Heredity, Variation and Genius 15 



In the ecstasies of love and religion — and the 

 religious trance of the ecstatic saint is manifestly 

 often a thrilling sublimation or spiritualization of 

 the physiological love-passion — the transport is 

 apt to be vast and indefinite, intellectual forms 

 being swamped and personality dissolved into 

 undefined feeling ; but in the more sober tran- 

 sports of the great musical composer, of the en- 

 raptured poet, of the truly inspired artist of every 

 sort, the inspiration is continent and creative, 

 irrigating rather than overflooding, being founded 

 on and conditioned by a solid basis of previous 

 intellectual acquirements which it animates and 

 impels to fit organic synthesis. So the great 

 work of art exhibits concentrated power in fine 

 form of beauty ; the aim and effect of it being 

 not pleasure only, as often alleged, but also the 

 power manifest in the pleasure. It is otherwise 

 with the sundry and diverse superstructures 

 of myths, fables and dogmas which religious J 

 superstition has built upon the rapture of feeling I 

 at different times and places ; they had no such 

 rational warrant in reality ; were plainly the 

 fanciful and oftentimes grossly irrational notions 

 pertaining to the particular intellectual develop- 

 ment of the time and place. Behind or beneath 

 which myths, dogmas and other forms, fit or 

 false, of expression, inspiring and sustaining them, 

 there was, nevertheless, the sort of transcendental 

 feeling that was abiding however much and often 

 its vesture was changed. An interesting reflection 



