gratify them, that the memory of organised substance is strongest--
the impulses and instincts that arise hence having still paramount
power over the minds of men. The spiritual life has been superadded
slowly; its most splendid outcome belongs to the latest epoch in the
history of organised matter, nor has any very great length of time
elapsed since the nervous system was first crowned with the glory of
a large and well-developed brain.

Oral tradition and written history have been called the memory of
man, and this is not without its truth. But there is another and a
living memory in the innate reproductive power of brain substance,
and without this both writings and oral tradition would be without
significance to posterity. The most sublime ideas, though never so
immortalised in speech or letters, are yet nothing for heads that are
out of harmony with them; they must be not only heard, but
reproduced; and both speech and writing would be in vain were there
not an inheritance of inward and outward brain development, growing
in correspondence with the inheritance of ideas that are handed down
from age to age, and did not an enhanced capacity for their
reproduction on the part of each succeeding generation accompany the
thoughts that have been preserved in writing. Man's conscious memory
comes to an end at death, but the unconscious memory of Nature is
true and ineradicable: whoever succeeds in stamping upon her the
impress of his work, she will remember him to the end of time.



CHAPTER VII