the race that is one, and the individual many. We all admit and
understand this readily enough now, but it was not understood when
Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the
Athenaeum above referred to. In the then state of our ideas a race
was only a succession of individuals, each one of them new persons,
and as such incapable of profiting by the experience of its
predecessors except in the very limited number of cases where oral
teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, was possible. The thread
of life was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between
each successive generation, and the importance of the physical and
psychical connection between parents and offspring had been quite,
or nearly quite, lost sight of. It seems strange how this could
ever have been allowed to come about, but it should be remembered
that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly discourage
attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise troublesome
questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible for
what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the
generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody
else is on many grounds the most convenient. Every now and then,
however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued
personality side of the connection between successive generations is
as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine,
and these tenth purposes--some of which are not unimportant--are
obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which
the more commonly needed conception has overgrown the other.

Neither view is more true than the other, but the one was wanted
every hour and minute of the day, and was therefore kept, so to
speak, in stock, and in one of the most accessible places of our
mental storehouse, while the other was so seldom asked for that it