ANCESTRAL MEMORY: A SUGGESTION

Otago Witness, Issue 2734, 8 August 1906, Page 70

ANCESTRAL MEMORY: A SUGGESTION

— Do We Inherit Our Drenms?

There are, writes the Rev. Forbes Phillips ;n; n t'uj Nineteenth Century (June), few people who have not at times been startled by some vivid reminiscence, which has suddenly illumined thar minds when visiting some entirely n<'\v locality, or while viewing some scene which they know they have never seen before. 'For an ail too brief space the- recollection is then; — a concept in the mind's eye, clear and stroiitg', th-en it fades away, while they desperately han^ on to the skirts of thevision. When it !•• entirely gone, they struggle to recall it as one w ould" recast a drenm. No use — it is s_»">nc ; and the more

serious one-- realise that there are thoughts without jiords, ns woll as songs without words ; slumberintr ideas : dormant pictures : genius held in bondage, which require but the magic word to call then*

into active operation. At other times the vision lingers sufficiently to enable us to get hold of something fairly definite: we are on firm enough ground to say, 'I have seen all this before. I recognise that hill and those ruins ; beyond that hill there is a village; the end of that lane will bring us to the main road,' and we pass on to give further details of what the picture brings back to us." After quoting a number of his own experiences, Mr Phillips goes on to remind us that the strange thing te which he refers has haunted the minds of men, gi*ven food for thought, and shaped itself in all kinds of speculation, from the very dawn of history. "In the subtle metaphysics of the Brahmins, and in the noble morality which has its home under the shadow of Buddha, it stands out precise and clear as an ultimate fact which requires a theory, and it would appear a religion, for its due expression. It was grafted into the theology of Egypt; it laid hold of the mind of Plato, who discusses it under the term 'anamnesis'—reminiscence of former existence or of things once known and seen. Among the Jews the Pharisees had explained it by a doctrine that the virtuous have- power to Tevive and live again (Josephus, 'Antiq.,' XVII I). In the New Testament John the Baptist is regarded by some as the re-in-carnation of Elijah, and the disciples of the Christ on one occasion asked whether/ a certain man born blind was suffering for the sin of his parents or for some sin of his own. Under the forms of transmigration, metempsychosis, re-incarnation, such phenomena were discussed among the early Church -fathers, some of whom decidedly believed that pre-existence was the explanation of such phenomena as I have mentioned. Schopenhauer, Les-sing, Hegel, Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte have d'2alt with it. Of English thinkers the Cambiidge Platonists regarded a previous existence as the only answer to the questions which such incidents raise, and in this shape it has become familiar to us through Shelley ; and Wordsworth says : Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,

The soul that rises with us. our life's star, Hath had e'=ewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar. Not m entiie forgetfulness. And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home. In every line of research we are bound, sooner or later, to stumble upon an ultimate fact, for which no reav>n is assigned at all, if we keep cleai of religion ' revelation. Here is an ultimate fact, the basis of which is memory, and it is in memory, rather than in any new theory of things, that we have to look for t-ha

solution. . . . lnat a child should present certain features of his father and mother, and reproduce certain well-known gestures and mannerisms of his grandfather, is looked upon as something very ordinary. 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, the 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, without seeking the aid of Eastern theology.

—A Haunted World.—

" Whether we believe in apparitions or not, this world is a haunted one. Our tbought-world is full of deep undertones that roll in upon us trom the past. As we lay our ear to the din of the present, we find its accompaniment to be the immeasurable muimur of the ages, as the voice of many waters. The commonplace expressions, the ordinary words we use, are blocks of mind-stuff, wrought* into their present state by the ponderous mace of t.me, and cast and recast in many brains. And the mind of man is a haunted one. Faraway generations of ancestors have cut deep the channels of our memories until what was once a volition is now an involuntary movement. We say a man ha 3 formed certain habits, but how often have they been formed for him in the dim past? As I walk along a dark, lonely road, my ears are on the alert, I glance to right and left, I look over my shoulder. Where did I learn this habit? May it not be the li'cmory-disc giving off its record? My savage ancestor learned by long years of experience to be specially on his guard in a lonely place, and in the dark. When my indignation is thoroughly roustd, I find my hands clench, there is a tightening of the lips, the teeth are more plainly \iHb!e, and the whole attitude is suggestive of making a spring. Here is a trait of early man, who gathered himself together, and sprang upon his enemy to rend with tooth and claw. I have often noticed that when people use the word 'offensive' it is accompanied by a quiver of the nostnls and an involuntary movement of the nose The imagination is still haunted by that piece of very offensive carrion which my primitive ancestor, -n ith a prejudice for raw meat, found too strong for him, s-o strong that his nose rejected it at once. People, when describing a horrid sight, fften shut their eyes momentaiily and ihmly, or shake their heads as if to drive away, or in an eftort not to see, something disagreeable. ... I think very often nur dreams are a jumble of ideas — often rm incoherent jumble, but still ideas that \\<> have inherited, and that dreaming is largely a kind of free play of what I have called ancestral memory." The writer thinks that wo may have he-re a theory which explains a large class of apparitions, and suggests thot "in that vast region of nivsteiy which surrounds ius, the data connected with this subject offer more than the usual n mount of encouragement, and to push back the nmnnference- of that which

encloses us ns far as w£ -can. I take to be the duty of the scientist ; and the desire to do so, a factoi in the cosmic scheme for getting the best out of us ; for every mystery is a great possibility:"