of thinking of any one as able to remember things that had happened
before he had been born or thought of. This notion will still
strike many of my non-readers as harsh and strained; no such
discord, therefore, should have been taken unprepared, and when
taken it should have been resolved with pomp and circumstance. Mr
Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never either
prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words
"experience of the race" sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with
the result that his words were barren. They were barren because
they were incoherent; they were incoherent because they were
approached and quitted too suddenly. While we were realising
"experience" our minds excluded "race," inasmuch as experience was
an idea we had been accustomed hitherto to connect only with the
individual; while realising the idea "race," for the same reason, we
as a matter of course excluded experience. We were required to fuse
two ideas that were alien to one another, without having had those
other ideas presented to us which would alone flux them. The
absence of these--which indeed were not immediately ready to hand,
or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them--made nonsense of
the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one
against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer's pages, only to find that
they had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we
put down his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know
what to do with his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly
while he chastised us with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with
whips, according to our temperaments.

I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and
the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and
plants, are one in principle--the sterility of hybrids being just as