ANCESTRAL MEMORY.

Evening Star, Issue 12873, 24 July 1906, Page 8

ANCESTRAL MEMORY.

" There are few people who have not at times been startled by some vivid reminiscence, which has suddenly illumined their minds when visiting some entirely new locality, or while viewing some scene which they know they have never seen before." Thus writes the Rev. F. Phillips in the 'Nineteenth Century.' "A key has been somehow turned; a bolt shot "back somewhere within the inner temple of their consciousness; a secret flushed in upon them, a thrill of insight has possessed them, and they feel for the moment a new light has broken over them. Words of amazed recognition rush to their lips, as a full current of new thought is switched on—and they feel they want to say so much all at once that the effort

generally ends in their saying little thai is coherent. Far an all-too-braf space the recollection is there—a concept in the mind's eye, dear and strong, then it fades away, while they desperately hazig on to the skirts of the vision- When it is entirely gone they 'struggle to'recall it as one would recast a dream. No nse—it is gone; and the more serious ones realise that there are thoughts without words, as well as songs without words; slumbering ideas; dormant pictures; genius held in bandage, which require but the magio word to call them into active operation. "And this strange tiling— this haunting as of a pre-existence, is not exceptional; it is not new; it is not limited to poets or dreamers, or to those whose minds are supersensitive. From the very dawn of history it has haunted the minds of men, grran food for thought, and shaped itself m all kinds of speculation. Is it not possible that the child may inherit something of his ancestor's, memory? That these flashes of reminiscence are the sudden awakening, the calling into action, of something we have in our blood—the discs, t«he records, of an ancestor's past life, which require but the essential adjustment and conditions to give up their secrets! If so, then we have in ancestral memory a natural answer to many of life's puzzles, wif bout seeking the aid of Eastern theology. The theory of an ancestral memory is a reasonable proposition, and as a working hypothesis will be found useful in the solution of many puzzles that confront us daily. If the memory cells of our ancestors were the collected photographed impressions of their experiences, and these cells in the process of photographing were : subjected to some subtle change in physical, structure, then that these negatives of impressions should be handed on to posterity is not difficult to understand and accept."