NATURAL SELECTION 93 



in circumstances and under conditions where its pre- 

 servation is absolutely impossible. But the last outrage 

 he inflicted upon the intelligence of his day and 

 generation was his assuming an indefinite power of 

 latency as a characteristic of individual variations. 

 The frailest, the most fugitive and evanescent of 

 entities, the individual variation, is endowed by him 

 with an endless life and an indomitable, undecaying 

 vigour ; not that he conceives of it as always effectively 

 living or effectively operative, but he conceives of it 

 as going to sleep, probably for hundreds of generations, 

 while its unconscious lips keep muttering Eesurgam. 

 At length its slumber is dispelled, and all unaffected 

 and unharmed by the constant inrush and outrush of 

 its fellows, it starts to active life with undiminished 

 potency, to subserve perchance, in some unknown way, 

 some evolutionary end. It is perhaps the most 

 irrational of all the unauthorised assumptions which 

 form the factors of his extraordinary theory, yet it has 

 proved one of his most splendid triumphs over the 

 intelligence of his followers. It is conspicuously 

 utilised in the philosophy of Spencer : it has entered 

 as a heritage of civilisation into the thought of 

 Christendom. All writers of fiction explain traits in 

 the characters of their personages as being resuscita- 

 tions of traits that belonged to long forgotten ancestors. 

 There is no end to the silly trash that is heard every- 

 where concerning what has been named Atavism, to 

 wit, the reappearance of the imaginary ancestor's traits. 

 I have been told of a preacher, an enthusiastic admirer 



