Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

It is like a great engine which he has been allowed the use of as long as he can keep it connected up properly with his cerebral arrangements.

This appears to be mainly what the cerebral brain is for, this keeping the man connected up. It acts as a kind of stopcock for one's infinity, for screwing on or screwing off one's vast race-consciousness, one's all-humanityness, all those unsounded deeps or reservoirs of human energy, of hope and memory, of love, of passionate thought, of earthly and heavenly desire that are lent to each of us as we slip softly by for seventy years, by a whole human race.

A human being is a kind of factory. The engine and the works and all the various machines are kept in the basement, and he sends down orders to them from time to time, and they do the work which has been conceived up in the headquarters. He expects the works down below to keep on doing these things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should, with the things that are new and different and special and that his mind alone can do—the things which, at least in their present initial formative or creative stage, no machines as yet have been developed to do, and that can only be worked out by the man up in the headquarters himself personally, by the handiwork of his own thought.

The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong, and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all the machines in the basement are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for discriminating, assimilating and classifying material, for pumping up power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away for him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him up in his very dreams new and strange powers to live and know with.

The men who have been the most developed of all, in this regard, civilization has always selected and set apart from the others. It calls these men, in their generation, men of genius.

Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius.

The reason that people set the genius apart and do not try to compete with him is that he has more and better machinery than they have. It is always the first thing one notices about a man of genius—the incredible number of things that he manages to get done for him, apparently the things that he never takes any time off, like the rest of us, to do himself. The subconscious, automatic, mechanical equipment of his senses, the extraordinary intelligence and refinement of his body, the way his senses keep his spirit informed automatically and convey outer knowledge to him, the power he has in return of informing this outer knowledge with his spirit, with his will, with his choices, once for all, so that he is always able afterward to rely on his senses to work out things beautifully for him quite by themselves, and to hand up to him, when he wants them, rare, deep, unconscious knowledge—all the things he wants to use for what his soul is doing at the moment—it is these that make the man of genius what he is. He has a larger and better factory than others, and has developed a huge subconscious service in mind and body. Having all these things done for him, he is naturally more free than others and has more vision and more originality, his spirit is swung free to build new worlds—to take walks with God, until at last we come to look upon him, upon the man of genius, a little superstitiously. We look up every little while from doing the things ourselves that he gets done for him by his subconscious machinery, and we wonder at him, we wonder at the strange, the mighty feats he does, at his thousand-leagued boots, at his apparent everywhereness. His songs and joys, sometimes, to us, his very sorrows, look miraculous.

And yet it is all merely because he has a factory, a great automatic equipment, a thousand employee-sense perceptions, down in the basement of his being, doing things for him that the rest of us do, or think we are obliged to do ourselves, and give up all of our time to. He is not held back as we are, and moves freely. So he dives under the sea familiarly, or takes peeps at the farther side of the stars, or he flies in the air, or he builds unspeakable railroads or thinks out ships or sea-cities, or he builds books, or he builds little new still-undreamed-of worlds out of chemistry, or he unravels history out of rocks, or plants new cities and mighty states without seeming to try, or perhaps he proceeds quietly to be interested in men, in all these funny little dots of men about him; and out of the earth and sky, out of the same old earth and sky everybody else had had, he makes new kinds and new sizes of men with a thought like some mighty, serene child playing with dolls!

It is generally supposed that the man of genius rules history and dictates the ideals, the activities of the next generation, writes out the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world, and lays the ground-plans of nations because he has an inspired mind. It is really because he has an inspired body, a body that has received its orders once for all, from his spirit. We would never wonder that everything a genius does has that vivid and strange reality it has, if we realized what his body is doing for him, how he has a body which is at work automatically drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking up practicability, art and technique for him into everything he sees and everything he hopes and desires. And every year he keeps on adding a new body, keeps on handing down to his basement new sets, every day, of finer and yet finer things to do automatically. The great spiritual genius becomes great by economizing his consciousness in one direction and letting it fare forth in another. He converts his old inspirations into his new machines. He converts heat into power, and power into light, and comes to live at last as almost any man of genius can really be seen living—in a kind of transfigured or lighted-up body. The poet transmutes his subconscious or machine body into words; and the artist, into colour or sound or into carved stone. The engineer transmutes his subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into stories of thoughtful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative genius is seen, sooner or later, to be the transmuted genius of some man's body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody. It is not as if he had had to work out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself.

The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.