338. Between the aspects of love here expressed in extreme terms, - the planetary aspect, if I may so term it, and the cosmical, - the choice is momentous. I do not indeed say that in our estimate of love is involved our estimate of Religion; for Religion should mean the sane response of the spirit to all that is known of Cosmic Law. But Religion in the sense in which it is often used, - our emotional and ethical attitude towards Life Unseen; - this is in reality too closely parallel to Platonic Love to allow the psychologist who denies reality in the one to assume reality in the other. For the Platonic lover the image of the Beloved one, - no longer a matter of conscious summons and imagination, - has become the indwelling and instinctive impulse to noble thought and deed. Even such to a Francis or to a Theresa is the image of the Divinity whom they adore; and if they claim that sometimes in moments of crisis they feel a sway, a guidance, a communicatio idiomatum with the Divine, we may point in reply to the humbler, but more tangible, evidence which assures us that even between souls still inhabiting and souls who have quitted the flesh there may exist a telepathic intercommunication and an impalpable confluence from afar.

339. Brief as this survey has been, it has served to indicate that the psychical type to which we have applied the name of genius may be recognised in every region of thought and emotion. In each direction a man's everyday self may be more or less permeable to subliminal impulses. The man who is in but small degree thus permeable, who acts uniformly on supraliminal considerations, - on ratiocination, as he will say, and not on impulse, - this man is likely to be safe in prudent mediocrity. He subsists upon a part of human nature which has already been thoroughly trained and prepared for this world's work. The man, on the other hand, who is more readily permeable to subliminal uprushes, takes the chance of wider possibilities, and moves through life on a more uncertain way. Nature rears such men from seed and not from cuttings; she does not simply reproduce the common conformation, but gives a chance to whatever of untried potency may lurk within the germ.

But how much may there be which is thus hidden and undeveloped? Within what limits of variation may we expect these psychical "sports" to find their play? To help in deciding this question we must go back once more to our simplest and, so to say, diagrammatic examples of genius.

340. If I have dwelt at some length on arithmetical prodigies, this is not, of course, because I regard this gift of subliminal computation as a high form of genius, but because the definiteness of the achievements presents some vague and illusive problems in a comparatively manageable form. Thus it is easier in the case of a Mangiamele than in the case of a Dante to ask oneself with exactness which is the least improbable of the conceivable answers - all of them largely conjectural - to the question, " Whence did the child get his genius? " - a question which the evolutionist, although he cannot solve it, must not ignore.

It appears to me that the answers which have been implicitly or explicitly given to such a question are reducible under four main heads. I shall cite these in the order in which they push the required answer further and further back. But the reader must remember that there is absolutely no difference in point of the mystery involved between one reply and another. All have to deal with the same ultimately inexplicable facts, and the most Lamarckian of answers is in reality as mystical as the most Platonic.

(1) First, then, I place what I have called the Lamarckian reply, - according to which the eminent capacity of the individual under discussion was inherited from the acquired capacities of self-improving ancestors. To this we must here answer that even assuming acquired characteristics to be inheritable, there were as a rule no such acquired capacities for our prodigies to inherit. Mangiamele the father, the rough Sicilian peasant, who did not teach his son his letters; Mondeux the father, the woodcutter of Tours, who did not teach his son the numerals, - these were not men who had developed their mathematical gifts as the Lamarckian giraffe developed the bones of his neck. The only case where heredity could be pleaded is that of the younger (not of the elder) Bidder - unless we count under this head the pre-natal suggestion which Mr. Blyth believes to have been efficacious in his own and his brother's case.

(2) Next comes the reply which I suppose would now be commonly given, and which, to avoid the ambiguities of the word Darwinian, I will call the protoplasmic solution. Mangiamele's gift, in this view, was a sport or by-product occurring in the course of evolution, - a new quality derived from old qualities not obviously resembling it. It was one of those favourable spontaneous variations of which natural selection has often been able to take advantage; and whose occasional unpredictable occurrence has raised our race to its present level. Now the cause of such sports, I need not say, Darwin expressly leaves unexplained. All that he says is that to sport in this way is characteristic of living matter. Sudden differentiation in unpredictable directions must, in short, be a latent capacity of protoplasm; and the explanation of Mangiamele's gift is virtually referred to the nature of the stock of protoplasm with which his earliest ancestors started operations.

This answer has the logical advantage over the Lamarckian answer (which, of course, at bottom is protoplasmic also), that, being hardly more than a mere restatement of the facts, it cannot help being true so far as it goes. But it does not supply, and was not propounded by Darwin as supplying an explanation of the ultimate source of faculty, but only of certain incidents in its terrene development.

(3) In direct contrast to these terrene explanations comes the pre-terrene explanation of Plato. A man learns geometrical truths easily, Plato said, because in reality he is only remembering them. He is remembering them because he learnt them originally in the ideal world, before his incarnation "in this body, which is our tomb." One wishes that Plato had had the facts now before us to work up into a dialogue, "Dase or Inspiration." If he thought his hypothesis of reminiscence necessary in order to explain the mental effort of an intelligent adult mastering such startling novelties as are now contained in the first books of Euclid - what would he have said of Pascal, who παiς εώυ αθvυρε μεγáλα Ipya, sported with cosmic laws in childish play; of Gauss flinging down his slate with the answer alone written upon it - "Da liegt es!" - the moment that the master had dictated the question which was to occupy the class for an hour; or above all, as I say, of the crass and stolid Dase, as it were an idiot supported from the Prytaneum, to declare secrets which the gods had hid from men?

(4) Lastly, the view which I am here suggesting is in some sort a renewal of the old Platonic "reminiscence," in the light of that fuller knowledge which is common property to-day. I hold, of course, that in the protoplasm or primary basis of all organic life there must have been an inherent adaptability to the manifestation of all faculties which organic life has in fact manifested. I hold, of course, that sports or variations occur, which are at present unpredictable, and which reveal in occasional offspring faculties which their parents showed no signs of possessing. But I differ from those who hold that the faculty itself thus manifested is now for the first time initiated in that stock by some chance combination of hereditary elements. I hold that it is not initiated, but only revealed; that the "sport " has not called a new faculty into being, but has merely raised an existing faculty above the threshold of supraliminal consciousness.

This view, if pushed back far enough, is no doubt inconsistent with the way in which evolution is generally conceived. For it denies that all human faculties must have been evoked by terrene experience. It assumes a subliminal self, with unknown faculties, originated in some unknown way, and not merely by contact with the needs which the terrene organism has had to meet. It thus seems at first sight to be introducing a new mystery, and to be introducing it in a gratuitous way.

To this I reply in the first place that so far as the origin of man's known powers is concerned, no fresh mystery is in fact introduced. All human powers, to put the thing broadly, have somehow or other to be got into protoplasm and then got out again. You have to explain first how they became implicit in the earliest and lowest living thing, and then how they have become thus far explicit in the latest and highest. All the faculties of that highest being, I repeat, existed virtually in the lowest, and in so far as the admitted faculties are concerned the difference between my view and the ordinary view may be said to be little more than a difference as to the sense which that word virtually is here to assume.