1 THE law of heredity which insists that the descendants shall suffer by the faults and profit by the virtues¹ of their ancestors comprises truths that are no longer disputed. They shine forth², visible to the eyes of all. The child of a drunkard will bear the burden of his father’s vice³ 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 injustice⁴ and that she acts on an unvarying principle in all the obscure circumstances in which we cannot follow the[214] inextricable windings⁵ of her will. This example, if we had no other, would be enough to brand that inhuman⁶ will with infamy⁷. 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 injustices⁸, 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 inhaling⁹ its first breath of air, smitten¹⁰ with irremediable insolvency¹¹, with a ferocious¹², irrevocable sentence and with evils which it will drag to the grave, it seems to us that not one of the most hateful tyrants¹³ 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[215] is a fact that we continue them, that we are the durable¹⁴ 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 entirely¹⁵, 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 precipice¹⁶. I was not born; I did not yet exist!”
 
How do you know? May there not be a fundamental mistake in the idea of heredity as we conceive it? At one end of the beam of those scales which we accuse of injustice hangs heredity, but the other is borne down by something different,[216] which we have never taken into account, for it has not yet a name, something which is the antithesis¹⁷ of heredity, which cleaves¹⁸ into the future instead of emerging from the past and which we might call preexistence or prenatality.
 
Even as our dead still live in us, so we have already lived in them. There is no reason to believe that the future, which is full of life, is less active and less potent¹⁹ than the past, which is full of the dead. Instead of descending²⁰, should we not rather ascend²¹ the course of the years to discover the source of our actions?
 
We know not in what fashion those already dwell in us who shall be born of us, down to the last generation; but that they do dwell in us is certain. Whatever the number of our descendants, in the sequence of the ages, whatever the transformations²² which the elements, climates, countries and centuries may cause them to undergo, they will keep intact, through all vicissitudes²³, the principle of life which they have derived²⁴ from us. They have not obtained it[217] elsewhere or they could not be what they are. They have really issued from us; and, if they have issued from us, it is because they were in us from the first. What were they doing within us, all these innumerable, accumulated lives? Is it permissible²⁵ to suppose that they were absolutely inactive? Then what were their functions, what their power? What divided them from us? When did we begin, where did they end? At what point did their thoughts and their desires mingle²⁶ with ours?
 
“How could they think and act in us,” you ask, “having as yet no brain?”
 
True; but they had ours. The dead too are without a brain; nevertheless no one will deny that they continue to think and act in us. This brain of which we are so proud is not the source but the condenser²⁷ of thought and will. Like the Leyden jar or the Ruhmkorff coil, it exists, it is animated²⁸ only so long as the electric fluid of life passes through it or resides in it. It does not produce this fluid, it collects[218] it; what matters is not its convolutions, which may be compared with the windings of an induction-coil, but the life that flows through it; and what can this life be, if it be not the sum of all the existences which are accumulated within us, which are not extinguished at our death, which begin before our birth and which continue us, forwards, and backwards²⁹, into the infinity³⁰ of time?
 
2
Writers of essays and novels have at times endeavoured to represent these diverse lives which we harbour within us; and each of us, if he question himself sincerely and profoundly, will discover in himself two or three clearly-defined types, which have nothing in common but the body in which they reside, which rarely agree among themselves, which are incessantly³² striving to gain the upper hand and which put up with one another as best they can, in order to go through an existence whose aggregate³³ forms our ego³⁴. This ego will be good or bad, remarkable³⁵ or[219] insignificant³⁶, more or less generous or selfish, calm or uneasy, pacific or pugnacious³⁷, heroic or pusillanimous³⁸, hesitating or decided³⁹ and enterprising, brutal

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