Jack London. Before Adam -
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convincing hypothesis. When they have visions of scenes they
have never seen in the flesh, memories of acts and events
dating back in time, the simplest explanation is that they have
lived before.
But they make the mistake of ignoring their own duality.
They do not recognize their other-personality. They think it is
their own personality, that they have only one personality; and
from such a premise they can conclude only that they have lived
previous lives.
But they are wrong. It is not reincarnation. I have
visions of myself roaming through the forests of the Younger
World; and yet it is not myself that I see but one that is only
remotely a part of me, as my father and my grandfather are
parts of me less remote. This other-self of mine is an
ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early line of
my race, himself the progeny of a line that long before his
time developed fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.
I must again, at the risk of boring, repeat that I am, in
this one thing, to be considered a freak. Not alone do I
possess racial memory to an enormous extent, but I possess the
memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor. And yet,
while this is most unusual, there is nothing over-remarkable
about it.
Follow my reasoning. An instinct is a racial memory. Very
good. Then you and I and all of us receive these memories from
our fathers and mothers, as they received them from their
fathers and mothers. Therefore there must be a medium whereby
these memories are transmitted from generation to generation.
This medium is what Weismann terms the "germplasm." It carries
the memories of the whole evolution of the race. These memories
are dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some