Since the germ of life appeared on earth, its history has been a history not only of gradual self-adaptation to a known environment, but of gradual discovery of an environment, always there, but unknown. What we call its primitive simple irritability was in fact a dim panæsthesia; a potential faculty, as yet unconscious of all the stimuli to which it had not yet learnt to respond. As these powers of sensation and of response have developed, they have gradually revealed to the living germ environments of which at first it could have no conception.
It is probable, to begin with, that the only environment which the vast majority of our ancestors knew was simply hot water. For the greater part of the time during which life has existed on earth it would have been thought chimerical to suggest that we could live in anything else. It was a great day for us when an ancestor crawled up out of the slowly-cooling sea;—or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for directly breathing air gradually revealed the fact that we had for long been breathing air in the water;—and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment,—the atmosphere of the earth. It was a great day again when another ancestor felt on his pigment-spot the solar ray;—or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for perceiving light revealed the fact that we had for long been acted upon by light as well as by heat; and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment,—namely, the illumined Universe that stretches to the Milky Way. It was a great day when the first skate (if skate he were) felt an unknown virtue go out from him towards some worm or mudfish;—or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for electrical excitation demonstrated the fact that we had long been acted upon by electricity as well as by heat and by light; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,—namely, an ether charged with infinite energy, overpassing and interpenetrating alike the last gulf of darkness and the extremest star. All this,—phrased perhaps in some other fashion,—all men admit as true. May we not then suppose that there are yet other environments, other interpretations, which a further awakening of faculty still subliminal is yet fated by its own nascent response to discover? Will it be alien to the past history of evolution if I add: It was a great day 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.
Once more. If this point of view be steadily maintained, we shall gain further light on some of those strangenesses and irregularities of genius which have led to its paradoxical juxtaposition with insanity as a divergence from the accepted human type. The distinctive characteristic of genius is the large infusion of the subliminal in its mental output; and one characteristic of the subliminal in my view is that it is in closer relation than the supraliminal to the spiritual world, and is thus nearer to the primitive source and extra-terrene initiation of life. And earthly Life itself—embodied as it is in psycho-physically individualised forms—is, on the theory advanced in these pages, a product or characteristic of the etherial or metetherial and not of the gross material world. Thence in some unknown fashion it came; there in some unknown fashion it subsists even throughout its earthly manifestation; thither in some unknown fashion it must after earthly death return. If indeed the inspirations of genius spring from a source one step nearer to primitive reality than is that specialised consensus of faculties which natural selection has lifted above the threshold for the purposes of working-day existence, then surely we need not wonder if the mind and frame of man should not always suffice for smooth and complete amalgamation; if some prefiguration of faculties adapted to a later stage of being should mar the symmetry of the life of earth.
And thus there may really be something at times incommensurable between the inspirations of genius and the results of conscious logical thought. Just as the calculating boy solves his problems by methods which differ from the methods of the trained mathematician, so in artistic matters also that "something of strangeness" which is in "all excellent beauty," may be the expression of a real difference between subliminal and supraliminal modes of perception. I cannot help thinking that such a difference is perceptible in subliminal relations to speech; that the subliminal self will sometimes surpass conscious effort, if it is treating speech as a branch of Art, in Poetry;—or else in some sense will fall short of conscious effort, when it is merely using words as an unavoidable medium to express ideas which common speech was hardly designed to convey.
Thus, on the one hand, when in presence of one of the great verbal achievements of the race—say the Agamemnon of Æschylus—it is hard to resist the obscure impression that some form of intelligence other than supraliminal reason or conscious selection has been at work. The result less resembles the perfection of rational choice among known data than the imperfect presentation of some scheme based on perceptions which we cannot entirely follow.
But, on the other hand, even though words may thus be used by genius with something of the mysterious remoteness of music itself, it seems to me that our subliminal mentation is less closely bound to the faculty of speech than is our supraliminal. There is a phrase in common use which involves perhaps more of psychological significance than has yet been brought out. Of all which we can call genius, or which we can ally with genius—of art, of love, of religious emotion—it is common to hear men say that they transcend the scope of speech. Nor have we any reason for regarding this as a mere vague sentimental expression.
There is no a priori ground for supposing that language will have the power to express all the thoughts and emotions of man. It may indeed be maintained that the inevitable course of its development tends to exhibit more and more clearly its inherent limitations. "Every language," it has been said, "begins as poetry and ends as algebra." To use the terms employed in this work, every language begins as a subliminal uprush and ends as a supraliminal artifice. Organic instincts impel to primitive ejaculation; unconscious laws of mind shape early grammar. But even in our own day—and we are still in the earth's infancy—this naïveté of language is fast disappearing. The needs of science and of commerce have become dominant, and although our vocabulary, based as it is on concrete objects and direct sensations, is refined for the expression of philosophic thought, still we cannot wonder if our supraliminal manipulation leaves us with an instrument less and less capable of expressing the growing complexity of our whole psychical being.
What then, we may ask, is the attitude and habit of the subliminal self likely to be with regard to language? Is it not probable that other forms of symbolism may retain a greater proportional importance among those submerged mental operations which have not been systematised for the convenience of communication with other men?