ity itself. A man may turn out
very different according to circumstances, education, influences. But he
would nevertheless recognise "himself" under any circumstances. He will
never become anything of which he had not the possibility within him from
the very beginning, any more than the rose will become a violet if it is
nurtured with a different kind of manure.

Genius.

We cannot venture to say much about genius and the mystery of it. In it
and its creative power something of the spirit, the nature of the spirit,
seems to look up at us, as we might think of it in itself and apart from
the limits of existence in time and space. It is usually most obvious and
most accessible to us in the domain of art. But it has its place too in
the realm of science. And it is most of all genius, and therefore most
inaccessible to us ordinary mortals, in the domain of religion.

Mysticism.

Even "pronounced individuality" "has an element of mysticism" in it--of the
non-rational, which we feel the more distinctly the more decidedly we
reject all attempts to make it rational again through crude or subtle
mythologies. This is much more true of genius, artistic insight, and
inspiration. But these are much too delicate to be exposed to the
buffeting of controversy, much more so the dark and mysterious boundary
region in the life of the human spirit which we know under the name of
mysticism in the true sense, without inverted commas. It is not a subject
that is adapted for systematic treatment. Where it has been subjected to
it, everything becomes crude and repulsive, a mere caricature of pure
mysticism like the recrudescent occultism of to-day. Therefore it is
enough simply to call the attention of the sympathetic reader to it and
then to pass it by. In face of the witness borne to it by all that is
finest and deepest in history, especially in the history of religion,
naturalism is powerless.

Mind and Spirit. The Human and the Animal Soul.

What is the relation between the human and the animal mind? This has
always been a vital question in the conflict between naturalism and the
religious outlook. And as in the whole problem of the psychical so here
the interest on both sides has been mainly concentrated on the question of
"mortality" or "immortality." Man is immortal because he has a soul.
Animals "have no souls." "Animals also have souls, differing only in
degree but not in substantial nature from the soul o