The only thing we can be certain of is that from time to time some epoch-making mind will express itself. Acquainted with all the devices of the schools it will brush them all aside, and half unconsciously, half a-dream, as if indeed it were literally "inspired," it will establish new standards, engender new methods, and endow the time with new delights. Criticism will dissect, examine and explain, until the creative mind is almost persuaded that it has all along understood itself; but the one thing by which criticism must ever be eluded, the one thing which must ever elude prophecy, is genius itself. When all is said that man can say, and all is said in vain, the best explanation of the unexplainable is perhaps the old one, that genius brings in some way a message from outside the world. Perhaps, since there is always a demand for something which man can worship, this inspiration may be the subject of the conscious adoration of the new age. Perhaps we have here the subject of the religion of the future; for inspiration, as we may most conveniently name this mystery, has just that character of the unknowable half-seized, which is precisely what the soul of man is ever yearning for. CHAPTER VI UTILISING THE SEA Except for a small tribute in the shape of fish food and certain salts the ocean is to-day almost a dead loss to the world, and what is worse, the greatest of all obstacles to progress. It separates us from our kin, wrecks our ships, claims a yearly toll of dead, and is barren, fruitless, a mere receptacle for garbage. A hundred years hence we shall have awakened to these facts and found means to make "the caverns vast of ocean old" something better than a subject for the poet and a resting-place for the dead whom it murders. Not every dream, however, can be realised--not even the engineer's. Some years ago certain ardent spirits in France announced that the desert of Sahara lay below the level of the sea and could be flooded with the Atlantic or Mediterranean. The effect of this, it was considered, would not merely be to inconvenience certain Arabs, but to change entirely the climate of the rest of equatorial Africa. Laved by the beneficent waves of ocean, lands at present uninhabitable would, it was declared, become fertile and salubrious. The project was dismissed or shelved as impracticable from engineering difficulties. Shall we, a hundred years hence, have met these difficulties?