firmest
convictions, in which things I later discover germs of most important
workable truth, the persons who tell me that, and who are different from
me as far as fairly decent persons can differ from each other, are
certainly not, as the good Du Prel would have us believe, myself. All
these things are not figments of _my_ mind--if they are figments of a
mind, it's a mind bigger than mine. The biggest claim I can make, or
assent to anybody else making, is that my mind is telepathically receptive
of the product of that greater mind.

Here are some farther evidences of the greater mind, given by Lombroso
(_After Death, What?_, 320 f.):

It is well known that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty
scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses.
So also La Fontaine (_The Fable of Pleasures_) and Coleridge and
Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one
of his most beautiful ceramic pieces....

Holde composed while in a dream _La Phantasie_, which reflects in
its harmony its origin; and Nodier created _Lydia_, and at the
same time a whole theory on the future of dreaming. Condillac in
dream finished a lecture interrupted the evening before. Kruger,
Corda, and Maignan solved in dreams mathematical problems and
theorems. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his _Chapters on Dreams_,
confesses that portions of his most original novels were composed
in the dreaming state. Tartini had while dreaming one of his most
portentous musical inspirations. He saw a spectral form
approaching him. It is Beelzebub in person. He holds a magic
violin in his hands, and the sonata begins. It is a divine adagio,
melancholy-sweet, a lament, a dizzy succession of rapid and
intense notes. Tartini rouses himself, leaps out of bed, seizes
his violin, and reproduces all that he had heard played in his
sleep. He names it the _Sonata del Diavolo_,...

Giovanni Dupre got in a dream the conception of his very beautiful
_Pieta_. One sultry summer day Dupre was lying on a divan thinking
hard on what kind of pose he should choose for the Christ. He fell
asleep, and in dream he saw the entire group at last complete,
with Christ in the very pose he had been aspiring to conceive, but
which his mind had not succeeded in completely realizing.

It is a quite frequent experience that a person perplexed by a problem at
night f