32 LUCK, OR CUNNING ? 



hension within our own system is mental as well as 

 physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and 

 evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a 

 cross — that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not 

 upon a large scale. Granted that no one can draw a 

 clean line and define the limits within which a miracle 

 is healthy working and beyond which it is unwhole- 

 some, any more than he can prescribe the exact 

 degree of fineness to which we must comminute our 

 food; granted, again, that some can do more than 

 others, and that at times all men sport, so to speak, 

 and surpass themselves, Still we know as a general rule 

 near enough, and find that the strongest can do but 

 very little at a time, and, to return to Mr, Spencer, the 

 fusion of two such hitherto unassociated ideas as race 

 and experience was a miracle beyond our strength. 



Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages 

 he quoted in the letter to the Athenceum above 

 referred to, we were not in the habit of thinking of 

 any one as able to remember things that had happened 

 before he had been born or thought of. This notion 

 will stiU strike many of my non-readers as harsh and 

 strained ; no such discord, therefore, should have been 

 taken unprepared, and when taken it should have been 

 resolved with pomp and circumstance. Mr. Spencer, 

 however, though he took it continually, never either 

 prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words 

 " experience of the race " sprang this seeming paradox 

 upon us, with the result that his words were barren. 

 They were barren because they were incoherent; they 

 were incoherent because they were approached and 



