Whether it does so remember
can only be settled by observing whether it acts as living beings
commonly do when they are acting under guidance of memory. I will
endeavour to show that, though heredity and habit based on memory go
about in different dresses, yet if we catch them separately--for
they are never seen together--and strip them there is not a mole nor
strawberry-mark, nor trick nor leer of the one, but we find it in
the other also.
What are the moles and strawberry-marks of habitual action, or
actions remembered and thus repeated? First, the more often we
repeat them the more easily and unconsciously we do them. Look at
reading, writing, walking, talking, playing the piano, &c.; the
longer we have practised any one of these acquired habits, the more
easily, automatically and unconsciously, we perform it. Look, on
the other hand, broadly, at the three points to which I called
attention in "Life and Habit":-
I. That we are most conscious of and have most control over such
habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences--which
are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after
birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not
become entirely human.
II. That we are less conscious of and have less control over eating
and drinking [provided the food be normal], swallowing, breathing,
seeing, and hearing--which were acquisitions of our prehuman
ancestry, and for which we had provided ourselves with all the
necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which are still,
geologically speaking, recent.
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