Before Adam | Page 7

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 strains of germplasm carry an excessive
freightage of memories--are, to be scientific, more atavistic than other
strains; and such a strain is mine. I am a freak of heredity, an atavistic
nightmare--call me what you will; but here I am, real and alive, eating
three hearty meals a day, and what are you going to do about it?
And now, before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate the doubting
Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff, and who would
otherwise surely say that the coherence of my dreams is due to
overstudy and the subconscious projection of my knowledge of
evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I have never been a zealous
student. I graduated last of my class. I cared more for athletics,
and--there is no reason I should not confess it--more for billiards.
Further, I had no knowledge of evolution until I was at college,
whereas in my childhood and youth I had already lived in my dreams
all the details of that other, long-ago life. I will say, however, that these
details were mixed and incoherent until I came to know the science of
evolution. Evolution was the key. It gave the explanation, gave sanity
to the pranks of this atavistic brain of mine that, modern and normal,
harked back to a past so remote as to be contemporaneous with the raw
beginnings of mankind.
For in this past I know of, man, as we to-day know him, did not exist. It
was in the period of his becoming that I must have lived and had my
being.

CHAPTER III
The commonest dream of my early childhood was something like this:
It seemed that I was very small and that I lay curled up in a sort of nest
of twigs and boughs. Sometimes I was lying on my back. In this
position it seemed that I spent many hours, watching the play of
sunlight on the foliage and the stirring of the leaves by the wind. Often
the nest itself moved back and forth when the wind was strong.
But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered as of tremendous
space beneath me. I never saw it, I never peered over the edge of the
nest to see; but I KNEW and feared that space that lurked just beneath
me and that ever threatened me like a maw of some all-devouring
monster.
This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more like a
condition than an experience of action, I dreamed very often in my
early childhood. But suddenly, there would rush into the very midst of
it strange forms and ferocious happenings, the thunder and crashing of
storm, or unfamiliar landscapes such as in my wake-a-day life I had
never seen. The result was confusion and nightmare. I could
comprehend nothing of it. There was no logic of sequence.
You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I was a wee babe
of the Younger World lying in my tree nest; the next moment I was a
grown man of the Younger World locked in combat with the hideous
Red-Eye; and the next moment I was creeping carefully down to the
water-hole in the heat of the day. Events, years apart in