True, Mr. Spencer made abundant use of such expressions as “the experience of the race,” “accumulated experiences,” and others like them, but he did not explain—­and it was here the difficulty lay—­ how a race could have any experience at all.  We know what we mean when we say that an individual has had experience; we mean that he is the same person now (in the common use of the words), on the occasion of some present action, as the one who performed a like action at some past time or times, and that he remembers how he acted before, so as to be able to turn his past action to account, gaining in proficiency through practice.  Continued personality and memory are the elements that constitute experience; where these are present there may, and commonly will, be experience; where they are absent the word “experience” cannot properly be used.

Formerly we used to see an individual as one, and a race as many.  We now see that though this is true as far as it goes, it is by no means the whole truth, and that in certain important respects it is the race that is one, and the individual many.  We all admit and understand this readily enough now, but it was not understood when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he adduced in the letter to the Athenaeum above referred to.  In the then state of our ideas a race was only a succession of individuals, each one of them new persons, and as such incapable of profiting by the experience of its predecessors except in the very limited number of cases where oral teaching, or, as in recent times, writing, was possible.  The thread of life was, as I have elsewhere said, remorselessly shorn between each successive generation, and the importance of the physical and psychical connection between parents and offspring had been quite, or nearly quite, lost sight of.  It seems strange how this could ever have been allowed to come about, but it should be remembered that the Church in the Middle Ages would strongly discourage attempts to emphasize a connection that would raise troublesome questions as to who in a future state was to be responsible for what; and, after all, for nine purposes of life out of ten the generally received opinion that each person is himself and nobody else is on many grounds the most convenient.  Every now and then, however, there comes a tenth purpose, for which the continued personality side of the connection between successive generations is as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes—­some of which are not unimportant—­are obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which the more commonly needed conception has overgrown the other.