Mr. Herbert Spencer 33 
an explanation. When I had worked the matter out in my 
own way, I saw that the illustration, with certain additions, 
would become an explanation, but I saw also that neither 
he who had adduced it nor any one else could 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. 
“Ts 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 individual, is in sober serious- 
ness the experience of one single being only, who repeats 
on a great many different occasions, and in slightly different 
ways, certain 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—I mean I saw that personality could not be 
broken as between generations, without also breaking it 
between the years, days, and moments of a man’s life. 
What differentiates ‘Life and Habit” from the 
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