Whence the idea came we do not know. It entered a mind that was ready to receive it, coming unbidden from a place unknown like an abiding quest from a spirit world. The mind that welcomed the idea was neither masculine nor feminine, it was both, a thing androgynous, for genius has ever been a single creative agent with a double sex. The tools with which genius has worked--the selected traditions and conventions, the acquired knowledge, the original observation, and the handicrafts of social life--have ever been plain enough, of course; but to see and admire tools is not to understand the advent of those imperishable ideas which not only transform history, but turn all ordinary men into their mimics and mechanics. For instance, whenever we light a candle or a fire we obey the genius of a Palæolithic savage, who, with sparks beaten from flint into some inflammable grass or moss or fluff from cocoons, brought into the world the earliest missionaries, artificial light and heat. Similarly, whenever we walk across a timber bridge, whether old or new, we are servants to the earliest savage who with a stone axe cut down a tree, causing it to fall from bank to bank of a river or chasm. Delete from history even two mother-ideas--the invention of wheels, for example, and the evolution of arched bridges from Nature’s models--and how many civilizations would you cancel? Omit from the annals of our “modern democracy” not more than three mother-ideas: the discovery of steam as a motive-power, the discovery of microbes, and the use of metal in bridge building. In a twinkling we go back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when hospitals were cesspools,[14] when surgery and medicine were wild empirics, when travellers in stage-coaches longed for the general Turnpike Act (a boon delayed till 1773), and when England was unspoiled by jerry-builders and a factory system. A pontist, then, if he understands his subject, looks upon genius as the solar system of human societies, hence he cannot be a willing servant to any mob-rule or mob-worship.