Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the letter to the _Athenæum_ 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. I may say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are one in principle—the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas—that is to say, into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as their neighbours do.