It is like a great engine which he has been allowed the 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 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