To look on heredity as an affair of transmitted habit-memories is to discover our true relation with it, once we have come to see what the spiritual memory of an enduring and accumulating spiritual life, lived according to its proper meaning, may be for man. In the chick the inherited habit-memory of its race is as the boundary wall of cellulose is for the plant-cell; in the child it is a standing ground from which, while his creative spirit stirs within him, he surveys the kingdoms of a world. In the man, like the habits he himself builds up, it may come to be a hill-top from which he looks down upon all those kingdoms and their glory. Life incurred death when first the cells were summoned out of solitude to work together in a body. And here, too, it is as though it foresaw what was coming, saw in a vision a creature come to being who should have life in himself and be divinely discontent, seeking to go on. It is hard to think that a creative impulse beginning so low down, so humbly, and yet purposive enough and skilful and potent enough to reach the immeasurable wonder and promises of man, should ever have been blind, or in the last resort should be no more and no greater than himself.
CHAPTER IX
The human animal desires to escape from its
animal prison by means of all kinds of love, by
freedom of emotion no less than of action and thought.
And it attains to the freedom of emotion when it is
aware of beauty. It cannot be aware of beauty
except in self-forgetfulness, and it cannot produce
beauty except in self-forgetfulness.