The great question between vast masses of living organism is simply this: “Am I to put you into a position with which your forefathers have been unfamiliar, or are you to put me into one about which my own have been in like manner ignorant?” Man is only the dominant animal on the earth, because he can, as a general rule, settle this question in his own favour. The only manner in which an organism, which has once forgotten its antecedents, can ever recover its memory, is by being assimilated by a creature of its own kind; one, moreover, which knows its business, or is not in such a false position as to be compelled to be aware of being so. It was, doubtless, owing to the recognition of this fact, that some Eastern nations, as we are told by Herodotus, were in the habit of eating their deceased parents—for matter which has once been assimilated by any identity or personality, becomes for all practical purposes part of the assimilating personality. The bearing of the above will become obvious when we return, as we will now do, to the question of personal identity. The only difficulty would seem to lie in our unfamiliarity with the real meanings which we attach to words in daily use. Hence, while recognising continuity without sudden break as the underlying principle of identity, we forget that this involves personal identity between all the beings who are in one chain of descent, the numbers of such beings, whether in succession, or contemporaneous, going for nothing at all. Thus we take two eggs, one male and one female, and hatch them; after some months the pair of fowls so hatched, having succeeded in putting a vast quantity of grain and worms into false positions, become full-grown, breed, and produce a dozen new eggs. Two live fowls and a dozen eggs are the present phase of the personality of the two original eggs. They are also part of the present phase of the personality of all the worms and grain which the fowls have assimilated from their leaving the eggshell; but the personalities of these last do not count; they have lost their grain and worm memories, and are instinct with the memorises of the whole ancestry of the creature which has assimilated them.