292 BIRD LIFE GLIMPSES 



more mysterious than another ? It seems foolish to 

 make a wonder out of our own ignorance ; which, 

 however, we are always doing. But, now, if such 

 powers and faculties as we have been considering, 

 transmitted, in a more or less latent condition, through 

 millions of generations that no longer needed them, 

 had come, at last, to man, they could, it seems prob- 

 able, only manifest themselves in him, through and 

 in connection with his own higher psychology ; just, 

 in fact, as sexual love does, for this, of course, is 

 essentially the same in man and beast. Yet we 

 have our novels and our plays. Thus, such endow- 

 ments, answering no longer to the lowly needs which 

 had brought them into being, would present, when 

 wrought into the skein of our human mentality, a 

 far higher and more exalted appearance, well calcu- 

 lated to put us in love with ourselves — never a very 

 difficult business — to the tune of such lines as *' We 

 feel that we are greater than we know," " Out of 

 the deep, my child, out of the deep,'' and many 

 another d'este jaez^ which, though they issue from 

 the lips of great poets, may be born, none the less, 

 of mere human pride and complacency. Yet, all 

 the time, animal reversion, as opposed to godlike 

 development, might be, as I believe it is, the vera 

 causa of what seems so high and so holy. 



Were the late Mr. Myers' conception of the 

 subliminal self — a part of us belonging, as far as one 

 can understand the idea, not to this earth but to a 

 spiritual state of things beyond and without it, and 

 bringing with it intuitive knowledge and enlarged 

 powers, from this outer sea, these extra-territorial 

 waters — were, I say, this conception a true one, it 



