“But,” I hear a puzzled parent protest, “do you mean that the formal education of the child should be begun before he has reached school age? Would you have us lay on the tender mind the burden of actual study?” I mean precisely that. Not only do I believe that the postponement of formal education to “school age” is a serious pedagogical error, but I also believe that “actual study,” properly directed, would by no means prove such a “burden” on the mind of the child as most people take for granted. I am willing to go further than this, and to contend, for reasons which I shall endeavour to make clear, that if the formal education of children were begun earlier than is the rule at present, and if it were carried out with the supplementary aid of education through a really good example and a really well arranged environment, our boys and girls would develop not only into morally superior men and women, but also into men and women of mental attainments fairly comparable with those to-day displayed by the comparative few acclaimed as men and women of “genius.” III THE SECRET OF GENIUS The theory of genius which it is my purpose to present and defend has little in common with the views held by most students of this world-old problem. Especially does it differ from the well-known and at present dominant doctrine of the Moreau-Lombroso-Hagen school of investigators, by whom the man of genius is regarded as an aberrant, even degenerate, type of humanity, closely allied to the insane, and hence by implication deserving to be repressed rather than encouraged. Nor am I at one with those who, justly protesting against the degeneracy theory, themselves contend that genius is an anomaly in the scheme of Nature, and that the man of genius, biologically speaking, is a “variation” dependent on unknown, perhaps unknowable, laws of heredity. On the contrary, following the lead of the late Frederic W. H. Myers—the first, in my opinion, to glimpse the true significance and fundamental characteristics of genius—I shall endeavour to show that in the man of genius there is, at bottom, no real departure from normality, and that he differs from the “average man” only in being the fortunate possessor of a power for utilising more freely than other men faculties common to all. More than this, going beyond Myers, I venture to affirm that genius is to an appreciable extent susceptible of cultivation, so as to become a far more frequent phenomenon than it is to-day. In other words, I maintain that God, in giving to the world its Dantes, Newtons, and Emersons, has not intended them as mere objects of admiration and bewilderment, but as indications of possibilities open to the generalty of mankind.