the same footing?

A friend who had been arguing with me for some time as above, concluded
with the following words:--

"If you cannot be content with the similar action of similar substances
(living or non-living) under similar circumstances--if you cannot accept
this as an ultimate fact, but consider it necessary to connect repetition
of similar action with memory before you can rest in it and be
thankful--be consistent, and introduce this memory which you find so
necessary into the inorganic world also. Either say that a chrysalis
becomes a butterfly because it is the thing that it is, and, being that
kind of thing, must act in such and such a manner and in such a manner
only, so that the act of one generation has no more to do with the act of
the next than the fact of cream being churned into butter in a dairy one
day has to do with other cream being churnable into butter in the
following week--either say this or else develop some mental
condition--which I have no doubt you will be very well able to do if you
feel the want of it--in which you can make out a case for saying that
oxygen and hydrogen on being brought together, and cream on being
churned, are in some way acquainted with, and mindful of, action taken by
other cream, and other oxygen and hydrogen on past occasions."

I felt inclined to reply that my friend need not twit me with being able
to develop a mental organism if I felt the need of it, for his own
ingenious attack on my position, and indeed every action of his life, was
but an example of this omnipresent principle.

When he was gone, however, I thought over what he had been saying. I
endeavoured to see how far I could get on without volition and memory,
and reasoned as follows:--A repetition of like antecedents will be
certainly followed by a repetition of like consequents, whether the
agents be men and women or chemical substances. "If there be two cowards
perfectly similar in every respect, and if they be subjected in a
perfectly similar way to two terrifying agents, which are themselves
perfectly similar, there are few who will not expect a perfect similarity
in the running away, even though ten thousand years intervene between the
original combination and its repetition." {189} Here certainly there is
no coming into play of memory, more than in the pan of cream on two
successive churning days, yet the action is similar.

A clerk in an office has an hour in the middle of the day for din