THE HEREDITY OF RICHARD ROE. 



139 



"vanished yesterdays" are the tyrants of to-morrow. 

 The higher heredity is the heredity from ourselves. The 

 art of life is in a large degree the process of " hold- 

 ing one's self together." The ego is the expression of 

 the result of this process. , Just as " Eng- 

 land " exists only as the co-operation 

 of all Englishmen, so does the mental 

 " ego " exist only in the co-ordination of working nerve 

 cells. The theory that the ego is a separate being 

 which plays on the organs of the brain as a musician on 

 the keys of a piano, belongs not to science but to poe- 

 try. As well think of England as a disembodied organ- 

 ism that plays on the hearts of Englishmen, leading them 

 to acts of glory or of shame. This, too, might be poetry ; 

 it is not fact. 



The unity of life, which is its sanity, depends on 

 bringing the various elements to work as one force. 

 Duality or plurality in life, the " leading 

 e e u " ity f of a double life " of any sort, is an evi- 

 dence of some kind of failure or disin- 

 tegration. " Science finds no ego, self, or will that can 

 maintain itself against the past." In other words, from 

 the past, its inheritance, and its experience, the elements 

 of the present are always drawn. The consciousness of 

 man is not the whole of man. It is not an entity work- 

 ing among materials foreign to itself. It is rather the 

 flame that flickers over embers set on fire long before 

 and whose burning may go on long after the individual 

 flame has ceased to be. 



" The soul," says Dr. Edward A. Ross, " is not a 

 spiritual unit, but a treacherous compound of strange 

 contradiction and warring elements, with traces of spent 

 passions and vestiges of ancient sins, with echoes of 

 forgotten deeds and survivals of vanished habits." 

 Moreover, "science tells us of the conscious and sub- 



