the race" sounded familiar, and were going about in magazines and
newspapers, but I did not know where they came from; if I had, I
should have given their source. To me they conveyed no meaning, and
vexed me as an attempt to make me take stones instead of bread, and
to palm off an illustration upon me as though it were an
explanation. When I had worked the matter out in my own way, I saw
that the illustration, with certain additions, would become an
explanation, but I saw also that neither he who had adduced it nor
any one else could have seen how right he was, till much had been
said which had not, so far as 1 knew, been said yet, and which
undoubtedly would have been said if people had seen their way to
saying it.

"What is this talk," I wrote, "which is made about the experience of
the race, as though the experience of one man could profit another
who knows nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner it nourishes
him and not his neighbour; if he learns a difficult art it is he
that can do it and not his neighbour" ("Life and Habit," p. 49).

When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally seen that though the
father is not nourished by the dinners that the son eats, yet the
son was fed when the father ate before he begot him.

"Is there any way," I continued, "of showing that this experience of
the race about which so much is said without the least attempt to
show in what way it may, or does, become the experience of the
individual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one single
being only, who repeats on a great many different occasions, and in
slightly different ways, certain performances with which he has
already become exceedingly familiar?"