do
himself. The subconscious, automatic, mechanical equipment of his
senses, the extraordinary intelligence and refinement of his body, the
way his senses keep his spirit informed automatically and convey outer
knowledge to him, the power he has in return of informing this outer
knowledge with his spirit, with his will, with his choices, once for all,
so that he is always able afterward to rely on his senses to work out
things beautifully for him 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 t