\o Heredity, Variation and Genius 



hopper-thought. Every form of perception or 

 knowledge being sense-derived and sense-condi- 

 tioned limitation of ultimate reality, which might 

 conceivably be pictured otherwise than in terms 

 of the senses of sight and touch, it is certainly 

 safer, in hope of getting nearer to the ultimate 

 reality of things, to rest on feeling which cannot 

 be formulated. While understanding or reason 

 represents the successive and increasing adapta- 

 tions to the environment, with careful maintenance 

 of just balance of relations, which the individual 

 offshoot of nature painfully makes in its process 

 of adaptation, feeling can be thus claimed to 

 represent its fundamental root in and union with 

 the nature it issues from and always remains part 

 of ; so that where elemental instincts come into 

 play the domain of intellect can be prescribed to 

 end and the domain of religion to begin. Neces- 

 sarily a somewhat vague and vacuous region — a 

 spacious feeling of an infinite within as of an 

 infinite without — but for that reason all the more 

 delectable ; for mystical feeling is a pleasing suf- 

 fusion necessitating no painstaking and tedious 

 labours of acquisition nor scrupulous regard of 

 proportion, and fancy may proudly people with 

 such forms as it pleases.* 



* And yet of the actual value of such vague feeling might it 

 not truly perhaps be said as of the value of vain and wander- 

 ing metaphysical thoughts ? 



" But apt the mind or fancy is to rove 



" Unchecked ; and of her roving is no end, 



