120. Continuing this inquiry in my third chapter, I shall consider what kind of man he is to whom the epithet of normal, - an epithet often obscure and misleading, - may be most fitly applied. I shall urge that in a rapidly altering genus - and such the genus homo undoubtedly is - the word normal may be best used to signify such a combination of new with old powers as can at the present stage be effected without dangerous instability. If, however, it be held that man's development is not in any given direction sufficiently definite to admit of this mode of measurement, then I shall at least claim that that man shall be regarded as normal who has the fullest grasp of faculties which inhere in the whole race. Among these faculties I shall venture to count subliminal as well as supraliminal powers; - the mental processes which take place below the conscious threshold as well as those which take place above it. What class of men, then, can we regard as reaping most advantage from this submerged mentation? Men of genius, I shall reply; - if to the vague word genius we may give a definite or psychological meaning, which, while adhering pretty closely to general usage, shall distinguish it in some real manner from other forms of capacity.

Such a definition, I think, we shall attain if we describe an "inspiration of genius " as a subliminal uprush; - an emergence into ordinary consciousness of ideas matured below the threshold. Falling back upon our simile of the spectrum, this process would be represented by the brightening of lines previously dimmed by interposing vapours; such a brightening as seems often due to an intensification of the central incandescence. The man who thus receives the upward message of his submerged self may or may not find in it something of value to the world. But at any rate he tends towards the employment of the whole range of his faculty, and thus also (as will be seen later on) towards a profounder realisation of his environment than is as yet possible for the mass of men.

This view differs widely from the estimate of genius now in fashion with a certain school of anthropologists, who regard the man of genius as in some sense an aberrant or even degenerate type, - and class him with the criminal and the lunatic. The alleged nervous disorder of men of genius, on which this apparent paradox is based, is largely, I think, the creation of mere gossip and anecdote. So far as it really exists, I regard it as illustrating the instability which in a rapidly changing species is apt to characterise those very organs which on the whole are moving most decisively along the path of progress. There is a perturbation which masks evolution; and just as at the child's birth into the world, or at his entrance into the wider emotions of adolescence, there may be much that is disturbing and strange, so too in that new birth, that entry into the emotions of a vaster world, for which Earth-life at its best is one great opportunity, there is likely to be some straining and disruption of the spiritual organism adapted to the earlier phase.

The true analogue of the genius is not the criminal nor the lunatic, but the child.

121. In the fourth chapter I (Introduction. Human Personality And Its Survival Of Bodily Death) shall deal with the alternating phase through which man's personality is constructed habitually to pass. I speak of sleep; which I regard as a phase of personality, adapted to maintain our existence in the spiritual environment, and to draw from thence the vitality of our physical organisms. Both sleep and waking will thus be developed phases of an earlier and less differentiated condition, from which waking life has been developed by practical needs, while sleep, less changed externally from the primitive state, may nevertheless have undergone some parallel evolution in its relations to that metetherial world. And thus I regard the passage back from waking into sleep as including elements both of reversion and of what I may term prcversion. There is firstly a relapse or reversion to an earlier animal condition; - a condition where the conscious part of the spectrum lay nearer to the red end; consisting mainly of organic faculties and sensations many of which are no longer present to waking consciousness.

But sleep also represents a stage of wider potentiality; a stage where a longer spectrum is more faintly seen; whereas the waking state represents a stage in which natural selection on this planet has operated both to intensify the range of faculty, and also to confine it within the limits serviceable for earthly life. When waking faculty, thus confined and thus intensified, is dimmed by sleep, we are able to catch some scattered lines of feeble radiance beyond each end of our ordinary spectrum. Of the ultra-red activities I have spoken just above. But there are traces of ultra-violet luminosity also. Those faculties which form man's link with the spiritual world, - telepathy and telaes-thesia - are apt (as dreams obscurely show us) to make in sleep their first rudimentary appearance; or to use another metaphor, sleep-waking states teach us to think of sleep as a kind of "primitive magma" or "mother-solution" from which various phases of personality have a tendency to crystallise out. Somnambulism, trance, ecstasy, are such crystallisations; representing co-ordinations of faculty unfitted indeed for man's self-preservation upon this planet, but which it may be worth his while to develop experimentally, when once that preservation has been secured.

Or I may put the matter in yet another way, so as to bring out a certain parallel between the forms of dissolution and of evolution to which each phase of our personality - the waking phase and the sleeping - has shown itself liable.

What hysteria is to ordinary waking life, that is morbid somnambulism to sleep; what genius is to ordinary waking life, that is hypnotic trance to sleep.

In somnambulism, as in waking hysteria, there is a narrowing of the field of attention, accompanied by an arbitrary unsettlement of the threshold of consciousness. Some of the normal faculties of sleep, - as its organic recuperative power, - may in somnambulism be concealed or arrested; and on the other hand some faculties not normal for sleep, as acute sensory perception, delicate muscular co-ordination, may rise into prominence. This exactly resembles the hysteric instability; and we need not wonder that in some hysterical conditions there is a mere confusion and jumble of states of imperfect sleep and of imperfect waking.

On the other hand, - as we are now about to see, - the sleeping phase of personality may be greatly improved, its beneficent effects greatly extended, by certain artifices which evoke in the sleeper a power of self-suggestion which corresponds to what in the waking phase we call an inspiration of genius.