to understand more about the vibrations.

But if, according to Professor Hering, the personal identity of the
single life consists in the uninterruptedness of vibrations, so also
do the phenomena of heredity. For not only may vibrations of a
certain violence or character be persistent unperceived for many
years in a living body, and communicate themselves to the matter it
has assimilated, but they may, and will, under certain circumstances,
extend to the particle which is about to leave the parent body as the
germ of its future offspring. In this minute piece of matter there
must, if Professor Hering is right, be an infinity of rhythmic
undulations incessantly vibrating with more or less activity, and
ready to be set in more active agitation at a moment's warning, under
due accession of vibration from exterior objects. On the occurrence
of such stimulus, that is to say, when a vibration of a suitable
rhythm from without concurs with one within the body so as to augment
it, the agitation may gather such strength that the touch, as it
were, is given to a house of cards, and the whole comes toppling
over. This toppling over is what we call action; and when it is the
result of the disturbance of certain usual arrangements in certain
usual ways, we call it the habitual development and instinctive
characteristics of the race. In either case, then, whether we
consider the continued identity of the individual in what we call his
single life, or those features in his offspring which we refer to
heredity, the same explanation of the phenomena is applicable. It
follows from this as a matter of course, that the continuation of
life or personal identity in the individual and the race are
fundamentally of the same kind, or, in other words, that there is a
veritable prolongation of identity or oneness of personality between
parents and offspring. Professor Hering reaches his conclusion by