Statement of an Objection 149 



plain that it opens up a vaster question in the relations 

 between the so-called organic and inorganic worlds — but 

 that I will refute the supposition that it any way militates 

 against Professor Hering's theory. 



Why, it may be asked, should we go out of our way to 

 invent unconscious memory — the existence of which must 

 at the best remain an inference^ — when the observed fact 

 that like antecedents are invariably followed by like con- 

 sequents should be sufficient for our purpose ? Why 

 should the fact that a given kind of chrysalis in a given 

 condition will always become a butterfly within a certain 

 time be connected with memory, when it is not pretended 

 that memory has anything to do with the invariableness 

 with which oxygen and hydrogen when mixed in certain 

 proportions make water ? 



We assume confidently that if a drop of water were de- 

 composed into its component parts, and if these were 

 brought together again, and again decomposed and again 

 brought together any number of times over, the results 

 would be invariably the same, whether decomposition or 

 combination, yet no one wiU refer the invariableness of 

 the action during each repetition, to recollection by the 

 gaseous molecules of the course taken when the process 

 was last repeated. On the contrary, we are assured that 

 molecules in some distant part of the world, which had 

 never entered into such and such a known combination 

 themselves, nor held concert with other molecules that 

 had been so combined, and which, therefore, could have 

 had no experience and no memory, would none the less 

 act upon one another in that one way in which other like 

 combinations of atoms have acted under like circum- 

 stances, as readily as though they had been combined and 

 separated and recombined again a hundred or a hundred 

 thousand times. It is this assumption, tacitly made by 



' I have put these words into the mouth of my supposed objector, 

 and shall put others like them, because they are characteristic ; but 

 nothing can become so well known as to escape being an inference. 



