Orr Bea 
obscurity: “When we consider the protoplasm’s respon- 
siveness to stimuli and to the effects of repetition or prac- 
tice, with the intricate co-ordinations that may thereby 
be effected, also the impressions made by stimuli which 
remain long fixed as “memory,” we are led directly to 
suppose that the property which is the basis of bodily 
development in organisms is the same property which 
we recognize as the basis of psychic activity and psychic 
development.” 
“On the same principle that a thought in the mind 
calls up an associated thought, or one tone of music 
calls up another, or one action in an oft repeated series 
of actions calls up the next subsequent action or actions, 
so the initial stimulus being given to an incipient organ- 
ism, its responsive activity each time tends to produce 
by association the next activity in the oft repeated series 
and so on through the successive steps of growth and 
development.” 191 
The points of contact between the mnemonic phenome- 
non of the association or succession of ideas and the phe- 
nomenon of ontogenetic development have already been 
very rightly brought forward by others and we shall 
return to them for closer examination in the last chapter. 
It may be remarked here merely that the first can in no 
way serve to explain the second. For in the first place 
it belongs to a class of phenomena still more specialized 
and more complex than the phenomenon to be explained, 
in the second place the conditions of origin and of repeti- 
tion are quite different in the two phenomena. 
When a melody strikes the ear for the first time and 
is later often repeated it leaves behind impressions on 
21Orr: Ibid. P. 238—230, 142. 
