use of as long
as he can keep it connected up properly with his cerebral arrangements.

This appears to be mainly what the cerebral brain is for, this keeping
the man connected up. It acts as a kind of stopcock for one's infinity,
for screwing on or screwing off one's vast race-consciousness, one's
all-humanityness, all those unsounded deeps or reservoirs of human
energy, of hope and memory, of love, of passionate thought, of earthly
and heavenly desire that are lent to each of us as we slip softly by for
seventy years, by a whole human race.

A human being is a kind of factory. The engine and the works and all the
various machines are kept in the basement, and he sends down orders to
them from time to time, and they do the work which has been conceived up
in the headquarters. He expects the works down below to keep on doing
these things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he
occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should, with the
things that are new and different and special and that his mind alone
can do--the things which, at least in their present initial formative or
creative stage, no machines as yet have been developed to do, and that
can only be worked out by the man up in the headquarters himself
personally, by the handiwork of his own thought.

The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong,
and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all the machines in the
basement are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for
discriminating, assimilating and classifying material, for pumping up
power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at
will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away
for him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him up in his
very dreams new and strange powers to live and know with.

The men who have been the most developed of all, in this regard,
civilization has always selected and set apart from the others. It calls
these men, in their generation, men of genius.

Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius.

The reason that people set the genius apart and do not try to compete
with him is that he has more and better machinery than they have. It is
always the first thing one notices about a man of genius--the incredible
number of things that he manages to get done for him, apparently the
things that he never takes any time off, like the rest of us, to