difficult operations can be performed successfully?

What is this talk that is made about the experience OF THE RACE, as
though the experience of one man could profit another who knows
nothing about him? If a man eats his dinner, it nourishes HIM and
not his neighbour; if he learns a different art, it is HE that can do
it and not his neighbour. Yet, practically, we see that the
vicarious experience, which seems so contrary to our common
observation, does nevertheless appear to hold good in the case of
creatures and their descendants. Is there, then, any way of bringing
these apparently conflicting phenomena under the operation of one
law? Is there any way of showing that this experience of the race,
of which so much is said without the least attempt to show in what
way it may or does become the experience of the individual, is in
sober seriousness the experience of one single being only, repeating
in a great many different ways certain performances with which he has
become exceedingly familiar?

It would seem that we must either suppose the conditions of
experience to differ during the earlier stages of life from those
which we observe them to become during the heyday of any existence--
and this would appear very gratuitous, tolerable only as a suggestion
because the beginnings of life are so obscure, that in such twilight
we may do pretty much whatever we please without danger of
confutation--or that we must suppose the continuity of life and
sameness between living beings, whether plants or animals, and their
descendants, to be far closer than we have hitherto believed; so that
the experience of one person is not enjoyed by his successor, so much
as that the successor is bona fide but a part of the life of his
progenitor, imbued with all his memories, profiting by all his