there being absolutely no precedent conditions by which the most ardent evolutionist could evolve William Shakspeare, for example, from old John Shakspeare and his wife. "The social philosopher must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations." But now if we reflect upon this prodigious series of spontaneous variations which I have called the sacred difference between man and man,--this personality which every father and mother are astonished at anew every day, when out of six children they perceive that each one of the six, from the very earliest moment of activity, has shown his own distinct individuality, differing wholly from either parent; the child who most resembles the parent physically, often having a personality which crosses that of the parent at the sharpest angles; this radical, indestructible, universal personality which entitles every "me" to its privacy, which has in course of time made the Englishman's house his castle, which has developed the Rights of Man, the American Republic, the supreme prerogative of the woman to say whom she will love, what man she shall marry; this personality, so precious that not even the miserablest wretch with no other possession _but_ his personality has ever been brought to say he would be willing to exchange it entire for that of the happiest being; this personality which has brought about that, whereas in the time of Æschylus the common man was simply a creation of the State, like a modern corporation with rights and powers strictly limited by the State's charter, now he is a genuine sovereign who makes the State, a king as to every minutest particle of his individuality so long as that kinghood does not cross the kinghood of his fellow,--when we reflect upon _this_ awful spontaneous variation of personality, this "mystery in us which calls itself _I_" (as Thomas Carlyle has somewhere called it), which makes every man scientifically a human atom, yet an atom endowed above all other atoms with the power to choose its own mode of motion, its own combining equivalent,--when farther we reflect upon the relation of each human atom to each other human atom, and to the great Giver of personalities to these atoms,--how each is indissolubly bound to each, and to Him, and yet how each is discretely parted and impassably separated from each and from Him by a gulf which is simply no less deep than the width between the finite and the infinite,--when we reflect, finally, that it is this simple, indivisible, radical, indestructible, new force which each child brings into the world under the name of its _self_; which controls the whole life of that child, so that its path is always a resultant of its own individual force on the one hand, and of the force of its surrounding circumstances on the other,--we are bound to confess, it seems to me, that such spontaneous variations carry us upon a plane of mystery very far above those