Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/394

382 losing; the race is ever gaining. A man's great-great-great-grandchild, living scarcely two hundred years after him, will be only one thirty-second part of himself, and the other thirty-one parts will be due to others, that is, to the race viewed as something opposed to his individuality.

The gain in the way of extension compensates for the loss of intension. While a man's part in the individuals descending from him rapidly becomes infinitesimal, the number of individuals in whom he has part rapidly increases until it includes, as we have seen, all the nation and then all the world. This widening out of his personality corresponds to the broadening of intelligence from mere interest in local news to that which is taken in scientific generalizations, and to the tendency of moral development which is to expand the love of family into patriotism, and then to convert patriotism into philanthropy, into a regard for man as man, irrespective of language or nationality. Thus the brook seeks the river, the river the sea, the sea the vast ocean.

Each man's personality, it has to be remembered, is borrowed from those behind him. The further back in time a man's place may be, the fewer ancestors he has behind him; the greater, too, his own part in the race, viewed as a whole existent through the ages, the oftener the infinitesimal re-sowing of him takes place, and the greater becomes the certainty that every separate inhabitant of the earth is one of his descendants. Furthermore, when there are fewer people, the lines of ancestry blend oftener, so that in the same individual it is more probable that an ancestor will be represented many times by means of different channels of descent meeting in him after proceeding from the same source. Posterity, not very remote, will have descended from a common ancestor through several of his children. A progenitor's part who lived three thousand years ago is very much larger than that of one who lived only one hundred or three hundred years ago. He has had more to do in the shaping and molding of the whole, just as the stem has more to do in the formation of the tree than any particular branch proceeding from it. The root or the seed has a still greater part, and, if it be conceded that the human race has proceeded from one common pair, it follows that of the nature of all the individuals now living half is of the proto-father and half of the first mother. To us existing at this late date, it is interesting to note how the channels of vitality, proceeding from the original pair to us, first diverge until they reach their numerical climax, and are coincident for a considerable period with all the inhabitants of the world; then converge until they are found reduced to two again in the household from which we immediately sprang.

As the people at no very distant date in the past were all our fathers and mothers, and the people who will be living not very far distant in the future will be all our sons and daughters, so the people living at the present time are all our near relations. We may call them, with very