26 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



have seen how right he was, till much had been said 

 which had not, so far as I knew, been said yet, and 

 which undoubtedly would have been said if people had 

 seen their way to saying it. 



" What is this talk," I wrote, " which is made about 

 the experience of the race, as though the experience 

 of one man could profit another who knows nothing 

 about him ? If a man eats his dinner it nourishes 

 him and not his neighbour ; if he learns a difficult art 

 it is he that can do it and not his neighbour " (" Life 

 and Habit," p. 49). 



When I wrote thus in 1877, it was not generally 

 seen that though the father is not nourished by the 

 dinners that the son eats, yet the son was fed when 

 the father ate before he begot him. 



" Is there any way," I continued, " of showing that 

 this experience of the race about which so much is 

 said without the least attempt to show in what way 

 it may, or does, become the experience of the indivi- 

 dual, is in sober seriousness the experience of one 

 single being only, who repeats on a great many 

 different occasions, and in slightly different ways, cer- 

 tain performances with which he has already become 

 exceedingly familiar ? " 



I felt, as every one else must have felt who reflected 

 "upon the expression in question, that it was fallacious 

 till this was done. When I first began to write 

 "Life and Habit" I did not believe it could be done, 

 but when I had gone right up to the end, as it were, 

 of my cul de sac, I saw the path which led straight to 

 the point I had despaired of reaching — 1 mean I saw 



