Chapter 8

APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS

THE ASSIMILATION OF OUTSIDE MATTER

Let us now return to the position which we left at the end of the fourth chapter. We had then concluded that the self-development of each new life in succeeding generations--the various stages through which it passes (as it would appear, at first sight, without rhyme or reason)--the manner in which it prepares structures of the most surpassing intricacy and delicacy, for which it has no use at the time when it prepares them--and the many elaborate instincts which it exhibits immediately on, and indeed before, birth--all point in the direction of habit and memory, as the only causes which could produce them.

Why should the embryo of any animal go through so many stages-- embryological allusions to forefathers of a widely different type? And why, again, should the germs of the same kind of creature always go through the same stages? If the germ of any animal now living is, in its simplest state, but part of the personal identity of one of the original germs of all life whatsoever, and hence, if any now living organism must be considered without quibble as being itself millions of years old, and as imbued with an intense though unconscious memory of all that it has done sufficiently often to have made a permanent impression; if this be so, we can answer the above questions perfectly well. The creature goes through so many intermediate stages between its earliest state as life at all, and its latest development, for the simplest of all reasons, namely, because this is the road by which it has always hitherto travelled to its present differentiation; this is the road it knows, and into every turn and up or down of which, it has been guided by the force of circumstances and the balance of considerations. These, acting in such a manner for such and such a time, caused it to travel in such and such fashion, which fashion having been once sufficiently established, becomes a matter of trick or routine to which the creature is still a slave, and in which it confirms itself by repetition in each succeeding generation.

Thus I suppose, as almost every one else, so far as I can gather, supposes, that we are descended from ancestors of widely different characters to our own. If we could see some of our forefathers a million years back, we should find them unlike anything we could call man; if we were to go back fifty million years, we should find them, it may be, fishes pure and simple, breathing through gills, and unable to exist for many minutes in air.

It is admitted on all hands that there is more or less analogy between the embryological development of the individual, and the various phases or conditions of life through which his forefathers have passed. I suppose, then, that the fish of fifty million years back and the man of to-day are one single living being, in the same sense, or very nearly so, as the octogenarian is one