In the realm of genius,--of uprushes of thought and feeling fused beneath the conscious threshold into artistic shape,--we get no longer masterpieces but half-insanities,--not the Sistine Madonna, but Wiertz's Vision of the Guillotined Head; not _Kubla Khan_, but the disordered opium dream. Throughout all the work of William Blake (I should say) we see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow. In the realm of hypnotism, again, we sink from the reasonable self-suggestion to the "platform experiments,"--the smelling of ammonia, the eating of tallow candles;--all the tricks which show a _profound_ control, but not a _wise_ control, over the arcana of organic life. I speak, of course, of the subject's _own_ control over his organism; for in the last resort it is _he_ and not his hypnotiser who really exercises that directive power. And I compare these tricks of middle-level subliminal centres to the powerful yet irrational control which the middle-level centres ruling the epileptic's arms and legs exercise over his muscles in the violence of the epileptic attack. And so again with the _automatisms_ which are, one may say, the subliminal self's peculiar province. Automatic script, for instance, may represent highest-level subliminal centres, even when no extraneous spirit, but the automatist's own mind alone, is concerned. It will then give us true telepathic messages, or perhaps messages of high moral import, surpassing the automatist's conscious powers. But much oftener the automatic script is regulated by what I have called middle-level subliminal centres only;--and then, though we may have scraps of supernormal intelligence, we have confusion and incoherence as well. We have the falsity which the disgusted automatist is sometimes fain to ascribe to a devil; though it is in reality not a devil, but a dream. And hence again, just as the epileptic sinks lower and lower in the fit,--from the incoordinated movements of the limbs down to the mere stertorous breathing of coma,--so do these incoherent automatisms sink down at last, through the utterances and drawings of the degenerate and the paranoiac,--through mere fragmentary dreams, or vague impersonal bewilderment,--into the minimum psychical concomitant, whatever that be, which must coexist with brain-circulation. Such is the apparent parallelism; but of course no knowledge of a hierarchy of the familiar forms of nervous action can really explain to us the mysterious fluctuations of subliminal power.