the operation of one law? Is there any way
of showing that this experience of the race, of 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 seriousness the experience of
one single being only, repeating in a great many different ways certain
performances with which it has become exceedingly familiar?

It comes to this--that we must either suppose the conditions of
experience to differ during the earlier stages of life from those which
we observe them to become during the heyday of any existence--and this
would appear very gratuitous, tolerable only as a suggestion because the
beginnings of life are so obscure, that in such twilight we may do pretty
much whatever we please without fear of being found out--or that we must
suppose continuity of life and sameness between living beings, whether
plants or animals, and their descendants, to be far closer than we have
hitherto believed; so that the experience of one person is not enjoyed by
his successor, so much as that the successor is _bona fide_ an elongation
of the life of his progenitors, imbued with their memories, profiting by
their experiences--which are, in fact, his own until he leaves their
bodies--and only unconscious of the extent of these memories and
experiences owing to their vastness and already infinite repetition.

Certainly it presents itself to us as a singular coincidence--

I. That we are _most conscious of_, _and have most control over_, such
habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences--which are
acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and
not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely
human.

II. That we are _less conscious of_, _and have less control over_, the
use of teeth, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing--which were
acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided
ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which
are still, geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent.

ill. That we are _most unconscious of_, _and have least control over_,
our digestion, which we have in common even with our invertebrate
ancestry, and which is a habit of extreme antiquity.

There is something too like method in this for it to be taken as the
result of mere chance--chance again being but another illustration of
Nature's love of a contradicti