hich is, as we know, a hindrance to invention. They are alike only with
respect to the great mass of separable materials, but where the
principle of unity is wanting there can be no creation.

2. Inspiration has often been likened to the state of excitement
preceding intoxication. It is a well-known fact that many inventors have
sought it in wine, alcoholic liquors, toxic substances like hashish,
opium, ether, etc. It is unnecessary to mention names. The abundance of
ideas, the rapidity of their flow, the eccentric spurts and caprices,
novel ideas, strengthening of the vital and emotional tone, that brief
state of bounding fancy of which novelists have given such good
descriptions, make evident to the least observing that under the
influence of intoxication the imagination works to a much greater extent
than ordinarily. Yet how pale that is compared to the action of the
intellectual poisons above mentioned, especially hashish. The
"artificial paradise" of DeQuincy, Moreau de Tours, Theophile Gautier,
Baudelaire and others have made known to all an enormous expansion of
the imagination launched into a giddy course without limits of time and
space.

Strictly, these are facts representing only a stimulated, artificial,
temporary inspiration. They do not take us into its true nature; at the
most they may teach us concerning some of their physiological
conditions. It is not even an inspiration in the strict sense, but
rather a beginning, an embryo, an outline, analogous to the creations
produced in dreams which are found very incoherent when we awake. One of
the essential conditions of creation, a principal element--the directing
principle that organizes and unifies--is lacking. Under the influence
of alcoholic drinks and of poisonous intoxicants attention and will
always fall into exhaustion.

3. With greater reason it has been sought to explain inspiration by
comparison with certain forms of somnambulism, and it has been said that
"it is only the lowest degree of the latter state, somnambulism in a
waking state. In inspiration it is as though a strange personality were
speaking to the author; in somnambulism it is the stranger himself who
talks or holds the pen, who speaks or writes--in a word, does the
work."[20] It would thus be the modified form of a state that is the
culmination of subconscious activity and a state of double personality.
As this last explanatory expression is wonderfully abused, and is called
upon t