It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food fine before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large lumps will choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again, that that which is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas.  Food is very thoughtful:  through thought it comes, and back through thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and comprehension within our own system is mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross—­that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale.  Granted that no one can draw a clear line and define the limits within which a miracle is healthy working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he can prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute our food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and that at all times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass themselves, still we know as a general rule near enough, and find that the strongest can do but very little at a time, and, to return to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two such hitherto unassociated ideas as race and experience was a miracle beyond our strength.

Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter to the Athenaeum above referred to, we were not in the habit of thinking of any one as able to remember things that had happened before he had been born or thought of.  This notion will still strike many of my non-readers as harsh and strained; no such discord, therefore, should have been taken unprepared, and when taken it should have been resolved with pomp and circumstance.  Mr Spencer, however, though he took it continually, never either prepared it or resolved it at all, but by using the words “experience of the race” sprang this seeming paradox upon us, with the result that his words were barren.  They were barren because they were incoherent; they were incoherent because they were approached and quitted too suddenly.  While we were realising “experience” our minds excluded “race,” inasmuch as experience was an idea we had been accustomed hitherto to connect only with the individual; while realising the idea “race,” for the same reason, we as a matter of course excluded experience.  We were required to fuse two ideas that were alien to one another, without having had those other ideas presented to us which would alone flux them.  The absence of these—­which indeed were not immediately ready to hand, or Mr. Spencer would have doubtless grasped them—­made nonsense of the whole thing; we saw the ideas propped up as two cards one against the other, on one of Mr. Spencer’s pages, only to find that they had fallen asunder before we had turned over to the next, so we put down his book resentfully, as written by one who did not know what to do with his meaning even if he had one, or bore it meekly while he chastised us with scorpions, as Mr. Darwin had done with whips, according to our temperaments.