44 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



cession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a 

 succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small 

 scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, 

 give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme 

 of endurance ; and on a still larger, kill whether they be 

 on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said in 

 "Life and Habit," hates that any principle should 

 breed hermaphroditically, but wOl give to each an help- 

 meet for it which shall cross it and be the undoing of 

 it ; and in the undoing, do ; and in the doing, undo, 

 and so ad infinitum. Cross-fertilisation is just as neces- 

 sary for continued fertility of ideas as for that of 

 organic life, and the attempt to frown this or that 

 down merely on the ground that it involves contradic- 

 tion in terms, without at the same time showing that 

 the contradiction is on a larger scale than healthy 

 thought can stomach, argues either small sense or 

 small sincerity on the part of those who make it. 

 The contradictions employed by Mr. Spencer are 

 objectionable, not on the ground of their being con- 

 tradictions at all, but on the ground of their being 

 blinked, and used unintelligently. 



But though it is not possible for any one to get a 

 clear conception of Mr. Spencer's meaning, we may 

 say with more confidence what it was that he did not 

 mean. He did not mean to make memory the key- 

 stone of his system ; he has none of that sense of 

 the unifying, binding force of memory which Professor 

 Hering has so well expressed, nor does he show any 

 signs of perceiving the far-reaching consequences that 

 ensue if the phenomena of heredity are considered as 



