Moreover, the talent of improvisation, which suggested these analogies, will sometimes act much more persistently than in the case of the orator or the musician. There is reason to believe (both from internal style and from actual statements) that it plays a large part in imaginative literature. Various passages from George Sand's life-history, corroborated by the statements of other persons familiar with her methods of working, reveal in her an unusual vigour and fertility of literary outflow going on in an almost dream-like condition; a condition midway between the actual inventive dreams of R. L. Stevenson and the conscious labour of an ordinary man's composition. What George Sand felt in the act of writing was a continuous and effortless flow of ideas, sometimes with and sometimes without an apparent _externalisation_ of the characters who spoke in her romances. And turning to another author, as sane and almost as potent as George Sand herself, we find a phenomenon which would have suggested to us actual insanity if observed in a mind less robust and efficient. If the allusions to the apparent independence of Dickens's characters which are scattered through his letters be read with our related facts in view, it will no longer be thought that they are intended as a mystification. Mrs. Gamp, his greatest creation, spoke to him, he tells us (generally in church) as with an inward monitory voice. And note further that as scientific introspection develops we are likely to receive fuller accounts of these concurrent mental processes, these partial externalisations of the creatures of the romancer's brain. One such account, both definite and elaborate, has been published by M. Binet in _L'Année Psychologique_ for 1894.[36] This account,--contributed as serious evidence, as M. Binet's long article shows,--is thoroughly concordant with several other cases already known to us. It comes midway between Stevenson's dreams and the hysteric's _idées fixes_. I have thus far endeavoured to show that Genius represents not only the crystallisation of ideas already existing in floating form in the supraliminal intelligence, but also an independent, although concurrent, stream of mentation, spreading often to wider range, although still concerned with matters in themselves cognisable by the normal intelligence. Let us proceed to push the inquiry a step further. It has been claimed in this work for subliminal uprushes generally that they often contain knowledge which no ordinary method of research could acquire. Is this supernormal knowledge--we ought now to ask--ever represented in the uprushes to which we give the name of Genius? What is the relation, in short, of the man of Genius to the sensitive?