Mr. Herbert Spencer 31 
important respects it is the race that is one, and the indi- 
vidual many. We all admit and understand this readily 
enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer 
wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the Atheneum 
above referred to. In the then state of our ideas a race was 
only a succession of individuals, each one of them new 
persons, and as such incapable of profiting by the experience 
of its predecessors except in the very limited number of 
cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, 
was possible. The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere 
said, remorselessly shorn between each successive genera- 
tion, and the importance of the physical and psychical 
connection between parents and offspring had been quite, 
or nearly quite, lost sight of. It seems strange how this 
could ever have been allowed to come about, but it should 
‘be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would 
strongly discourage attempts to emphasize a connection 
that would raise troublesome questions as to who in a future 
state was to be responsible for what; and, after all, for 
nine purposes of life out of ten the generally received 
opinion that each person is himself and nobody else is on 
many grounds the most convenient. Every now and then, 
however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the con- 
tinued personality side of the connection between successive 
generations is as convenient as the new personality side is 
for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes—some 
of which are not unimportant—are obscured and fulfilled 
amiss owing to the completeness with which the more 
commonly needed conception has overgrown the other. - 
Neither view is more true than the other, but the one 
was wanted every hour and minute of the day, and was 
therefore kept, so to speak, in stock, and in one of the most 
accessible places of our mental storehouse, while the other 
was so seldom asked for that it became not worth while 
to keep it. By-and-by it was found so troublesome to 
send out for it, and so hard to come by even then, that 
