quite by themselves, and to hand up to him, when he wants them, rare, deep, unconscious knowledge—­all the things he wants to use for what his soul is doing at the moment—­it is these that make the man of genius what he is.  He has a larger and better factory than others, and has developed a huge subconscious service in mind and body.  Having all these things done for him, he is naturally more free than others and has more vision and more originality, his spirit is swung free to build new worlds—­to take walks with God, until at last we come to look upon him, upon the man of genius, a little superstitiously.  We look up every little while from doing the things ourselves that he gets done for him by his subconscious machinery, and we wonder at him, we wonder at the strange, the mighty feats he does, at his thousand-leagued boots, at his apparent everywhereness.  His songs and joys, sometimes, to us, his very sorrows, look miraculous.

And yet it is all merely because he has a factory, a great automatic equipment, a thousand employee-sense perceptions, down in the basement of his being, doing things for him that the rest of us do, or think we are obliged to do ourselves, and give up all of our time to.  He is not held back as we are, and moves freely.  So he dives under the sea familiarly, or takes peeps at the farther side of the stars, or he flies in the air, or he builds unspeakable railroads or thinks out ships or sea-cities, or he builds books, or he builds little new still-undreamed-of worlds out of chemistry, or he unravels history out of rocks, or plants new cities and mighty states without seeming to try, or perhaps he proceeds quietly to be interested in men, in all these funny little dots of men about him; and out of the earth and sky, out of the same old earth and sky everybody else had had, he makes new kinds and new sizes of men with a thought like some mighty, serene child playing with dolls!

It is generally supposed that the man of genius rules history and dictates the ideals, the activities of the next generation, writes out the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world, and lays the ground-plans of nations because he has an inspired mind.  It is really because he has an inspired body, a body that has received its orders once for all, from his spirit.  We would never wonder that everything a genius does has that vivid and strange reality it has, if we realized what his body is doing for him, how he has a body which is at work automatically drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking up practicability, art and technique for him into everything he sees and everything he hopes and desires.  And every year he keeps on adding a new body, keeps on handing down to his basement new sets, every day, of finer and yet finer things to do automatically.  The great spiritual genius becomes great by economizing his consciousness in one direction and letting it fare forth in another.  He converts his old inspirations