It is a pleasant fancy to imagine some ambitious hoarder of wealth, some egotistical founder of name and family, returning to find his descendants—­his descendants—­after the lapse of a few brief generations.  His heir and namesake may have not a thousandth part of his heredity, while under some other name, lost to all the tradition and glory of him, enfeebled and degenerate through much intermarriage, may be a multitude of people who have as much as a fiftieth or even more of his quality.  They may even be in servitude and dependence to the really alien person who is head of the family.  Our founder will go through the spreading record of offspring and find it mixed with that of people he most hated and despised.  The antagonists he wronged and overcame will have crept into his line and recaptured all they lost; have played the cuckoo in his blood and acquisitions, and turned out his diluted strain to perish.

And while I am being thus biological let me point out another queer aspect in which our egotism is overridden by physical facts.  Men and women are apt to think of their children as being their very own, blood of their blood and bone of their bone.  But indeed one of the most striking facts in this matter is the frequent want of resemblance between parents and children.  It is one of the commonest things in the world for a child to resemble an aunt or an uncle, or to revive a trait of some grandparent that has seemed entirely lost in the intervening generation.  The Mendelians have given 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.