when the first thought or feeling flashed into some mind of beast or man from a mind distant from his own?--when a previously unsuspected capacity of telepathic percipience revealed the fact that we had long been acted upon by telepathic as well as by sensory stimuli; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,--a thought-world or spiritual universe charged with infinite life, and interpenetrating and overpassing all human spirits,--up to what some have called World-Soul, and some God? And now it will be easily understood that one of the corollaries from the conception of a constantly widening and deepening perception of an environment infinite in infinite ways, will be that the faculties which befit the material environment have absolutely no primacy, unless it be of the merely chronological kind, over those faculties which science has often called _by-products_, because they have no manifest tendency to aid their possessor in the struggle for existence in a material world. The higher gifts of genius--poetry, the plastic arts, music, philosophy, pure mathematics--all of these are precisely as much in the central stream of evolution--are perceptions of new truth and powers of new action just as decisively predestined for the race of man--as the aboriginal Australian's faculty for throwing a boomerang or for swarming up a tree for grubs. There is, then, about those loftier interests nothing exotic, nothing accidental; they are an intrinsic part of that ever-evolving response to our surroundings which forms not only the planetary but the cosmic history of all our race. What inconsistencies, what absurdities, underlie that assumption that evolution means nothing more than the survival of animals fittest to conquer enemies and to overrun the earth. On that bare hypothesis the genus _homo_ is impossible to explain. No one really attempts to explain him except on the tacit supposition that Nature somehow tended to evolve intelligence--somehow needed to evolve joy; was not satisfied with such an earth-over-runner as the rabbit, or such an invincible conqueror as the influenza microbe. But _how much_ intelligence, _what_ kind of joy Nature aimed at--is this to be left to be settled by the instinct of _l'homme sensuel moyen?_ or ought we not rather to ask of the best specimens of our race what it is that they live for?--whether they labour for the meat that perisheth, or for Love and Wisdom? To more and more among mankind the need of food is supplied with as little conscious effort as the need of air; yet these are often the very men through whom evolution is going on most unmistakably--who are becoming the typical figures of the swiftly-changing race.