genius. "But genius cannot work miracles, cannot do what is
impossible." Do what is impossible to whom? To the critics, the men
of common sense.

Alas, all this way of talking about "miracles," and "the impossible,"
and "genius" is quite vague and popular. What do we mean by
"genius"? The Latin term originally designates, not a man's everyday
intellect, but a spirit from without which inspires him, like the
"Daemon," or, in Latin, "Genius" of Socrates, or the lutin which rode
the pen of Moliere. "Genius" is claimed for Shakespeare in an
inscription on his Stratford monument, erected at latest some six
years after his death. Following this path of thought we come to
"inspiration": the notion of it, as familiar to Australian savages
as to any modern minds, is that, to the poet, what he produces is
GIVEN by some power greater than himself, by the Boilyas (spirits) or
Pundjel, the Father of all. This palaeolithic psychology, of course,
is now quite discredited, yet the term "genius" is still (perhaps
superstitiously) applied to the rare persons whose intellectual
faculties lightly outrun those of ordinary mortals, and who do
marvels with means apparently inadequate.

In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers, put--in
place of the Muses or the Boilyas, or the Genius--what they call the
"Subliminal Self," something "far more deeply interfused than the
everyday intellect." This subconscious self, capable of far more
than the conscious intelligence, is genius.

On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only
higher in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday
intellect which, for example, pens this page.