What is it accounts for race-persistence? Not just what you see on the physical plane.  There is what we should call an astral mold; and this is fed and nourished,—­its edges kept firm and distinct,—­by forces from the plane of causes, the thought-plane.  When this mold has been well established,—­as by centuries of national greatness and power,—­all sorts of waves of outer circumstance may roll over the race, and apparently wash its raciality clean away; and yet something in the unseen operates to resist, and, when the waves recede, to raise up first the old race-consciousness, and finally national existence again.  Take Ireland for example.  It has been over-run and over-run so much that many authorities would deny the existence of any Celtic blood there at all.  But what is absolutely undeniable is that a distinct and well-defined racial type exists there; and that it corresponds largely to the racial type—­I do not mean physical so much as spiritual,—­that the Greek and Roman writers ascribed to the Celtic Gauls.  It is often claimed that an Irishman is merely an inferior kind of Englishman, and that there is little difference in blood between the two; but those who make this claim most loudly would not dream of denying the difference of the mental types; they are generally the ones who see most difference.  Why was it that the children of the Norman invaders of Ireland became Hiberniores ipsis Hiberniis? Because of the astral mold, certainly.  It is race-consciousness that makes race, and not the other way; and there is something behind that makes race-consciousness; so that even where calamity has smashed up the latter and put it altogether in abeyance, the seeds of it remain, in the soil and on the inner planes, to sprout again in their day; when the Crest-Wave rolls in; when Souls come to revive them.  It may be that this will never happen, of course; but it seems to me that where Nature wishes to put an end to these racial recrudescences, she must take strong steps.

Though the British Celts had been under Roman rule for four centuries, their language today is Celtic.—­Why?—­Because there was what you may call a very old, well-established and strong Celtic-speaking astral mold.  We absorbed a large number of Latin words; but assimilated them to the Celtic mold so that you would never recognise them; whereas in a page of English the Latin borrowings stand out by the score.  Look at that ascend, for instance:  Latin ascendere parading itself naked and unashamed, and making no pretense whatever to be anything else.  You shall find ascendere, too, on any page of Welsh; or rather, you shall not find him, by reason of his skillful camouflage.  He has cut off his train, as in English; but he has cut off more of it:  the d of the stem, as well as the ending.  He has altered both his vowels, and one of his three remaining consonants; and appears as esgyn, to walk the pages undetected for an alien by that vigilant police, the Celtic sense of euphony.  He is typical of a thousand others.  Wherefore the difference?—­The English were a new people in process of formation, and besides with a whole heap of Latin blood in them from the Roman province; their mold was faintly formed, or only forming; but the Celts had formed theirs rigidly in ancient times.