22 Mr. H. L. Stewart on 



roughly into types. When they thought of the genius of intellect 

 they had the reasoning faculty strongly in evidence, coupled with 

 enormous exaltation. There was also the genius of feeling, and 

 the great genius of every form of art. But there was another type 

 that stirred the world as often as it appeared, and, considered 

 from the psychological point of view, this type was the most 

 extraordinary and fascinating of the three. That was the type 

 described as the overmastering power of a strong personality, seen 

 in Mahomet, Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, and other leaders of 

 men — the genius of will, deficient perhaps in the reasoning faculty, 

 but incomparable in driving power. It was now tolerably certain 

 that the pre-eminent faculty when it once appeared was fairly 

 certain to reappear, and the inference seemed reasf)nable that 

 parentage was in some way accountable for the phenomenon. 

 Statistical information went to show that if genius was a lusus 

 naturce^ it tended to reproduce itself. Having dealt in detail with 

 Lombroso's extensive and minute investigations, the lecturer said 

 any argument that rested on empirical facts was liable to error. 

 The second theory as to the origin of genius was one of the most 

 ambitious in the whole range of modern psychology, that of 

 Frederick Myers. His theory was that genius was the result of 

 sub-concious mental activity. It was the theory that the con- 

 scious waking experience of man was but a fragment of his 

 personality. There was in each one of us enormous mental 

 reserves that never rose into utility, and to this theory, with certain 

 limitations, he (the lecturer) thought there was no adequate or 

 intelligible reply. It showed that a man of genius could call upon 

 reserves of mental energy which existed in everyone, but which 

 the ordinary individual could not bring into operation. It was 

 the theory of the sub-liminal and the super-liminal region of the 

 mind, genius alone having access to the former. If Myers were 

 right, the normal state of the ordinary type was a state of pro- 

 foundly dissociated personality, for by far the larger region of the 

 mind was permanently inaccessible to our reach. And those rare 

 cases which were called genius were so far from being morbid that 



