Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/74

 HEREDITARY MEMORIES

observing," continued the Doctor, "that it very frequently happens that upon seeing or hearing something new for the first time,—that is, something entirely new to us,—we feel a surprise, not caused by the novelty of that which we see or hear, but by a very curious echo in the mind. I say echo. I would do better to use the word memory-echo. It seems to us, although we know positively we have never seen or heard of this new thing in our mortal lives, that we heard or saw it in some infinitely remote period. An old Latin writer considered this phenomenon to be a proof of the theory of Preëxistence. A Buddhist would tell you that the soul, through all its wanderings of a million years, retains faint memories of all it has seen or heard in each transmigration and that each of us now living in the flesh possesses dim and ghostly recollections of things heard and seen æons before our birth. That the phenomenon exists there can be no doubt. I am