De Musset writes, "On ne travaille pas, on écoute, c'est comme un inconnu qui vous parle à l'oreille." Lamartine says, "Ce n'est pas moi qui pense; ce sont mes idées qui pensent pour moi." Rémy de Gourmont: "My conceptions rise into the field of consciousness like a flash of lightning or like the flight of a bird." M. S. writes: "In writing these dramas I seemed to be a spectator at the play; I gazed at what was passing on the scene in an eager, wondering expectation of what was to follow. And yet I felt that all this came from the depth of my own being." Saint-Saens had only to listen, as Socrates to his Dæmon; and M. Ribot, summing up a number of similar cases, says: "It is the unconscious which produces what is vulgarly called inspiration. This condition is a positive fact, accompanied with physical and psychical characteristics peculiar to itself. Above all, it is impersonal and involuntary, it acts like an instinct, when and how it chooses; it may be wooed, but cannot be compelled. Neither reflection nor will can supply its place in original creation.... The bizarre habits of artists when composing tend to create a special physiological condition,--to augment the cerebral circulation in order to provoke or to maintain the unconscious activity." In what precise way the cerebral circulation is altered we can hardly at present hope to know. Meantime a few psychological remarks fall more easily within our reach. In the first place, we note that a very brief and shallow submergence beneath the conscious level is enough to infuse fresh vigour into supraliminal trains of thought. Ideas left to mature unnoticed for a few days, or for a single night, seem to pass but a very little way beneath the threshold. They represent, one may say, the first stage of a process which, although often inconspicuous, is not likely to be discontinuous,--the sustenance, namely, of the supraliminal life by impulse or guidance from below. In the second place, we see in some of these cases of deep and fruitful _abstraction_ a slight approach to duplication of personality. John Stuart Mill, intent on his _Principles of Logic_, as he threaded the crowds of Leadenhall Street, recalls certain morbid cases of hysterical _distraction_;--only that with Mill the process was an integrative one and not a dissolutive one--a gain and not a loss of power over the organism.