38 Luck, or Cunning ? 
scale. Granted that no one can draw a clear line and define 
the limits within which a miracle is healthy working and 
beyond which it is unwholesome, 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 all 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 Atheneum 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 still 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 quitted too suddenly. While we 
were realising ‘‘ experience’ our minds excluded “ race,” 
inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accus- 
tomed hitherto to connect only with the individual ; 
while realising the idea “ race,” for the same reason, we as a 
matter of course excluded experience. We were required 
to fuse two ideas that were alien to one another, without 
having had those other ideas presented to us which would 
alone flux them. The absence of these—which indeed 
were not immediately ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would 
have doubtless grasped them—made nonsense of the whole 
