314. In the first place, we note that a very brief and shallow submergence beneath the conscious level is enough to infuse fresh vigour into supraliminal trains of thought. Ideas left to mature unnoticed for a few days, or for a single night, seem to pass but a very little way beneath the threshold. They resemble pebbles which the earthworm sucks into its burrow and re-ejects upon the lawn, rather than an uprushing lava-stream from caves of hidden fire. They represent, one may say, the first stage of a process which, although often inconspicuous, is not likely to be discontinuous, - the sustenance, namely, of the supraliminal life by impulse or guidance from below.

In the second place, we see in some of these cases of deep and fruitful abstraction a slight approach to duplication of personality. John Stuart Mill, intent on his Principles of Logic, as he threaded the crowds of Leadenhall Street, recalls certain morbid cases of hysterical distraction; - only that with Mill the process was an integrative one and not a dissolutive one - a gain and not a loss of power over the organism.

And thirdly, in some of these instances we see the man of genius achieving spontaneously, and unawares, much the same result as that which is achieved for the hypnotic subject by deliberate artifice. For he is in fact co-ordinating the waking and the sleeping phases of his existence. He is carrying into sleep the knowledge and the purpose of waking hours; - and he is carrying back into waking hours again the benefit of those profound assimilations which are the privilege of sleep. Hypnotic suggestion aims at co-operations of just this kind between the waking state in which the suggestion, say, of some functional change, is planned and the sleeping state in which that change is carried out, - with benefit persisting anew into waking life. The hypnotic trance, which is a developed sleep, thus accomplishes for the ordinary man what ordinary sleep accomplishes for the man of genius.

The coming chapters on Sleep and Hypnotism will illustrate this point more fully. But I may here anticipate my discussion of dreams by quoting one instance where dreams, self-suggested by waking will, formed, as one may say, an integral element in distinguished genius.

The late Robert Louis Stevenson, being in many ways a typical man of genius, was in no way more markedly gifted with that integrating faculty - that increased power over all strata of the personality which I have ascribed to genius, than in his relation to his dreams (see " A Chapter on Dreams" in his volume Across the Plains). Seldom has the essential analogy between dreams and inspiration been exhibited in such a striking way. His dreams had always (he tells us) been of great vividness, and often of markedly recurrent type. But the point of interest is that, when he began to write stories for publication, the " little people who managed man's internal theatre " understood the change as well as he.

When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs.... For the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is simply occupied he or his little people - in consciously making stories for the market....

The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my question: "Who are the Little People?" They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his training;... they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, - they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim.

That part [of my work] which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.

Slight and imperfect as the above statistics and observations admittedly are, they seem to me to point in a more useful direction than do some of the facts collected by that modern group of anthropologists who hold that genius is in itself a kind of nervous malady, a disturbance of mental balance, akin to criminality or even to madness. I must here pause and briefly consider the evidence advanced in support of a thesis almost directly contradictory of my own.

315. Professor Lombroso especially, in his popular if somewhat superficial book on the Man of Genius, has gathered together many anecdotes of the follies and frailties of eminent men. Striking, however, though his collection is, there are many reasons for caution in drawing from it the deductions which he suggests. In the first place (and this the author himself to a great extent admits) the distinguished men with whom he deals do not and cannot form any true psychological class. They are merely a somewhat random selection from a much larger number of persons whose acts or writings have made them well known in the ancient or in the modern world. Many of them succeeded by means of qualities as, remote as possible from those elsewhere in the book assumed as characteristic of genius; rose in their professions, for instance, by mere hard work and worldly wisdom, or were brought into prominence by political accidents. Were any charge of degeneracy or "nervosity" made out against all these eminent men as a body, it would merely seem to prove the paradox that degeneracy makes for success. But in truth many of the cases alleged admit of a much simpler explanation. There are in most of us some traits of human nature which we are not very anxious to reveal.

If the great world looks at us too closely these traits tend to come out. The case is the same with those who are born great as with those who achieve greatness. Lombroso's chronique scandaleuse of poets and painters might be well matched by the chronique scandaleuse of princes and peers. The Mémoires de St. Simon, for instance, would amply suffice to prove the thesis that a trace of the blood royal - or even a place at court - in itself implied a neurotic heredity. But it is scarcely worth while to go to history for what any valet de chambre will maintain of any hero. What you have to prove is rather that the average man is any less degenerate than his betters. And this is not easy; for we must reckon in our account abnormalities of defect as well as of exaggeration; bluntness and opacities must be set against irritabilities and illusions; and hardly a good easy man among us but might be analysed into half neuropath and half Philistine, if it would serve a theory.