We have no thoughts of our own, no opin­ions of our own; they are trans­mit­ted to us, trained into us. All that is orig­i­nal in us, and there­fore fairly cred­itable or dis­cred­itable to us, can be cov­ered up and hid­den by the point of a cam­bric nee­dle, all the rest be­ing atoms con­trib­uted by, and in­her­ited from, a pro­ces­sion of an­ces­tors that stretches back a bil­lion years to the Adam-clam or grasshop­per or mon­key from whom our race has been so te­diously and os­ten­ta­tiously and un­prof­itably de­vel­oped.