Let me point out that this is no sentimental or mystical statement.  It is hard fact as any hard fact we know.  We, you and I, are not only parts in a thought process, but parts of one flow of blood and life.  Let me put that in a way that may be new to some readers.  Let me remind you of what is sometimes told as a jest, the fact that the number of one’s ancestors increases as we look back in time.  Disregarding the chances of intermarriage, each one of us had two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on backward, until very soon, in less than fifty generations, we should find that, but for the qualification introduced, we should have all the earth’s inhabitants of that time as our progenitors.  For a hundred generations it must hold absolutely true, that everyone of that time who has issue living now is ancestral to all of us.  That brings the thing quite within the historical period.  There is not a western European palaeolithic or neolithic relic that is not a family relic for every soul alive.  The blood in our veins has handled it.

And there is something more.  We are all going to mingle our blood again.  We cannot keep ourselves apart; the worst enemies will some day come to the Peace of Verona.  All the Montagues and Capulets are doomed to intermarry.  A time will come in less than fifty generations when all the population of the world will have my blood, and I and my worst enemy will not be able to say which child is his or mine.

But you may retort—­perhaps you may die childless.  Then all the sooner the whole species will get the little legacy of my personal achievement, whatever it may be.

You see that from this point of view—­which is for me the vividly true and dominating point of view—­our individualities, our nations and states and races are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great stream of the blood of the species, incidental experiments in the growing knowledge and consciousness of the race.

I think this real solidarity of humanity is a fact that is only slowly being apprehended, that it is an idea that we who have come to realize it have to assist in thinking into the collective mind.  I believe the species is still as a whole unawakened, still sunken in the delusion of the permanent separateness of the individual and of races and nations, that so it turns upon itself and frets against itself and fails to see the stupendous possibilities of deliberate self-development that lie open to it now.

I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that strains and I believe grows towards beauty, and of a great mental being that strains and I believe grows towards knowledge and power.  In this persuasion that I am a gatherer of experience, a mere tentacle that arranges thought beside thought for this being of the species, this being that grows beautiful and powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling idea of which I stand in need, the ruling idea that reconciles and adjudicates among my warring motives.  In it I find both concentration of myself and escape from myself; in a word, I find Salvation.