But science, not content with tracing institutions, has been analyzing personality. We see now that there can never again be such an orgie of the Ego as that led by Fichte and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. "It is the last of the fates," says Wilde, "and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know." It is the "divinity that shapes our ends" and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science dissolves the personality into temperaments and susceptibilities, predispositions, and transmitted taints, atavisms, and reversions. It finds the soul not a spiritual unit, but a treacherous compound of strange contradictions and warring tendencies, with traces of spent passion and vestiges of ancient sins, with echoes of forgotten deeds and survivals of vanished habits. We are "possessed" not by demons but by the dead. These are in Ibsen's drama the real ghosts which throng our lives and haunt our footsteps, remorseless as the furies. We are followed by the shades of our ancestors who visit us, not with midnight squeak and gibber, but in the broad noonday, speaking with our speech, and doing with our deed. We are bound to a destiny fixed before birth, and choice is the greatest of illusions. The world is indeed a stage, and life is but a hollow ceremony, spontaneous enough to the eye, but wherein the actors recite speeches and follow stage directions written for them long before they were born. Thus science grinds color for our modern Rembrandts. The final blow to the old notion of the ego is given by the doctrine of multiple individuality. Science tells of the conscious and the sub-conscious, of the higher nerve centres and the lower, of the double cerebrum and the wayward ganglia. It hints at the many voiceless beings that live out in our body their joy and pain, and scarce give sign, dwellers in the sub-centres, with whom, it may be, often lies the initiative when the conscious centre thinks itself free. This _I_ is, no doubt, a hierarchy or commonwealth of psychical units that at death dissolves and sinks below the threshold of consciousness. It is plain, then, that the swift spread of science has brought men into a new universe. Few there are that can adorn the new home with ornaments saved from the old. For most men the universe which science tells of rises about them unsightly and barn-like, with bare walls and naked rafters, and until art can beautify the walls, and poetry gild the rafters, men will have that appalling feeling of being nowhere at home, that awful sinking as if the bottom were dropping out of all things.