THE HEREDITY OF RICHARD ROE. 139 
“vanished yestetdays”’ 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 orof 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 
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 byrning 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- 
The higher 
heredity. 
The unity of 
the ego. 
