have travelled farthest in the same time. They have varied also in the greatest number of directions; they have evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime. Of all creatures man has gone furthest both in differentiation and in integration; he has called into activity the greatest number of those faculties which lay potential in the primal germ,--and he has established over those faculties the strongest central control. The process still continues. Civilisation adds to the complexity of his faculties; education helps him to their concentration. It is in the direction of a still wider range, a still firmer hold, that his evolution now must lie. I shall maintain that this ideal is best attained by the man of genius. Let us consider the way in which the maximum of faculty is habitually manifested; the circumstances in which a man does what he has never supposed himself able to do before. We may take an instance where the faculty drawn upon lies only a little way beneath the surface. A man, we say, outdoes himself in a great emergency. If his house is on fire, let us suppose, he carries his children out over the roof with a strength and agility which seem beyond his own. That effective impulse seems more akin to instinct than to calculation. We hardly know whether to call the act reflex or voluntary. It is performed with almost no conscious intervention of thought or judgment, but it involves a new and complex adaptation of voluntary muscles such as would need habitually the man's most careful thought to plan and execute. From the point of view here taken the action will appear to have been neither reflex nor voluntary in the ordinary sense, but _subliminal_;--a subliminal uprush, an emergence of hidden faculty,--of nerve co-ordinations potential in his organism but till now unused,--which takes command of the man and guides his action at the moment when his being is deeply stirred. This stock instance of a man's possible behaviour in moments of great physical risk does but illustrate in a gross and obvious manner, and in the motor region, a phenomenon which, as I hold, is constantly occurring on a smaller scale in the inner life of most of us. We identify ourselves for the most part with a stream of voluntary, fully conscious ideas,--cerebral movements connected and purposive as the movement of the hand which records them. Meantime we are aware also of a substratum of fragmentary automatic, _liminal_ ideas, of which we take small account. These are bubbles that break on the surface; but every now and then there is a stir among them. There is a rush upwards as of a subaqueous spring; an inspiration flashes into the mind for which our conscious effort has not prepared us. This so-called inspiration may in itself be trivial or worthless; but it is the initial stage of a phenomenon to which, when certain rare attributes are also present, the name of genius will be naturally given.