INSPIRED LIMITATIONS 293 



is difficult to see why such knowledge and such 

 powers should always have stood in an ordered 

 relation to the various culture-states through which 

 man the terrestrial or supraliminal part of him, 

 that is to say has passed, and to his earthly 

 advantages and means of acquiring knowledge. It 

 is difficult to see why the subliminal part of such a 

 gifted race as the Greeks, though proportionately 

 high, yet knew, apparently, so much less than this 

 same sleeping partner in the joint-firm, so to speak, 

 of far less gifted, but later-living peoples : why 

 genius, which is " a welling-up of the subliminal 

 into the supraliminal region," should bear, always, 

 the impress of its age, race, and country : why it is 

 governed by the law of deviation from an average, 

 as laid down by Galton : why it should so often be 

 ignorant in matters which ought to be well known to 

 the subliminal ego, as thus conceived of: why it 

 asserts what is false as frequently as what is true, 

 and with the same inspired eloquence : * why " the 

 daemon of Socrates " was either ignorant of its own 

 nature, or else deceived Socrates, who of all men, 

 surely, was fitted to know the truth : why Aristotle 

 perceived less than Darwin : why Pythagoras grasped 

 only imperfectly what Copernicus saw fully : why no 

 other Greek astronomer had an inkling of the same 

 truths : why Shakespeares and Newtons do not 

 spring out of low savage tribes : why the negro 



1 Compare, for instance, with the "Out of the Deeps," &c., 

 these lines of Catullus 



" Soles occidere, et redire possunt, 

 Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux 

 Nox est perpetua una dormenda." 



