Man comes into his heritage. He inherits, we may allow ourselves to say, from the habits of elements and from the habit-memories of cells, single and corporate. He inherits from the habit-memories of every living creature in his ancestry. And each habit-memory of them all has contributed to his setting free. Now he is so far master that life has put into his hands the choice between a greater freedom still towards which its impulsive purpose has been directed from the first, and a new slavery that the man himself is able to make for himself. For—and surely we need to note this for our warning—the conduct and determination of life, which is in some small measure in the power of every creature within its manner of life, is given over to man; and the next step in emancipation is for him to take or leave as he will. He may dominate the whole chain of habits and go forward; or he may wind it about him and entangle his spirit in its fetters.
Matter, his body, the habits or habit-memories he inherits or makes for himself, all these may either be instruments of his growing liberation or machines that turn him to the likeness of themselves. The pianist who has wrought his music into the living instrumentality of his fingers may leave his fingers to work as mechanism, or he may pour into their established habit the riches and beauty of an artistic soul. Thus it is with all the heritage and possessions of a man. He may submit to them as to a constraining mechanism and grow mechanical himself, or he may infuse them with his spirit and raise them and himself to that further altitude which spirit seeks. We may well say of some men that they are the slaves of habit; we may well think more than we do of the many kinds of habit to which men may be slaves.
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.