THE LIVING SUBSTANCE. i6i 



formed, and the powers and processes which formed both it 

 and the parent are by no means to be limited or defined by 

 those results, nor have they thus wholly expressed themselves. 

 The individual may rather be said to be one recurrent result 

 of conditions that guide substance habits along lines produc- 

 ing race history. The rhythm of that recurrence may in all 

 or a variable number of its parts include many generations. 

 Atavism as commonly known is but a grosser expression of 

 this truth about substance habit. The father element con- 

 tributes his portion of the web of phenomena of substance 

 habit and substance opportunity ; the mother hers. Both 

 doubtless contribute some of each sort of conditions as well 

 as of living substance, but the mother, as a rule, patently sup- 

 plies most of the immediate inclusion opportunities. Sex is 

 determined, it seems to me, at some variable time by existing 

 internal opportunities which decide the sort of race organ 

 most possible, or most in harmony with these. The race organ 

 has other meaning than immediate self-expression of the sub- 

 stance, but has also its relations to existing external oppor- 

 tunities as well as internal and these become known to and 

 recognized by the sentient mass substance. 



From this standpoint one no longer thinks of "transmission " 

 but of trafisitiotis ; one no longer wrestles as Jacob with the 

 angel, with the problem of transplantation and distribution of 

 representative and determinant biophores, — but one sees 

 spread out before one, sequence of phases and phenomena, 

 origin and maintenance of substance organs and substance 

 habit, and the maze of intermittent or recurrent rhythms these 

 form; — one sees the whole race history of the substance as a 

 vast, web-like, compound grouping of physiological as well as 

 physical and chemical phenomena, in three dimensions of space. 

 The individual becomes a single chord in a great orchestral sym- 

 phony. At this standpoint one finds oneself suddenly relieved 

 of the burden of mental necessity or yearning for any theory 

 of heredity, for such " heredity " appears here to be but a 

 phantom difificulty, a result of artificial separation of portions of 

 the web of sequences, a term forced upon us by an inherited 

 standpoint from whose necessary limitations we have suffered 



