"Partly and partly metaphysical. I'll tell you my theory, if you like; it's my own, and probably worthless, but such as it is you can have it. It's this. In every human being there exists something—call it soul, call it subconscious self if you like—and that something, which I hold to be immortal, passes at death to another body. But in the majority, though it controls, it works underground, and is silent; in others, however—the abnormal—it makes itself heard, and at certain moments takes charge and speaks; then we have what are called flashes of genius. A genius does not reason or think a matter out as we do. His ideas come, and are followed. And to my thinking they come not from the man himself, but from his soul, endowed with the knowledge and experience of thousands of years. That's what makes the characters and masterpieces of poets and painters that were drawn ages ago true to present-day life. It is universal, not individual, human nature they describe."
"But the visions—how do you account for them, a man can't see his own soul?"
"Something or someone seen when the mind, from certain causes, is extraordinarily excited, and so it becomes indelibly photographed on the mental vision; thenceforth, by a very natural sequence, the voice of subconscious self becomes that of the vision."
"But I've always understood that these visions are only seen occasionally."
"Exactly, when the mind is in the same state as it was when the apparition first appeared, that can and usually is as the mental picture fades with physical powers, for delusion dies with or just before the body, brought about by drugs or some other excitant to the nerves."
"What for?"
"Because he must have the vision to tell him what to do. It gives him the inspiration, without which he's firmly convinced he cannot act—and he couldn't."
"But Graeme's not a drug-taker; he won't touch even a sleeping-draught, though ordered by a doctor; he smokes but little too, five cigarettes a day, never more."
"What does he drink?"
"He's a teetotaler, save for an occasional bottle of champagne. Hullo, Glover, what do you want?"