Luck or Cunning? by Samuel Butler
page 47 of 291 (16%)
page 47 of 291 (16%)
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he not infrequently approaches the Heringian position.
Thus, he says that the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily life and hereditary memory "are so numerous and precise" as to justify us in considering them to be of essentially the same kind. {52b} Again, he says that although the memory of milk shown by new-born infants is "at all events in large part hereditary, it is none the less memory" of a certain kind. {52c} Two lines lower down he writes of "hereditary memory or instinct," thereby implying that instinct is "hereditary memory." "It makes no essential difference," he says, "whether the past sensation was actually experienced by the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by its ancestors. {52d} For it makes no essential difference whether the nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the life-time of the individual or during that of the species, and afterwards impressed by heredity on the individual." Lower down on the same page he writes:- "As showing how close is the connection between hereditary memory and instinct," &c. And on the following page:- "And this shows how closely the phenomena of hereditary memory are related to those of individual memory: at this stage . . . it is practically impossible to disentangle the effects of hereditary |
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