Immanent Causation in Organisms and in Body-Mind

Abstract

In the memory which is recall, inheritance is also appropriation which can be put to new use. In habit memory, inheritance comes as entrained repetition of a pattern. Recall memory belongs to our conscious experience, habit memory is part of the psycho-physiological substructure of our experience. I do not know how far down into nature habit memory, or some analogy with it, may go. If it can be extended, I suspect that the notion of a functioning organism would also need to be extended with it. To press this could lead to pan-psychism, which might be avoided if ‘memory’ is divested of any suggestion of conscious awareness, and used for a store of cumulated phylogenetic inheritance on which the individual draws in ontogeny.¹ This, it may be claimed, is shown by the way in which the embryo runs through a repertoire of evolutionary forms.