Refutation 163 



cover the other, for the writs of the laws common to all 

 matter run within the womb as freely as elsewhere ; but 

 admitting that there are combinations into which living 

 beings enter with a faculty called memory which has its 

 effect upon their conduct, and admitting that such com- 

 binations are from time to time repeated (as we observe 

 in the case of a practised performer playing a piece of 

 music which he has committed to memory), then I main- 

 tain that though, indeed, the likeness of one performance 

 to its immediate predecessor is due to likeness of the 

 combinations immediately preceding the two perform- 

 ances, yet memory plays so important a part in both 

 these combinations as to make it a distinguishing feature 

 in them, and therefore proper to be insisted upon. We 

 do not, for example, say that Herr Joachim played such 

 and such a sonata without the music, because he was such 

 and such an arrangement of matter in such and such 

 circumstances, resembling those under which he played 

 without music on some past occasion. This goes without 

 saying ; we say only that he played the music by heart 

 or by memory, as he had often played it before. 



To the objector that a caterpihar becomes a chrysalis 

 not because it remembers and takes the action taken by 

 its fathers and mothers in due course before it, but because 

 when matter is in such a physical and mental state as to 

 be called caterpillar, it must perforce assume presently 

 such another physical and mental state as to be called 

 chrysalis, and that therefore there is no memory in the 

 case — to this objector I rejoin that the offspring cater- 

 pillar would not have become so like the parent as to 

 make the next or chrysalis stage a matter of necessity, 

 unless both parent and offspring had been influenced by 

 something that we usually call memory. For it is this 

 very possession of a common memory which has guided 

 the offspring into the path taken by, and hence to a vir- 

 tually same condition with, the parent, and which guided 

 the parent in its turn to a state virtually identical with a 



