If this view is adopted, our memory of a thing is our retention within the brain of a small leaven of the actual thing itself, or of what _quâ_ us is the thing that is remembered, and the ease with which habitual actions come to be performed is due to the power of the vibrations having been increased and modified by continual accession from without till they modify the molecular disturbances of the nervous system, and therefore its material substance, which we have already settled to be only our way of docketing molecular disturbances. The same vibrations, therefore, form the substance remembered, introduce an infinitesimal dose of it within the brain, modify the substance remembering, and, in the course of time, create and further modify the mechanism of both the sensory and motor nerves. Thought and thing are one.
I commend these two last speculations to the reader’s charitable consideration, as feeling that I am here travelling beyond the ground on which I can safely venture; nevertheless, as it may be some time before I have another opportunity of coming before the public, I have thought it, on the whole, better not to omit them, but to give them thus provisionally. I believe they are both substantially true, but am by no means sure that I have expressed them either clearly or accurately; I cannot, however, further delay the issue of my book.
Returning to the point raised in my title, is luck, I would ask, or cunning, the more fitting matter to be insisted upon in connection with organic modification? Do animals and plants grow into conformity with their surroundings because they and their fathers and mothers take pains, or because their uncles and aunts go away? For the survival of the fittest is only the non-survival or going away of the unfittest—in whose direct line the race is not continued, and who are therefore only uncles and aunts of the survivors. I can quite understand its being a good thing for any race that its uncles and aunts should go away, but I do not believe the accumulation of lucky accidents could result in an eye, no matter how many uncles and aunts may have gone away during how many generations.
I would ask the reader to bear in mind the views concerning life and death expressed in an early chapter. They seem to me not, indeed, to take away any very considerable part of the sting from death; this should not be attempted or desired, for with the sting of death the sweets of life are inseparably bound up so that neither can be weakened without damaging the other. Weaken the fear of death, and the love of life would be weakened. Strengthen it, and we should cling to life even more tenaciously than we do. But though death must always remain as a shock and change of habits from which we must naturally shrink—still it is not the utter end of our being, which, until lately, it must have seemed to those who have been unable to accept the grosser view of the resurrection with which we were familiarised in childhood. We too now know that though worms destroy this body, yet in our flesh shall we so far see God as to be still in Him and of Him—biding our time for a resurrection in a new and more glorious body; and, moreover, that we shall be to the full as conscious of this as we are at present of much that concerns us as closely as anything can concern us.