Such subsidiary sciences are to the researcher of the present day what old languages were to the antiquary of other days; they construe for him the words which he discovers, they give a richness and a truth-like complexity to the picture which he paints, even in cases where the particular detail they tell is not much.
But what here concerns me is that man himself has, to the eye of science, become "an antiquity." Science tries to read, and is beginning to read, in the frame of each man the result of a whole history of all his life, of what he is and what makes him so -- of all his forefathers, of what they were and of what made them so. Each nerve has a sort of memory of its past life, is trained or not trained, dulled or quickened, as the case may be; each feature is shaped and characterized, or left loose and meaningless, as may happen; each hand is marked with its trade and life, subdued to what it works in -- if we could but see it.
It may be answered that in this there is nothing new; that we always knew how much a man's past modified a man's future; that we all knew how much a man is apt to be like his ancestors; that the existence of national character is the greatest commonplace in the world; that when a philosopher cannot account for anything in any other manner, he boldly ascribes it to an occult quality in some race.
