Note 19 — IX BUDDHISM AND THE PROBLEM OF BIOLOGY

Thus, Hering writes in Das Gedächtniss als Funktion der belebten Materie: “The central sections of the nervous system must retain some memory of that which they formerly have done.... In like manner the motor system must possess memory, albeit unknown to us it is true.” Further on he says: “The reappearance in the daughter organism of the characteristics of the mother organism is a reproduction on the matter side, of such a process as the former already once before has shared in, if only as germ in the ovary, which process it remembers, inasmuch as to like stimuli it reacts exactly as that organism of which it once formed a part”; from which the fact of the hereditary transmission of characteristic qualities would work out as a specimen merely of the “memory of unconscious matter.” Hering adds: “Thus every organic being of the present day stands before us ultimately as a product of the unconscious memory of organized matter.”

All such ideas are nothing but ingenious paraphrases of actuality; and in the last analysis amount to nothing but an audacious juggle with the word memory. And when it is further said: “If memory be attributed to the species the same as to the individual, instinct immediately becomes comprehensible”; and in conclusion: “The conscious memory of man is extinguished at death, but the unconscious memory of nature is indestructible,” I can only call this dealing in poetry, not science, a possibility only to be arrived at by the dis-actualizing of actuality. In reality memory exists solely where something is remembered, just as a flame exists there only where it is burning. Of this kind of memory, however, but one example is to be found in all the world—I myself! It is just this lack of the sense of actuality—as displayed in physics—which to such a large extent constitutes the greatness of science, while it also no less constitutes its weakness, as in biology. E. Mach in his Erkenntnis und Irrtum, p. 49, expresses himself to the selfsame effect: “Heredity, instinct, may then be depicted as memory stretching out beyond the individual,” a sentence that possesses about as much content of actuality as the “songs unsung” of a dead poet.