In daily life
people let fairly normal circumstances come and go without much heed
as matters of course. If they have been lucky they make a note of
it and try to repeat their success. If they have been unfortunate
but have recovered rapidly they soon forget it; if they have
suffered long and deeply they grizzle over it and are scared and
scarred by it for a long time. The question is one of cognisance or
non-cognisance on the part of the new germs, of the more profound
impressions made on them while they were one with their parents,
between the occasion of their last preceding development, and the
new course on which they are about to enter. Those who accept the
theory put forward independently by Professor Hering of Prague
(whose work on this subject is translated in my book, "Unconscious
Memory") {40} and by myself in "Life and Habit," {41} believe in
cognizance, as do Lamarckians generally. Weismannites, and with
them the orthodoxy of English science, find non-cognisance more
acceptable.
If the Heringian view is accepted, that heredity is only a mode of
memory, and an extension of memory from one generation to another,
then the repetition of its development by any embryo thus becomes
only the repetition of a lesson learned by rote; and, as I have
elsewhere said, our view of life is simplified by finding that it is
no longer an equation of, say, a hundred unknown quantities, but of
ninety-nine only, inasmuch as two of the unknown quantities prove to
be substantially identical.
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