Igneus est ollis vigor et coelestis origo Seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra.

- Virgil.

300. In my second chapter I (Introduction. Human Personality And Its Survival Of Bodily Death) made no formal attempt to define that human personality which is to form the main subject of this book. I was content to take the conception roughly for granted, and to enter at once on the study of the lapses of personality into abnormal conditions, short of the lowest depths of idiocy or madness. From that survey it appeared that these degenerations could be traced to some defect in that central control which ought to clasp and integrate into steady manhood the hierarchies of living cells which compose the human organism. This insight into the Self's decay was the needed prerequisite to our present task - that of apprehending its true normality, and thereafter of analysing certain obscurer faculties which indicate the line of its evolution during and after the life of earth.

Strength and concentration of the inward unifying control - that must be the true normality which we seek; and in seeking it we must remember how much of psychical operation goes on below the conscious threshold, imperfectly obedient to any supraliminal appeal. What advance can we make in inward mastery? how far extend our grasp over the whole range of faculty with which we are obscurely endowed?

301. "Human perfectibility" has been the theme of many enthusiasts; and many Utopian schemes of society have been and still are suggested, which postulate in the men and women of the future an increase in moral and physical health and vigour. And it is plain that in a broad and general way natural selection, sexual selection, and the advance of science are working together towards improvements of these kinds. But it is plain also that these onward tendencies, at least in comparison with our desires and ideals, are slow and uncertain; and it is possible to argue that the apparent advance in our race is due merely to the improvement which science has effected in its material environment, and not to any real development, during the historical period, in the character or faculties of man himself. Nay, since we have no means of knowing to what extent any genus has an inward potentiality of improvement, it is possible for the pessimist to argue that the genus homo has reached its fore-ordained evolutionary limit; so that it cannot be pushed further in any direction without risk of nervous instability, sterility, and ultimate extinction.

Somewhat similarly (it might be urged) you cannot domesticate some wild tribes of animals (perhaps some wild tribes of men) without checking their fertility; and even among animals most susceptible to domestication, and to the induction of varieties in the domesticated state, - as, for instance, pigeons, - you cannot at present exaggerate fantail or pouter beyond a certain limit without bringing on a fragility of constitution which would soon extinguish the overpressed variety. Some dim apprehension of this kind lends plausibility to many popular diatribes. Dr. Max Nordau's works afford a well-known example of this line of protest against the present age as an age of overwork and of nervous exhaustion. And narrowing the vague discussion to a somewhat more definite test, Professor Lombroso and other anthropologists have discussed the characteristics of the "man of genius"; with the result of showing (as they believe) that this apparently highest product of the race is in reality not a culminant but an aberrant manifestation; and that men of genius must be classed with criminals and lunatics, as persons in whom a want of balance or completeness of organisation has led on to an over-development of one side of their nature; - helpful or injurious to other men as accident may decide.

302. On this point I shall join issue; and I shall suggest, on the other hand, that Genius - if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a psychological definition - should rather be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate in all; - a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought; - so that an " inspiration of Genius " will be in truth a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may be, of something supernormal' - of something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage.