i6o Unconscious Memory 



is in the steam-engine or watermill when once set in 

 motion. The actions of tliese machines recur in a regular 

 series, at regular intervals, with the unerringness of circu- 

 lating decimals. 



When we bear in mind, then, the omnipresence of this 

 tendency in the world around us, the absolute freedom 

 from exception which attends its action, the manner in 

 which it holds equally good upon the vastest and the 

 smallest scale, and the completeness of its accord with our 

 ideas of what must inevitably happen when a like com- 

 bination is placed in circumstances like those in which it 

 was placed before — when we bear in mind all this, is it 

 possible not to connect the facts together, and to refer 

 cycles of living generations to the same unalterableness in 

 the action of like matter under like circumstances which 

 makes Jupiter and Saturn revolve round the sun, or the 

 piston of a steam-engine move up and down as long as 

 the steam acts upon it ? 



But who will attribute memory to the hands of a clock, 

 to a piston-rod, to air or water in a storm or in course of 

 evaporation, to the earth and planets in their circuits 

 round the sun, or to the atoms of the universe, if they too 

 be moving in a cycle vaster than we can take account of ? ^ 

 And if not, why introduce it into the embryonic develop- 

 ment of living beings, when there is not a particle of 

 evidence in support of its actual presence, when regu- 

 larity of action can be ensured just as well without it as 

 with it, and when at the best it is considered as existing 

 under circumstances which it baffles us to conceive, inas- 

 much as it is supposed to be exercised without any con- 

 scious recollection ? Surely a memory which is exercised 

 without any consciousness of recollecting is only a peri- 

 phrasis for the absence of any memory at all. 



^ It must be remembered that this passage is put as if in the 

 mouth of an objector. 



