ets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it, or in some way
"works it off." "What shall I think of it?" a common person says to
himself about a vexed question; but in a "cranky" mind "What must I do
about it?" is the form the question tends to take. In the
autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the
following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but
very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk
anything in its support. 'Someone ought to do it, but why should I?'
is the ever reechoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Someone ought to
do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man,
eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these
two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough!
and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the
ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior
intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce--as in the endless
permutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound to
coalesce often enough--in the same individual, we have the best
possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the
{25} biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics
and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they
inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.
It is they who get counted when Messrs. Lombroso, Nisbet, and others
invoke statistics to defend their paradox.

[7] Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems
to consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty
of association by similarity.

To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we
shall see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious
evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers.
Take the trancelike states of insight into truth which all religious
mystics report.[8] These are each and all of them special cases of
kinds of human experience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy,
whatever peculiarities it may have qua religious, is at any rate
melancholy. Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is
trance. And the moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is
exploded away as soon as it is classed with others, or its origin is
shown; the moment we agree to stand