Likeness of Ontogeny and Memory 317 



on the part of organized matter, of processes in which 

 it already took part at another time, even if only as 

 a germ in the ovary, and which now at an opportune 

 moment it recalls exactly while reacting to the same or 

 similar stimuli in a way similar to that formerly followed 

 by that organism of which it was once a part, and 

 whose vicissitudes it then had shared? If the parent 

 organism by long custom or repeated action has changed 

 somewhat in nature in such a way that the germinal 

 cellule within it has also been affected however 

 feebly it may be, and if this latter commences a 

 new existence growing and developing into a new being 

 of which the different parts are yet only itself and flesh 

 of its flesh; and if in thus developing it reproduces that 

 experience which it had already shared at another time 

 as part of a great whole; this is indeed just as astonishing 

 as when the memory of his earliest childhood suddenly 

 comes back to the old man, but it is no more astonishing. 

 And whether it is still the same organized substance 

 which reproduces a process already once experienced, 

 or whether it is only a descendant, a portion of itself, 

 which in the interval has grown and become large, this 

 is manifestly a difference of degree only and not of 

 essence." 231 



We shall not repeat here the objections which have 

 been advanced against the similar affirmations of Orr 



231 Ewald Hering: liber das Gedachtnis als eine allgemeine 

 Funktion der organisierten Materie. Wien, Gerold, 1876. P. 16 17. 

 Hering's thesis has recently been taken up again by Richard Semon 

 and been treated more thoroughly and completely in his work : Die 

 Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Gesche- 

 hens. Leipzig, Engelmann, 1904. (See Eugenio Rignano: Une 

 nouvelle theorie mnemonique du developpement. Revue Philoso- 

 phique. Paris, Alcan, November 1906. No. II.) 



