It is therefore fairly probable that all these species take part in our existence, in, our instincts, in all our feelings, in all our thoughts; and here once more we are led back to the great religions of India, which foresaw all the truths that we are gradually discovering and which already, thousands of years ago, were telling us that man is everything and that he must recognize his essence in every living creature. HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE XV HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE 1 The law of heredity which insists that the descendants shall suffer by the faults and profit by the virtues of their ancestors comprises truths that are no longer disputed. They shine forth, visible to the eyes of all. The child of a drunkard will bear the burden of his father’s vice all his life long, from the day of his birth to that of his death, in body and in mind. One might say that by this irrefutable example nature had intended ostentatiously to affirm and manifest the implacable character of her law, as though to make us understand that she takes no account whatever of our conceptions of justice and injustice and that she acts on an unvarying principle in all the obscure circumstances in which we cannot follow the inextricable windings of her will. This example, if we had no other, would be enough to brand that inhuman will with infamy. There is no law more repugnant to our reason, to our sense of responsibility, nor one which does a deeper injury to our trust in the universe and the unknown spirit that rules it. Of all life’s injustices, this is the most glaring and the least comprehensible. For most of the others we find excuses or explanations; but, when we remember that a new-born child, a child which did not ask to be born, is, from the moment of inhaling its first breath of air, smitten with irremediable insolvency, with a ferocious, irrevocable sentence and with evils which it will drag to the grave, it seems to us that not one of the most hateful tyrants that history has cursed would have dared to do what nature does quietly every day. But do we really bear the burden of the errors of the dead? In the first place, is it quite certain that the dead are really dead and no longer dwell within us? It is a fact that we continue them, that we are the durable part of what they were. We cannot deny that we are still subject to their influence, that we reproduce their features and their characters, that we represent them almost entirely, that they continue to live and to act in us; it is therefore very natural that they also should continue to bear the consequences of an action or a way of living which their departure has not interrupted. “But,” you may say, “I had no part in this action, this habit, this vice for which I am paying to-day. I was not consulted; I had no opportunity of uttering a protest, of checking my father, or my grandfather, as he went to his ruin down the fatal precipice. I was not born; I did not yet exist!”