THE CAUSES OF THE STRUGGLE. 305 



of the individual life. The former is necessarily 

 the strongest, as may be seen from the fact that 

 our likes and dislikes are often unreasonable, and 

 yet refuse to be governed by the will. 



This physical memory or instinct seems to be 

 common to both the animal and vegetable king- 

 dom. It is a beautiful provision of nature for 

 protecting every one of her creatures. On account 

 of it young birds hide from the soaring hawk and 

 the timid deer speeds away as man approaches, 

 even when the particular individual may never 

 have seen a bird of prey or a human being, much 

 less suffered from their cruelty. In man it appears 

 as a horror of snakes and other more or less 

 noxious animals, probably inherited from ancestors 

 far more subject to their attacks than later gene- 

 rations. 



To return now to individuality ; the more we 

 study it the more difficult it becomes. Perhaps 

 the very characters which we lay most stress upon 

 are nothing more than the re-appearance of traits 

 which belong to the family, and which have been 

 obscured for centuries. Then there is another set 

 of characters which have resulted from the environ- 

 ment of childhood and youth, and affect our esti- 

 mate of the individual to a wonderful degree. In 



ordinary cases we might even go so far as to say 

 20 



