319. The weak point in the materialistic synthesis, briefly given above, is of course the superficial way in which it is forced to treat the appearance of life on the planet. In our absolute ignorance of the source from whence life came, we have no ground for assuming that it was a purely planetary product, or that its unknown potentialities are concerned with purely planetary ends. It would be as rash for the biologist to assume that life on earth can only point to generations of further life on earth as it would have been for some cosmic geologist to assume - before the appearance of life on earth - that geological forces must needs constitute all the activity which could take place on this planet.

Since the germ of life appeared on earth, its history has been a history not only of gradual self-adaptation to a known environment, but of gradual discovery of an environment, always there, but unknown. What we call its primitive simple irritability was in fact a dim panæsthesia; a potential faculty, as yet unconscious of all the stimuli to which it had not yet learnt to respond. As these powers of sensation and of response have developed, they have gradually revealed to the living germ environments of which at first it could have no conception.

It is probable, to begin with, that the only environment which the vast majority of our ancestors knew was simply hot water. For the greater part of the time during which life has existed on earth it would have been thought chimerical to suggest that we could live in anything else. It was a great day for us when an ancestor crawled up out of the slowly-cooling sea; - or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for directly breathing air gradually revealed the fact that we had for long been breathing air in the water; - and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment, - the atmosphere of the earth. It was a great day again when another ancestor felt on his pigment-spot the solar ray; - or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for perceiving light revealed the fact that we had for long been acted upon by light as well as by heat; and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment, - namely, the illumined Universe that stretches to the Milky Way. It was a great day when the first skate (if skate he were) felt an unknown virtue go out from him towards some worm or mudfish; or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for electrical excitation demonstrated the fact that we had long been acted upon by electricity as well as by heat and by light; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment, - namely, an ether charged with infinite energy, overpassing and interpenetrating alike the last gulf of darkness and the extremest star.

All this, - phrased perhaps in some other fashion, - all men admit as true. May we not then suppose that there are yet other environments, other interpretations, which a further awakening of faculty still subliminal is yet fated by its own nascent response to discover? Will it be alien to the past history of evolution if I add: It was a great day when the first thought or feeling flashed into some mind of beast or man from a mind distant from his own? - when a previously unsuspected capacity of telepathic percipience revealed the fact that we had long been acted upon by telepathic as well as by sensory stimuli; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,__a thought-world or spiritual universe charged with infinite life, and interpenetrating and overpassing all human spirits, - up to what some have called World-Soul, and some God ?

This, as I conceive, is the scheme of Evolution, so far as we can as yet guess it. This is the progress of the game of chess, from the play of pawns to the play of pieces; and in telepathy, as I take it, we have seen a piece already moved.

320. It is not, however, with the more advanced moves in this game that I am at present concerned. I am dealing not with supernormal sensitivities, but with genius, - defined as the co-operation of the submerged with the emergent self, - as the integration of subliminal with supraliminal faculty within the limits of the range of faculties which all men admit and know. Yet it seemed needful to look for a moment somewhat further, in order to show the true position of genius in the evolutionary scale, in which it forms by no means either an extreme term or an accidental deviation. For it will be easily understood that one of the corollaries from the conception of a constantly widening and deepening perception of an environment infinite in infinite ways, will be that the faculties which befit the material environment have absolutely no primacy, unless it be of the merely chronological kind, over those faculties which science has often called by-products, because they have no manifest tendency to aid their possessor in the struggle for existence in a material world.

The higher gifts of genius - poetry, the plastic arts, music, philosophy, pure mathematics - all of these are precisely as much in the central stream of evolution - are perceptions of new truth and powers of new action just as decisively predestined for the race of man - as the aboriginal Australian's faculty for throwing a boomerang or for swarming up a tree for grubs. There is, then, about those loftier interests nothing exotic, nothing accidental; they are an intrinsic part of that ever-evolving response to our surroundings which forms not only the planetary but the cosmic history of all our race.

What inconsistencies, what absurdities, underlie that assumption that evolution means nothing more than the survival of animals fittest to conquer enemies and to overrun the earth. On that bare hypothesis the genus homo is impossible to explain. No one really attempts to explain him except on the tacit supposition that Nature somehow intended to evolve intelligence - somehow needed to evolve joy; was not satisfied with such an earth-over-runner as the rabbit, or such an invincible conqueror as the influenza microbe. But how much intelligence, what kind of joy Nature aimed at - is this to be left to be settled by the instinct of l'homme sensuel moyen? or ought we not rather to ask of the best specimens of our race what it is that they live for? - whether they labour for the meat that perisheth, or for Love and Wisdom? To more and more among mankind the need of food is supplied with as little conscious effort as the need of air; yet these are often the very men through whom evolution is going on most unmistakably - who are becoming the typical figures of the swiftly-changing race.