ed--an intellectual want
relieved which had haunted me for at least fifteen years before." Mr.
Appolo, a distinguished scientific inventor, stated in the Proceedings
of the Royal Society that it was his habit to get the bearings and facts
of a case during the day and go to bed, and wake the next morning with
the problem solved. If the problem was a difficult one he always passed
a restless night. Examples might be multiplied. Sir Benjamin Brodie,
speaking of his own mental action, states that when he was unable to
proceed further in some investigation he was accustomed to let the
matter drop. Then "after an interval of time, without any addition to my
stock of knowledge, I have found the obscurity and confusion in which
the subject was originally enveloped to have cleared away. The facts
have seemed all to settle themselves in their right places, and their
mutual relations to have become apparent, although I have not been
sensible of having made any distinct effort for that purpose."

Not only is there such a thing, then, as unconscious thought, but it is
probable that the best thinking is rarely, if ever, done under the
influence of consciousness. The poet creates his work when the
inspiration is on him and he is forgetful of himself and the world.
Consciousness may aid in pruning and polishing, but in creating it often
interferes with, rather than helps, the cerebral action. I think any one
of my readers who has done any literary or scientific writing will agree
that his or her best work is performed when self and surrounding objects
have disappeared from thought and consciousness scarcely exists more
than it does in a dream. Sometimes the individual is conscious of the
flow of an undercurrent of mental action, although this does not rise to
the level of distinct recognition. Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks of a
business-man of Boston who, whilst considering a very important
question, was conscious of an action going on in his brain so unusual
and painful as to excite his apprehension that he was threatened with
palsy; but after some hours his perplexity was all at once cleared up by
the natural solution of the problem which was troubling him, worked out,
as he believed, in the obscure and restless interval. "Jumping to a
conclusion," a process to which the female sex is said to be especially
prone, is often due to unconscious cerebration, the reasoning being so
rapid that the consciousness cannot follow the successive st