to a loss of " memory " ? Must we not 

 rather concede that the species, all the time it was indulging 

 in armadillo-feasts, was undergoing a loss of " essential " 

 memory, i.e., the memory of former non-predaceous mammalian 

 food-getting which alone could assure genuine survival ? Or could 

 it be argued that the tiger had lost an erstwhile arithmetical 

 rule of its ancestors which consisted in sparing just sufficient 

 armadilloes to prevent their becoming extinct ? Who is he who 

 will propound the thesis that a relation so non-symbiotic as that 

 between tiger and armadillo ever has any chance of permanence ? 

 In the evolutionary sense, " to thine own self be true " means 

 true to the virtues of an essentially symbiotic character coupled 

 with cross-feeding habits, which alone avail towards life. The 

 " mischief " which Butler says may " happen " to a species is 

 chiefly one which follows upon disobedience to bio-moral laws. 

 It may involve a dissolution which is apt, in one way or another, 

 to give back the constituent parts to the common organic fund 

 of life. It is clear, however, that species faithful to a good 

 ancestral character, are not so to be dissolved and, therefore, 

 not to be " assimilated " by others. Species may well be con- 

 ceived as standing for a definite idea in so far as they have an 



