���TIPSters may be interested in a public exchange of letters between Darwin and the Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe on animal experimentation that I've just chanced upon: http://timesonline.typepad.com/timesarchive/2009/02/video-ben-macin.html (Hold down left hand side of your mouse and drag to see complete letter.)
My knowledge of Cobbe previously did not extend beyond her perspicacious remarks on memory, which rebutted the contemporary idea of memory and also provided an explanation for false memories: Memory is for ever likened by poets and rhetoricians to an engraved tablet, treasured in the recesses of mind, and liable only to obliteration by the slow abrasion of time, or the dissolving heat of=2 0 madness. We venture to affirm that such a simile is not in the remotest degree applicable to the real phenomena of the case, and that memory is neither an impression made, once for all, like an engraving on a tablet, nor yet safe for an hour from obliteration or modification, after being formed. Rather is memory a finger mark traced on shifting sand, ever exposed to obliteration when left unrenewed; and if renewed, then modified, and made, not the same, but a fresh and different mark. […] Again, by this theory of memory, we obtain an available hypothesis, to account for the notorious but marvellous fact, that liars come in time to believe their own falsehoods. The warp ing of the original trace of the story, albeit voluntary and conscious, has, equally with unconscious dereliction, effected the end of obliterating the primary mark, and substituting a false one, which has assumed the place of a remembrance. Without conscious falsehood, the same thing happens also occasionally when we realize strongly by imagination some circumstance which never happened, or happened to another person… Frances Power Cobbe, “The Fallacies of Memory” (1867) (Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, pp. 151-152, OUP, 1998) Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
