criminals and lunatics, as persons in whom a want of balance or completeness of organisation has led on to an over-development of one side of the nature;--helpful or injurious to other men as accident may decide. On this point I shall join issue; and I shall suggest, on the other hand, that Genius--if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a psychological definition--should rather be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate in all;--a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought;--so that an "inspiration of Genius" will be in truth a _subliminal uprush_, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may be, of something _supernormal_;--of something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage. But before proceeding further I wish to guard against a possible misapprehension. I shall be obliged in this chapter to dwell on valuable aid rendered by subliminal mentation; but I do not mean to imply that such mentation is _ipso facto superior_ to supraliminal, or even that it covers a large proportion of practically useful human achievement. When I say "The differentia of genius lies in an increased control over subliminal mentation," I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and I suggest an important inference,--namely, that the man of genius is for us the best type of the normal man, in so far as he effects a successful co-operation of an unusually large number of elements of his personality--reaching a stage of integration slightly in advance of our own. Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is not to be pushed further:--as though I claimed that all our best thought was subliminal, or that all that was subliminal was potentially "inspiration." It is true, however, that the range of our subliminal mentation is more extended than the range of our supraliminal. At one end of the scale we find _dreams_,--a normal subliminal product, but of less practical value than any form of sane supraliminal thought. At the other end of the scale we find that the rarest, most precious knowledge comes to us from outside the ordinary field,--through the eminently subliminal processes of telepathy, telæsthesia, ecstasy. And between these two extremes lie many subliminal products, varying in value according to the dignity and trustworthiness of the subliminal mentation concerned.