nly when dressed in magnificent style, his pupils crowded about
him and attending to his wants in respectful silence.

On the opposite side are those requiring retirement, silence,
contemplation, even shadowy darkness, like Lamennais. In this class we
find especially scientists and thinkers--Tycho-Brahe, who for twenty-one
years scarcely left his observatory; Leibniz, who could remain for
three days almost motionless in an armchair.

But most methods are too artificial or too strong not to become quickly
noxious. Every one knows what they are--abuse of wine, alcoholic
liquors, narcotics, tobacco, coffee, etc., prolonged periods of
wakefulness, less for increasing the time for work than to cause a state
of hyperesthesia and a morbid sensibility (Goncourt).

Summing up: The organic bases of the creative imagination, if there are
any specially its own, remain to be determined. For in all that has been
said we have been concerned only with some conditions of the general
working of the mind--assimilation as well as invention. The
eccentricities of inventors studied carefully and in a detailed manner
would finally, perhaps, be most instructive material, because it would
allow us to penetrate into their inmost individuality. Thus, the
physiology of the imagination quickly becomes pathology. I shall not
dwell on this, having purposely eliminated the morbid side of our
subject. It will, however, be necessary to return thereto, touching upon
it in another part of this essay.

III

There remains a problem, so obscure and enigmatic that I scarcely
venture to approach it, in the analogy that most languages--the
spontaneous expression of a common thought--establish between
physiologic and psychic creation. Is it only a superficial likeness, a
hasty judgment, a metaphor, or does it rest on some positive basis?
Generally, the various manifestations of mental activity have as their
precursor an unconscious form from which they arise. The sensitiveness
belonging to living substance, known by the names heliotropism,
chemotropism, etc., is like a sketch of sensation and of the reactions
following it; organic memory is the basis and the obliterated form of
conscious memory. Reflexes introduce voluntary activity; appetitions and
hidden tendencies are the forerunners of effective psychology. Instinct,
on several sides, is like an unconscious and specific trial of reason.
Has the creative power of the human mind also analogous anteceden