marvel at it is as if the cake
should marvel at the fit of the dough-pan. Everything in man is the
outcome of forces and conditions still present with us. Man and his
civilization are held suspended in protoplasm and sunlight. Let but a
plague sweep us away to-day, and to-morrow would begin the second
evolution of man."

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