52 What habit is for the iyidividual 



itineraries — let us say — the historical and the 

 automatic, the route of the original struggle 

 and the routine of its recapitulation after 

 many repetitions. But the more repetitions 

 the more fixity. ^In short, what habit is for 

 individual life that is heredity for racial life. 

 But the one lags enormously behind the 

 other: the repetitions that will suffice to 

 make a habit automatic for a lifetime are 

 very far from sufficing to ensure heredity 

 for future generations. And the more ad- 

 vanced the race, the farther heredity lags 

 behind acquisition. At the unicellular stage, 

 they are on a par, in other words there is as 

 yet neither distinction nor interval between 

 body and germ. At the multicellular stage 

 there is both, and so, as the scale of life 

 rises farther, the greater becomes the dis- 

 parity between the still unicellular germ 

 and the mature organism of ever increasing 



