much attention to facts of this
nature; and though their general method of exposition seems to me quite
unjustifiably exact and precise, it cannot be denied that it is often
vividly illuminating. It is so in this connexion. They distinguish
between "dominant" and "recessive" qualities, and they establish cases
in which parents with all the dominant characteristics produce offspring
of recessive type. Recessive qualities are constantly being masked by
dominant ones and emerging again in the next generation. It is not the
individual that reproduces himself, it is the species that reproduces
through the individual and often in spite of his characteristics.

The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the
incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a statement
of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as we seek to
follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without
significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realize ourselves as
experiments of the species for the species, just in so far do we escape
from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience
greater than ourselves.

Now none of this, if you read me aright, makes for the suppression of
one's individual difference, but it does make for its correlation. We
have to get everything we can out of ourselves for this very reason that
we do not stand alone; we signify as parts of a universal and immortal
development. Our separate selves are our charges, the talents of which
much has to be made. It is because we are episodical in the great
synthesis of life that we have to make the utmost of our individual
lives and traits and possibilities.

2.10. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT.

What stupendous constructive mental and physical possibilities are
there to which I feel I am contributing, you may ask, when I feel that
I contribute to this greater Being; and at once I confess I become vague
and mystical. I do not wish to pass glibly over this point. I call your
attention to the fact that here I am mystical and arbitrary. I am what
I am, an individual in this present phase. I can see nothing of
these possibilities except that they will be in the nature of those
indefinable and overpowering gleams of promise in our world that we call
Beauty. Elsewhere (in my "Food of the Gods") I have tried to render my
sense of our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of
those who will "stand