1 8 Unconscious Memory 



chooses. I shall venture, therefore, to stick to it that the 

 octogenarian was once a fish, or if Professor Huxley 

 prefers it, " an organism which must be classified among 

 fishes." 



But if a man was a fish once, he may have been a fish a 

 million times over, for aught he knows ; for he must 

 admit that his conscious recollection is at fault, and has 

 nothing whatever to do with the matter, which must be 

 decided, not, as it were, upon his own evidence as to what 

 deeds he may or may not recollect having executed, but by 

 the production of his signatures in court, with satisfactory 

 proof that he has delivered each document as his act and deed. 



This made things very much simpler. The processes of 

 embryonic development, and instinctive actions, might 

 be now seen as repetitions of the same kind of action by 

 the same individual in successive generations. It was 

 natural, therefore, that they should come in the course of 

 time to be done unconsciously, and a consideration of the 

 most obvious facts of memory removed all further doubt 

 that habit — which is based on memory — was at the bottom 

 of all the phenomena of heredity. 



I had got to this point about the spring of 1874, and 

 had begun to write, when I was compelled to go to Canada, 

 and for the next year and a half did hardly any writing. 

 The first passage in " Life and Habit " which I can date 

 with certainty is the one on page 52, which runs as follows: — 



" It is one against legion when a man tries to differ from 

 his own past selves. He must yield or die if he wants to differ 

 widely, so as to lack natural instincts, such as hunger or thirst, 

 ' and not to gratify them. It is more righteous in a man that 

 he should ' eat strange food,' and that his cheek should ' so 

 much as lank not,' than that he should starve if the strange 

 food be at his command. His past selves are living in him at 

 this moment with the accumulated life of centuries. ' Do this, 

 this, this, which we too have done, and found out profit in it,' 

 cry the souls of his forefathers within him. Faint are the far 

 ones, coming and going as the sound of bells wafted on to a 

 high mountain ; loud and clear are the near ones, urgent as an 

 alarm of fire." 



