It is exceptional states that determine the artist--such states as are all intimately related and entwined with morbid symptoms, so that it would seem almost impossible to be an artist without being ill. The physiological conditions which in the artist become moulded into a "personality," and which, to a certain degree, may attach themselves to any man:-- (1) Intoxication, the feeling of enhanced power; the inner compulsion to make things a mirror of one's own fulness and perfection. (2) The extreme sharpness of certain senses, so that they are capable of understanding a totally different language of signs--and to create such a language (this is a condition which manifests itself in some nervous diseases); extreme susceptibility out of which great powers of communion are developed; the desire to speak on the part of everything that is capable of making-signs; a need of being rid of one's self by means of gestures and attitudes; the ability of speaking about one's self in a hundred different languages--in fact, a state of _explosion._ One must first imagine this condition as one in which there is a pressing and compulsory desire of ridding one's self of the ecstasy of a state of tension, by all kinds of muscular work and movement; also as an involuntary _co-ordination_ of these movements with inner processes (images, thoughts, desires)--as a kind of automatism of the whole muscular system under the compulsion of strong stimuli acting from within; the inability to resist reaction; the apparatus of resistance is also suspended. Every inner movement (feeling, thought, emotion) is accompanied by _vascular changes,_ and consequently by changes in colour, temperature, and secretion. The suggestive power of music, its "_suggestion mentale._" (3) _The compulsion to imitate:_ extreme irritability, by means of which a certain example becomes contagious--a condition is guessed and represented merely by means of a few signs.... A complete picture is visualised by one's inner consciousness, and its effect soon shows itself in the movement of the limbs,--in a certain suspension of the _will_ (Schopenhauer!!!!). A sort of blindness and deafness towards the external world,--the realm of admitted stimuli is sharply defined. This differentiates the artist from the layman (from the spectator of art): the latter reaches the height of his excitement in the mere act of apprehending: the former in giving--and in such a way that the antagonism between these two gifts is not only natural but even desirable. Each of these states has an opposite standpoint--to demand of the artist that he should have the point of view of the spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking him to impoverish his creative power.... In this respect the same difference holds good as that which exists between the sexes: one should not ask the artist who gives to become a woman--to _"receive."_