The Founder of Science himself--the permanent type of sanity, shrewdness, physical robustness, and moral balance--was guided in all the affairs of life by a monitory Voice,--by "the Dæmon of Socrates." This is a case which can never lose its interest, a case which has been vouched for by the most practical, and discussed by the loftiest intellect of Greece,--both of them intimate friends of the illustrious subject;--a case, therefore, which one who endeavours to throw new light on hallucination and automatism is bound, even at this distance of time, to endeavour to explain.[167] And this is the more needful, since a treatise was actually written, a generation ago, as "a specimen of the application of the science of psychology to the science of history," arguing from the records of the δαιμὁνιον in Xenophon and Plato that Socrates was in fact insane.[168] I believe that it is now possible to give a truer explanation; to place these old records in juxtaposition with more instructive parallels; and to show that the messages which Socrates received were only advanced examples of a process which, if supernormal, is not abnormal, and which characterises that form of intelligence which we describe as _genius_. The story of Socrates I take as a signal example of _wise automatism_; of the possibility that the messages which are conveyed to the supraliminal mind from subliminal strata of the personality,--whether as sounds, as sights, or as movements,--may sometimes come from far beneath the realm of dream and confusion,--from some self whose monitions convey to us a wisdom profounder than we know. Similarly in the case of Joan of Arc, I believe that only now, with the comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an impulse from the mind's deeper strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself,--only now, I repeat, can we understand aright that familiar story. Joan's condemnation was based on her own admissions; and the Latin _procès-verbal_ still exists, and was published from the MS. by M. Quicherat, 1841-9, for the French Historical Society.[169] Joan, like Socrates, was condemned mainly on the ground, or at least on the pretext of her monitory voices: and her Apology remarkably resembles his, in its resolute insistence on the truth of the very phenomena which were being used to destroy her. Her answers are clear and self-consistent, and seem to have been little, if at all, distorted by the recorder. Few pieces of history so remote as this can be so accurately known. Fortunately for our purpose, her inquisitors asked her many questions as to her voices and visions; and her answers enable us to give a pretty full analysis of the phenomena which concern us.