Heredity, Variation and Genius 9 



thoughts and feelings : these enrapturing because 

 intensely thrilled with the transport of a vague 

 and vast emotion which may be gloriously inter- 

 preted as a transient union or communion with 

 the primal and divine energy from which all 

 things proceed ; those sublimely exalting because 

 tired with the special conceit of a superior faculty 

 of insight into the realities of being which the 

 common mind is destitute of. 



Is it true then that there lurks deep in human 

 nature — in the heart rather than in the head — a 

 slumbering instinct of cosmic unity, or, failing 

 that, of organic unity ? A reluctance of human 

 pride to share such humbler organic being may 

 be pacified by representing the matter as a shar- 

 ing in the divinity of nature, inborn love of which 

 omnipresent divinity can then be triumphantly 

 proclaimed to mark the opening of a faculty of 

 insight transcending intellect. If the ultimate 

 inspiration of art, poetry, music, love, religion, 

 so transporting at its best as to be styled divine, 

 be an awakened feeling of a mingling with the 

 universe, a thrill of the infinite not ever to be 

 expressed adequately in terms of the understand- 

 ing, such inspiration must necessarily be aspiration 

 rather than apprehension, exclamation or cry 

 rather than articulate language, prayer rather 

 than predication. The man lauds, as the bee 

 buzzes and the grasshopper chirps, the divine ; 

 either of which no doubt pictures it, if it picture 

 it at all, in suitable forms of bee-thought or grass- 



