normal man for subject, then if the operator could suggest some action colorless enough to let only native activity come into play,—a purity of experiment practically unattainable,—we should probably, as the trance state deepened and the man lost himself, see him lose first his individual characteristics, then his family traits, then the habits of his clan, and so down, till only the broadly human ones survived. The trance state would undo what evolution has done, and return to us a primeval savage in the body of an end-of-the-century man. But fortunately that most insipid individual, the normal man, whose mild portrait you shall see in any composite photograph, it is impossible to obtain. For the very essence of evolution consists in the survival of the slightly abnormal. The spirit of the cosmos is itself one great ideé fixe working itself out. The normality of the whole depends upon the abnormality of each part. To be a trifle onesided gives each of us our chance. Indeed, nothing is easier than to show that were everything, as the Roman expression had it, smooth and round, nothing could ever have developed, just as without irregularity
