450 PHYSIOLOGY CHAP. 



difficult problem, nothing comes off well, at the lirst, attempt; 

 then one takes a longer or shorter rest, and again sits down at 

 the table. Again for the first half-hour nothing occurs, and then 

 suddenly the determining idea crops up in the mind. . . . This 

 pause has been filled by an unconscious travail." 



He gives a characteristic description of the way in which he 

 discovered the Fuchsian functions by which so many algebraic 

 equations have hern marvellously simplified. "For a fortnight I 

 had been trying to prove that no function, analogous to what 

 I have since termed the Fuchsian functions, could exist. I was 

 then very ignorant. I sat down every day at my writing-table 

 and remained for an hour or two; I tried a vast number of 

 combinations and failed to reach any result. One night, contrary 

 to custom, I drank black coll'ee and could not sleep : my thoughts 

 came crowding up; I felt them tumbling over each other till two 

 became as it were locked together so as to form a stable combina- 

 tion. In the morning I had established the existence of a class of 

 Fuchsian functions ... it only remained to tabulate the results." 



Some physiologists and psychologists have objected that 

 Mvris' theory i^ .-rated, but the observations of Poiucare 



seem to afford a direct proof of it. Del Greco (1906) made many 

 criticisms, with a view to emphasising the supreme importance, in 

 the collective mental activities, of the suprcUiminal self. But he 

 has overlooked the fact that Myers foresaw this criticism and 

 opposed to it the following statement : 



" I do not mean to imply that subliminal is ipso facto superior 

 to supraliminal mentation, or even that it covers a large proportion 

 of practically useful human achievement. When I say ' the 

 differentia of genius Lies in an increased control over subliminal 

 mentation,' I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and I 

 suggest an important inference, namely, that the man of genius is 

 for us the best type of the normal man, in so far as he effects a 

 successful co-operation of an unusually large number of elements 

 of his personality reaching a stage of integration slightly in 

 advance of our own. . . . That which extends beneath the thres- 

 hold, beyond the margin of a field of consciousness specialised for 

 our ordinary needs, will probably be both more extensive and 

 more miscellaneous than that which is contained within those 

 limits. . . ." Genius, he continues, is no aberration of the human 

 mind, no sign of its degeneration; in the evolutionary scale 

 genius forms by no means either an extreme term or an accidental 

 deviation. The higher gifts of genius poetry, the plastic arts, 

 music, philosophy, pure mathematics which are often called by- 

 products, because they have no manifest tendency to aid their 

 possessor in the struggle for existence in a material world, are all 

 perceptions of new truth and powers of new action decisively 

 predestined for the race of man. 



