Chapter 9 - Page 2

the unfamiliar, i.e., with the question, whether they seem likely to compel us to change our habits, either for better or worse.

Thus, if an object or incident be very unfamiliar, as, we will say, a whale or an iceberg to one travelling to America for the first time, it will make a deep impression, though but little affecting our interests; but if we struck against the iceberg and were shipwrecked, or nearly so, it would produce a much deeper impression, we should think much more about icebergs, and remember much more about them, than if we had merely seen one. So, also, if we were able to catch the whale and sell its oil, we should have a deep impression made upon us. In either case we see that the amount of unfamiliarity, either present or prospective, is the main determinant of the depth of the impression.

As with consciousness and volition, so with sudden unfamiliarity. It impresses us more and more deeply the more unfamiliar it is, until it reaches such a point of impressiveness as to make no further impression at all; on which we then and there die. For death only kills through unfamiliarity--that is to say, because the new position, whatever it is, is so wide a cross as compared with the old one, that we cannot fuse the two so as to understand the combination; hence we lose all recognition of, and faith in, ourselves and our surroundings.

But however much we imagine we remember concerning the details of any remarkable impression which has been made us by a single blow, we do not remember as much or nearly as much as we think we do. The subordinate details soon drop out of mind. Those who think they remember even such a momentous matter as the battle of Waterloo recall now probably but half-a-dozen episodes, a gleam here, and a gleam there, so that what they call remembering the battle of Waterloo, is, in fact, little more than a kind of dreaming--so soon vanishes the memory of any unrepeated occurrence.

As for smaller impressions, there is very little of what happens to us in each week that will be in our memories a week hence; a man of eighty remembers few of the unrepeated incidents of his life beyond those of the last fortnight, a little here, and a little there, forming a matter of perhaps six weeks or two months in all, if everything that he can call to mind were acted over again with no greater fulness than he can remember it. As for incidents that have been often repeated, his mind strikes a balance of its past reminiscences, remembering the two or three last performances, and a general method of procedure, but nothing more.

If, then, the recollection of all that is not very novel, or very often repeated, so soon fades from our own minds, during what we consider as our single lifetime, what wonder that the details of our daily experience should find no place in that brief epitome of them which is all we can give in so small a volume as offspring?

If we cannot