Every form of insensibility is closely allied with muscular relaxation or paralysis.
IV
Examples of the operation of the Supra-conscious faculties upon the concrete plane are supplied by the marvellous feats of "lightning calculators."
The most intricate mathematical problems—calculations that would call for lengthy and complicated intellectual processes on the part of expert mathematicians to work out by ordinary methods—are solved instantaneously by the genius of such natural "calculators." You cannot puzzle them; you cannot baffle them. Scarcely have you stated your problem than they have calmly presented you with the solution. As Maeterlinck records in his interesting book, The Unknown Guest, this genius for figures developed in Colbourn and Safford at the age of six, in Mangiamele at ten, in Gauss and Whateley at three. All that and more than expert mathematicians laboriously acquire by decades of study and practice, these boy-prodigies achieved by way of native faculty. Such have not the slightest notion how they arrive at their results. These are obtained automatically—are products of unconscious cerebration.
Maeterlinck observes of this, that the resultant "appears to rise, infallible and ready-done, from a sort of eternal and cosmic reservoir wherein the answer to every question lies dormant."
What is this "eternal and cosmic reservoir" if it be not Mind, or Supra-consciousness, as distinguished from conscious intellection—a native intuitive, but undifferentiate, or potential, consciousness which holds the answer, "infallible and ready-done," to every question.
Truth Is. There is but one solution—the true one—of a mathematical or any other problem of exact science.
A significant fact is that such prodigy boys generally lose their mysterious faculty "at the moment when the possessor begins to go to school." So soon, that is, as he develops the power of conscious brain-processes—the power to work out his problems by concrete methods—his native supra-conscious gift of solving them spontaneously fails.
Intuition, the woman-mode of arriving at conclusions, lightning quick and true without reason or reflection, is a kindred potency of Mind. "When a man," says a French writer, "has laboriously climbed a staircase, he is sure to find a woman at the top—although she will be unable to say how she came there!"
He did not add the further truth, that—as with the prodigy boys—the more you educate her to come at her conclusions by processes of intellection, the more you rob her of her native woman-gift of divination.