"Wax to receive and marble to retain"; such, as we all have felt, is the human mind in moments of excitement which transcend its resistant powers. This may be for good or for evil, may tend to that radical change in ethical standpoint which is called _conversion_, or to the mere setting-up of some hysterical disability. Who shall say how far we desire to be susceptible to stimulus? Most rash would it be to assign any fixed limit, or to class as inferior those whose main difference from ourselves may be that they feel sincerely and passionately what we feel torpidly, or perhaps only affect to feel. "The term degenerate," says Dr. Milne Bramwell, "is applied so freely and widely by some modern authors that one cannot help concluding that they rank as such all who do not conform to some primitive, savage type, possessing an imperfectly developed nervous system." Our "degenerates" may sometimes be in truth _progenerate_; and their perturbation may mask an evolution which we or our children needs must traverse when they have shown the way. Let us pause for a moment and consider what is here implied. We are getting here among the _hystériques qui mènent le monde_. We have advanced, that is to say, from the region of _idées fixes_ of a paltry or morbid type to the region of _idées fixes_ which in themselves are reasonable and honourable, and which become morbid only on account of their relative intensity. Here is the debateable ground between hysteria and genius. The kind of genius which we approach here is not, indeed, the purely intellectual form. Rather it is the "moral genius," the "genius of sanctity," or that "possession" by some altruistic idea which lies at the root of so many heroic lives. The hagiology of all religions offers endless examples of this type. That man would hardly be regarded as a great saint whose conduct seemed completely reasonable to the mass of mankind. The saint in consequence is apt to be set unduly apart, whether for veneration or for ridicule. He is regarded either as inspired or as morbid; when in reality all that his mode of life shows is that certain _idées fixes_, in themselves of no unworthy kind, have obtained such dominance that their impulsive action may take and retake, as accident wills, the step between the sublime and the ridiculous.