From my point of view, of course, I can but admire the acumen which enabled this great thinker to pierce to the root of the matter by the aid of so few observations. He does not seem to have perceived the connection between these "schematic phantasms," to borrow a phrase from Professor Ladd,[33] and the hallucinatory figures of men or animals seen in health or in disease. But even from his scanty data his inference seems to me irresistible;--"we have evidence of a _thought_, an intelligence, working within our own organisation, distinct from that of our own personality." I shall venture to claim him as the first originator of the theory to which the far fuller evidence now accessible had independently led myself. Cases observed as definitely as those just quoted are few in number; and I must pass on into a much trodden--even a confusedly trampled--field;--the records, namely, left by eminent men as to the element of subconscious mentation, which was involved in their best work. Most of these stories have been again and again repeated;--and they have been collected on a large scale in a celebrated work,--to me especially distasteful, as containing what seems to me the loose and extravagant parody of important truth. It is not my business here to criticise Dr. Von Hartmann's _Philosophy of the Unconscious_ in detail; but I prefer to direct my readers' attention to a much more modest volume, in which a young physician has put together the results of a direct inquiry addressed to some Frenchmen of distinction as to their methods especially of imaginative work.[34] I quote a few of the replies addressed to him, beginning with some words from M. Sully Prudhomme,--at once psychologist and poet,--who is here speaking of the subconscious clarification of a chain of abstract reasoning. "I have sometimes suddenly understood a geometrical demonstration made to me a year previously without having in any way directed thereto my attention or will. It seemed that the mere spontaneous ripening of the conceptions which the lectures had implanted in my brain had brought about within me this novel grasp of the proof." With this we may compare a statement of Arago's--"Instead of obstinately endeavouring to understand a proposition at once, I would admit its truth provisionally;--and next day I would be astonished at understanding thoroughly that which seemed all dark before." Condillac similarly speaks of finding an incomplete piece of work finished next day in his head. Somewhat similarly, though in another field, M. Retté, a poet, tells Dr. Chabaneix that he falls asleep in the middle of an unfinished stanza, and when thinking of it again in the morning finds it completed. And M. Vincent d'Indy, a musical composer, says that he often has on waking a fugitive glimpse of a musical effect which (like the memory of a dream) needs a strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from vanishing.