The special communicative gifts, either active or passive, which have been alluded to, are no peculiar irreducible abilities. They can be described in terms of activities already mentioned. The use of past similarities in experience and the control of these elements through the dependence of their effects upon one another, make up the speaker’s, the active communicator’s gift. Discrimination, suggestibility, free and clear resuscitation of elements of past experience _disentangled from one another_, and control of irrelevant personal details and accidents, make up the recipient’s gift. We may now consider these more closely. Certain favourable and unfavourable special circumstances in the temperaments or characters of the persons concerned may be set aside. Thus courage or audacity, enterprise, goodwill, absence of undue pride or conceit, honesty, humaneness, humility in its finest sense, humour, tolerance, good health, and the Confucian characteristics of the ‘superior man’ are favourable general conditions for communication. But we will assume them present in sufficient degree and pass on to the less evident because more fundamental conditions. In the first place all those which we have enumerated as desirable in the recipient are also necessary in the artist. He is pre-eminently accessible to external influences and discriminating with regard to them. He is distinguished further by the freedom in which all these impressions are held in suspension, and by the ease with which they form new relations between themselves. The greatest difference between the artist or poet and the ordinary person is found, as has often been pointed out, in the range, delicacy, and freedom of the connections he is able to make between different elements of his experience. “All the images of nature were still present to him,” says Dryden, with felicity, of Shakespeare, “and he drew them not laboriously but luckily.” It is this available possession of the past which is the first characteristic of the adept in communication, of the poet or the artist. Availability, not mere possession, however, is what is essential. Many people are endowed with memories of marble upon which time can do little to efface even the slightest mark, but they benefit little from their endowment. A merely repetitive retention is rather a disability than an asset in communication, since it makes the separation of the private and irrelevant from the essential so difficult. Persons to whom the past comes back as a whole are likely to be found in an asylum.