ng something which in the person of its parent
or parents it has done once, and if once, then any number of times,
already.

It is obvious, therefore, that the germ-plasm (or whatever the fancy word
for it may be) of any one generation is as physically identical with the
germ-plasm of its predecessor as any two things can be. The difference
between Professor Weismann and, we will say, Heringians consists in the
fact that the first maintains the new germ-plasm when on the point of
repeating its developmental processes to take practically no cognisance
of anything that has happened to it since the last occasion on which it
developed itself; while the latter maintain that offspring takes much the
same kind of account of what has happened to it in the persons of its
parents since the last occasion on which it developed itself, as people
in ordinary life take of things that happen to them. In daily life
people let fairly normal circumstances come and go without much heed as
matters of course. If they have been lucky they make a note of it and
try to repeat their success. If they have been unfortunate but have
recovered rapidly they soon forget it; if they have suffered long and
deeply they grizzle over it and are scared and scarred by it for a long
time. The question is one of cognisance or non-cognisance on the part of
the new germs, of the more profound impressions made on them while they
were one with their parents, between the occasion of their last preceding
development, and the new course on which they are about to enter. Those
who accept the theory put forward independently by Professor Hering of
Prague (whose work on this subject is translated in my book, "Unconscious
Memory") {40} and by myself in "Life and Habit," {41} believe in
cognizance, as do Lamarckians generally. Weismannites, and with them the
orthodoxy of English science, find non-cognisance more acceptable.

If the Heringian view is accepted, that heredity is only a mode of
memory, and an extension of memory from one generation to another, then
the repetition of its development by any embryo thus becomes only the
repetition of a lesson learned by rote; and, as I have elsewhere said,
our view of life is simplified by finding that it is no longer an
equation of, say, a hundred unknown quantities, but of ninety-nine only,
inasmuch as two of the unknown quantities prove to be substantially
identical. In this case the inheritance of acquired characteri