Education, the cultivation of the
critical faculty, would be fatal to some writers, actors, painters, and
musicians; it would but spoil the Working Sub-Consciousness. Others--more
sanely balanced--would gain in art more than they lost in nature.
Now, what are the elements with which our Sub-Consciousness works?--what
does this ocean contain? It would be easier to discover what it does not
contain. Wrecks and argosies and dead faces, mermaidens and subterranean
palaces, and the traces of vanished generations; these are but a
millionth part of its treasures: the Sub-Consciousness were perhaps
better likened to the property-room and scene-dock of the Great Cosmic
Theatre, holding infinite wardrobes and scenes ready-painted, parks and
seas and libraries, and ruined cottages and whitewashed attics, to say
naught of an army of supers ready to put on all the faces we have ever
seen. In our Sub-Consciousness, moreover, are stored up all the voices
and sounds and scents we have ever perceived, and to all these
reminiscences of our own sensations are perhaps added the shadows of our
ancestors' sensations--episodes that perchance we re-experience only in
dreamland--so that part of the vivid vision of genius, of the poet's eye
bodying forth the shapes of things unknown, may be inherited Memory.
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