cut off at all. This will be more
readily seen in the case of worms which have been cut in half. Let a
worm be cut in half, and the two halves will become fresh worms; which of
them is the original worm? Surely both. Perhaps no simpler cage than
this could readily be found of the manner in which personality eludes us,
the moment we try to investigate its real nature. There are few ideas
which on first consideration appear so simple, and none which becomes
more utterly incapable of limitation or definition as soon as it is
examined closely.

It has gone the way of species. It is now generally held that species
blend or have blended into one another; so that any possibility of
arrangement and apparent subdivision into definite groups, is due to the
suppression by death both of individuals and whole genera, which, had
they been now existing, would have linked all living beings by a series
of gradations so subtle that little classification could have been
attempted. What we have failed to see is that the individual is as much
linked onto other individuals as the species is linked on to other
species. How it is that the one great personality of life as a whole,
should have split itself up into so many centres of thought and action,
each one of which is wholly, or at any rate nearly unconscious of its
connection with the other members, instead of having grown up into a huge
polyp, or as it were coral reef or compound animal over the whole world,
which should be conscious but of its own one single existence; how it is
that the daily waste of this creature should be carried on by the
conscious death of its individual members, instead of by the unconscious
waste of tissue which goes on in the bodies of each individual (if indeed
the tissue which we waste daily in our own bodies is so unconscious of
its birth and death as we suppose); how, again, that the daily repair of
this huge creature life should have become decentralised, and be carried
on by conscious reproduction on the part of its component items, instead
of by the unconscious nutrition of the whole from a single centre, as the
nutrition of our own bodies would appear (though perhaps falsely) to be
carried on; these are matters upon which I dare not speculate here, but
on which some reflections may follow in subsequent chapters.

INSTINCT AS INHERITED MEMORY. (CHAPTER XI. OF LIFE AND HABIT.)

Obviously the memory of a habit or experience will not commonl