54 MENTAL EMBRYOLOGY 



to say that this universal desire of the soul in man 

 to have the power to project, or to impart, itself to 

 another one has never been anything but a wish 

 and a delusion. 



" But whither will conjecture stray? " as Words- 

 worth asks. In this case only this far. We cannot 

 imagine a mentality other than our own — that of a 

 wasp, let us say, or of a visitor from Mars; or even 

 of a member of the human race of a subspecies nearly 

 allied to ours, whose mental evolution has progressed 

 so far and lasted so long as to have given him a far 

 bigger brain than we possess, since the evolution has 

 not been on our lines and is consequently to us 

 unimaginable. 



Nevertheless we are not wholly without hope, so 

 let us go cheerfully stumbling and fumbling on; or 

 " rushing in," as the anthropologist, physiologist, 

 biologist and psychologist will each exclaim with 

 a giggle from his own particular water-and-air-tight 

 compartment. 



And what gives us hope is something still to be 

 found in ourselves — in some, if not in all, of us; 

 vestiges of ancient outlived impulses, senses, instincts, 

 faculties, which stir in us and come to nothing, and 

 in some exceptional cases are rekindled and operate 

 so that a man we know may seem to us, in this 

 particular, like a being of another species. They 

 are numerous enough, and when collected and 

 classified they may form a new subject or science 

 with a specially invented new name, signifying 

 an embryology of the mind. 



