330. And note further that as scientific introspection develops we are likely to receive fuller accounts of these concurrent mental processes, these partial externalisations of the creatures of the romancer's brain. One such account, both definite and elaborate, has been published by M. Binet in L'Annte Psychologique for 1894, and I summarise it here.1

M. de Curel, a French dramatist of distinction, while apparently quite unaware of the phenomena described either by Dickens or by Stevenson, does nevertheless carry the waking experiences of the one to a point where they closely approach the dream-experiences of the other. M. de Curel's personages, after a period of painful incubation, seem to assume an independent type; they carry on their conversations independently of his will, nor need he even keep his attention fixed on them. The process of invention thus continues without conscious fatigue. We are here reminded of certain performances under hypnotic suggestion, where mental or bodily feats, as play-acting, are accomplished without effort or exhaustion.

1 L'Annie Psychologique; i. 1894, p. 124, F. de Curel, par A. Binet.

M. de Curel is an ingenious and refined, if not a widely popular dramatist. His work is of a sufficiently high class to give real interest to his careful and serious analysis of his methods, or rather his experiences while working.

He begins in an ordinary way, or with even more than the usual degree of difficulty and distress in getting into his subject. Then gradually he begins to feel the creation of a number of quasi-personalities within him; the characters of his play, who speak to him; - exactly as Dickens used to describe Mrs. Gamp as speaking to him in church. These personages are not clearly visible, but they seem to move round him in a scene say a house and garden - which he also dimly perceives, somewhat as we perceive the scene of a dream. He now no longer has the feeling of composition, of creation, but merely of literary revision; the personages speak and act for themselves, and even if he is interrupted while writing, or when he is asleep at night, the play continues to compose itself in his head. Sometimes while out shooting, etc, and not thinking of the play, he hears sentences rising within him which belong to a part of this play which he has not yet reached. He believes that subliminally the piece has been worked out to that further point already.

M. de Curel calls these minor duplications Of personality a bourgeonnement or budding of his primary personality; - into which they gradually, though not without some painful struggle, re-enter after the play is finished.

It will be seen that this account, - contributed as serious evidence, as M. Binet's long article shows, - is thoroughly concordant with several other cases already known to us. It comes midway between Stevenson's dreams and the hysteric's idies fixes.

M. de Curel's insistent ideas are self-suggested. Just that power of crystallising round a nucleus which, when hysterically started, makes the ide'e obsedante, - makes, when supraliminally started and well directed, the living personage of the play.

331. I have thus far endeavoured to show that Genius represents not only the crystallisation of ideas already existing in floating form in the supraliminal intelligence, but also an independent, although concurrent, stream of mentation, spreading often to wider range, although still concerned with matters in themselves cognisable by the normal intelligence.

Let us proceed to push the inquiry a step further. It has been claimed in this work for subliminal uprushes generally that they often contain knowledge which no ordinary method of research could acquire. Is this supernormal knowledge - we ought now to ask - ever represented in the uprushes to which we give the name of Genius?

What is the relation, in short, of the man of Genius to the sensitive?

If the man of Genius be, as I have urged, on the whole the completest type of humanity, and if the sensitive's special gift be in itself one of the most advanced forms of human faculty, ought not the inspirations of genius to bring with them flashes of supernormal knowledge as intimate as those which the sensitive - perhaps in other respects a commonplace person - from time to time is privileged to receive?

Some remarkable instances of this kind undoubtedly do exist. The most conspicuous and most important of all cannot, from motives of reverence, be here discussed. Nor will I dwell upon other founders of religions, or on certain traditional saints or sages. But among historical characters of the first mark the names of Socrates and of Joan of Arc are enough to cite. I shall try in a later chapter to show that the monitions of the Daemon of Socrates, - the subliminal self of a man of transcendent genius, - have in all probability been described to us with literal truth: and did in fact convey to that great philosopher precisely the kind of telæsthetic or precognitive information which forms the sensitive's privilege to-day. We have thus in Socrates the ideal unification of human powers.

It must, however, be admitted that such complete unification is not the general rule for men of genius; that their inspirations generally stop short of telepathy or of telæsthesia. I think we may explain this limitation somewhat as follows. The man of genius is what he is by virtue of possessing a readier communication than most men possess between his supraliminal and his subliminal self. From his subliminal self, he can only draw what it already possesses; and we must not assume as a matter of course that the subliminal region of any one of us possesses that particular sensitivity that specific transparency - which can receive and register definite facts from the unseen. That may be a gift which stands as much alone - in independence of other gifts or faculties - in the subliminal region, as, say, a perfect musical ear in the supraliminal. The man of genius may draw much from those hidden wells of being without seeing reflected therein any actual physical scene in the universe beyond his ordinary ken.

And yet neither must we hastily assume that because the man of genius gets no definite impression of a world beyond our senses he does not therefore get any true impression, which is all his own.

I believe, on the contrary, that true, though vague, impressions of a world beyond the range of sense are actually received - I do not say by all men of genius, but by men of genius of certain types.

332. Certain very important types of genius, indeed, - those, for instance, concerned with numbers, forms, and sounds, - do not seem habitually to tend towards the apprehension of deeper aspects of the cosmic mystery. Or perhaps I ought rather to say that the mathematician, on the one hand, is unlikely to give expression to any such supernormal intimations, while the painter and the musician, on the other hand, command acts of expression so subtly and obscurely suggestive, that it is hard for the mere onlooker to infer what the artist's own spiritual attitude may in fact have been. Deeply interesting, therefore, as such discussions may be - discussions as to what was the inward experience of a Raphael or a Beethoven - the content of that experience must at present be too uncertain for any psychological analysis, such as we wish to make here, of its veritable truth, - of its trustworthiness as actual insight into a spiritual world.

It would seem, then, that for any valid appreciation of what I may call the vague supernormal content of moments of inspiration, we shall have to examine a very limited group of men of genius. Chiefly, perhaps, of the philosopher and the poet must we needs feel that if any genius reaches out into an interpenetrating spiritual world, theirs must do so; that they ought to have some message corroborating, even though but in vague general fashion, the results to which sensitives have been led by a plainer, if a narrower, way.

Even among this small class, however, our choice of instructive examples is still further limited. Few philosophers have been men of genius in the sense in which we are using the word in the present chapter; and few poets have spoken with enough of weight and sincerity to make their testimony to subjective moods worth quoting in serious argument. Yet it must be mainly in the works of poets of pronounced subjective type - rather than in epos or drama - that passages to us instructive are likely to be found.