"-> 



8 Heredity, Variation and Genius 



conditions of his environment from the begin- 

 nings of his being ; just the structuralized ratio in 

 mental organization, the static reason, of which 

 the conscious reason is the function. No one 

 reasons by the reason he is conscious of, any 

 more than he imagines by the imagination which 

 he forms ; his conscious reason is the performed 

 reason, as his imagination is the formed imagina- 

 tion ; both products of the unconscious or very 

 partially conscious processes of the underlying 

 cerebral operations. Man being the Nature-made 

 means by which Nature is made better in its 

 process of evolution, the same rational processes 

 ruling in it and displayed so abundantly in the 

 marvellous structures of organic life, vegetable 

 and animal, are carried on through his mental 

 organization : life in mind a continuation of life 

 in the world. In the process of evolutional equi- 

 libration between him and the outer world it is 

 Nature which structuralizes in him the reason 

 which he finds in Nature and, because he is con- 

 scious of, magnifies mightily and is so mightily 

 proud of. Consciousness is just the illumination 

 of vital experience in practice, the reflective out- 

 come of the realized action." 



* Gross materialism it will perhaps be said, and to say so 

 be deemed a sufficient refutation. "One calls materialist 

 every philosophy which defines thought as the product of a 

 compound whose elements do not imply thought." But why 

 does not a superior philosophy exactly define thought for us ? 

 That would help us to understand what are its elements and 



