INSPIRED LIMITATIONS 293 



is difficult to see why such knowledge and such 

 powers should always have stood in an ordered 

 relation to the various culture-states through which 

 man — the terrestrial or supraliminal part of him, 

 that is to say — has passed, and to his earthly 

 advantages and means of acquiring knowledge. It 

 is difficult to see why the subliminal part of such a 

 gifted race as the Greeks, though proportionately 

 high, yet knew, apparently, so much less than this 

 same sleeping partner in the joint-firm, so to speak, 

 of far less gifted, but later-living peoples : why 

 genius, which is " a welling-up of the subliminal 

 into the supraliminal region," should bear, always, 

 the impress of its age, race, and country : why it is 

 governed by the law of deviation from an average, 

 as laid down by Galton : why it should so often be 

 ignorant in matters which ought to be well known to 

 the subliminal ego, as thus conceived of: why it 

 asserts what is false as frequently as what is true, 

 and with the same inspired eloquence : ^ why *' the 

 dcemon of Socrates " was either ignorant of its own 

 nature, or else deceived Socrates, who of all men, 

 surely, was fitted to know the truth : why Aristotle 

 perceived less than Darwin : why Pythagoras grasped 

 only imperfectly what Copernicus saw fully : why no 

 other Greek astronomer had an inkling of the same 

 truths : why Shakespeares and Newtons do not 

 spring out of low savage tribes: why the negro 



1 Compare, for instance, with the "Out of the Deeps," &c., 

 these lines of Catullus — 



" Soles occidere, et redire possunt, 

 Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux 

 Nox est perpetua una dormenda." 



