for that month, and, despite many hours’ examination, it defied all my
efforts, and I had almost given it up as a hopeless case. It had been
the subject of my waking thoughts for many nights, and had occupied
a large portion of my leisure hours. Matters remained thus unsettled
until December 11. On this night I had not, to my knowledge, once
thought of the subject, but I had not been long in bed, and _asleep_,
when my brain was as busy with the books as if I had been at my desk.
The cash-book, banker’s pass-book, etc., appeared before me, and
without any apparent trouble I almost immediately discovered the cause
of the mistake, which had arisen out of a complicated cross-entry.
“I perfectly recollect having taken a slip of paper in my dream and
making such a memorandum as would enable me to correct the error at
some leisure time; having done this, the whole of the circumstances
had passed from my mind. When I awoke in the morning I had not the
slightest recollection of my dream, nor did it once occur to me
during the day, although I had the very books before me on which I
had apparently been engaged in my sleep. When I returned home in the
afternoon, as I did early for the purpose of dressing, and proceeded
to shave, I took up a piece of paper from my dressing-table to wipe
my razor, and you may imagine my surprise at finding thereon the very
memorandum I fancied had been made during the night.
“The effect on me was such that I returned to our office and turned to
the cash-book, when I found that I had really, _when asleep_, detected
the error which I could not detect in my waking hours, and had actually
jotted it down at the time.”
The modern psychological explanation of all this would be that in his
many hours of searching through the books he had, though without being
in the least aware of it, gradually brought together the data necessary
to the solution of his problem; and that in this case this happened to
be first definitely formulated in his mind while he slept, thus giving
rise to the dream that caused him such astonishment. Or he might from
the outset have subconsciously been aware of the cause of his error,
but without being able to profit from the knowledge until a favouring
condition in sleep permitted its emergence above the threshold of his
consciousness.
Now, suppose that instead of being a business man he had been a
novelist, artist, or musician, and had been preoccupied with some
special or general problem peculiar to his art. If in that event he
had had a dream in which was presented to his sleeping consciousness a
plot or subject or theme, which, being afterward given permanent form
on paper or canvas, proved to have the qualities of a “work of genius,”
would it not be logical to infer that precisely the same mental
processes were operant in the second instance as in the first, the only
difference being in the character of the product? This is what, from
their own statement, has happened to not a few men of high achievement.
Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” was a dream composition. So was the
sonata by which the composer Tartini is best known, and to which he
appropriately gave the name of “The Devil’s Sonata,” in recognition of
the fact that he owed it to a dream of selling his soul to the devil,
and being rewarded by hearing the latter play on a violin the music out
of which grew what Tartini himself regarded as his best piece of work.
Benjamin Franklin was another man of genius who gained something from
his dreams, as was Condillac. But the most striking illustration is
afforded by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose marvellous “Doctor Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde” was only one of several novels and stories that he conceived
in dreams. Stevenson, it is worth adding, in his delightful “Chapter on
Dreams,” frankly recognises and acknowledges the debt he owed to his
subconsciousness, which, with characteristic felicity and whimsicality,
he personified as “Brownies” and “little people.”
“This dreamer, like many other persons,” is the way he puts it, “has
encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the bank
begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate,
he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that is his
readiest bread-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin to
bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and
all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted
theatre. No fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the
frozen scalp are things bygone; applause, growing applause, growing
interest, growing exultation in his own cleverness—for he takes all the
credit—and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry ‘I have
it; that’ll do!’ upon his lips—with such and similar emotions he sits
at these nocturnal dramas; with such outbreaks, like Cassius in the
play, he scatters the performance in the midst.
“Often enough the waking is a disappointment. He has been too deep
asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness has gained his little
people; they have gone stumbling and maundering through their
parts; and the play, to the wakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of
absurdities. And yet, how often have these sleepless Brownies done him
honest service, and given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in
the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for himself.
“The more I think of it,” Stevenson goes on, “the more I am moved to
press upon the world my question, ‘Who are the little people?’ They
are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt; they share in his
training; they have plainly learned, like him, to build the scheme of a
considerable story, and to arrange emotion in progressive order. Only,
I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt—they can
tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him the while
in ignorance of where they aim.
“That part of my work which is done while I am sleeping is the
Brownies’ part, beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up
and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show that
the Brownies have a hand in it even then.”
Than these exquisite paragraphs, it would be hard to find—and I have
quoted them for that reason—anything more graphically descriptive of
the mechanism which I am convinced is always operant in the production
of works of genius. Asleep or awake, it is from the resources of
the subconscious region of their minds that men of genius gain the
“inspirations” that delight, benefit, or amaze posterity.
Mostly, of course, the subconscious upsurgings come to them when
they are awake, sometimes in momentary gleams of insight, sometimes
continuing through comparatively long periods, when they write,
compose, or develop valuable discoveries without conscious effort. In
fact, there even is one type of genius—although by no means the most
useful—in which, within a certain limited field, the subconscious is
perpetually in evidence, and perpetually responsive to the demands
of the upper consciousness. I refer to the so-called “lightning
calculators,” those prodigies whose mathematical feats, performed
without the aid of pencil and paper, have been a source of unending
surprise to the world, and have at times been so remarkable as to be
well-nigh incredible.
Thus, Zerah Colburn, an American lightning calculator, when only six
years old, unable to read, and ignorant of the name and value of any
numeral set down on paper, is known to have stated correctly the number
of seconds in a period as long as two thousand years, and to have
returned the correct answer (9,139,200) to the question, “Supposing I
have a corn-field, in which are 7 acres, having 17 rows to each acre,
64 hills to each row, 8 ears on a hill, and 150 kernels on the ear, how
many kernels in the corn-field?”
A little later, having been taken by his father to England, it is
recorded that, in the presence of a number of witnesses:
“He undertook and succeeded in raising the number 8 to the sixteenth
power, 281,474,976,780,656. He was then tried as to other numbers,
consisting of one figure, all of which he raised as high as the tenth
power, with so much facility that the person appointed to take down the
results was obliged to enjoin him not to be too rapid. With respect
to numbers of two figures, he would raise some of them to the sixth,
seventh, and eighth power, but not always with equal facility; for the
larger the products became the more difficult he found it to proceed.
He was asked the square root of 106,929, and before the number could be
written down he immediately answered 327. He was then requested to name
the cube root of 268,336,125, and with equal facility and promptness he
replied 645.”
Henri Mondeux, Vito Mangiamele, Jacques Inaudi, Zacharias Dase,
Jedediah Buxton, Truman Safford, André Ampère, Karl Gauss, George
Bidder and his son of the same name, were other world famous
calculators. From some of them direct evidence as to the subconscious
character of their calculations has been forthcoming. One of the most
remarkable in this group, the elder Bidder, in a paper contributed to
a scientific journal, declared, “Whenever I feel called upon to make
use of the stores of my mind, they seem to rise with the rapidity
of lightning.” In a later issue of the same journal it is asserted
regarding him:
“He had an almost miraculous power of seeing, as it were, intuitively,
what factors would divide any large number, not a prime. Thus, if he
were given the number 17,861, he would instantly remark that it was
327 × 53. He could not, he said, explain how he did this; it seemed a
natural instinct with him.”
Another expert calculator, an English civil engineer named Blyth, says
in a letter:
“I am conscious of an intuitive recognition of the relations of
figures. For instance, in reading statements of figures in newspapers,
which are often egregiously wrong, it seems to come to me intuitively
that something is wrong, and when that occurs I am usually right.”
In the case of at least one lightning calculator there is proof
positive of the concurrent operation of two trains of thought, the one
conscious, the other subconscious. This is Jedediah Buxton, who “would
talk freely while doing his questions, that being no molestation or
hindrance to him.”
Moreover, prodigious memory power is nearly always characteristic of
the lightning calculator. This of itself is evidence of unusual access
to the subconscious, since it is in the subconscious that memories
are stored. Most impressive of all, however, is the rapid, almost
instantaneous emergence of the answers to the problems propounded by
those testing the calculator’s powers. It is as though the mere putting
of the problem, and the mere desire to solve it, were enough to set
in motion a “thinking machine” that automatically brought about the
desired result. It is significant that in most cases, as in Bidder’s,
the calculators themselves are unable to give any satisfactory account
of the methods they employ, and sometimes frankly admit that they “do
not know how the answers come.”
Now, this sudden irruption of ideas, this dazzling solution of
problems, is characteristic not only of calculating prodigies, but
also of all men of genius. They may not have—in truth, they have
comparatively seldom—such a spectacular resort to the subconscious;
but they assuredly have it in an astonishing measure, and to better
purpose. Precisely as we find the answers to mathematical puzzles
rising spontaneously in the minds of ready reckoners, so, time and
again, do we find great thoughts, amounting it may be to epoch-making
conceptions, forcing themselves upon men of genius, frequently at
moments when they are consciously thinking of some other matter, or are
not consciously exercising their minds at all. And again we have only
to go to the published testimony of men of genius themselves to obtain
a strong body of evidence bearing out this statement.
Many a poet of the first order, puzzling over the state of his mind
during his creative moments, has declared that his works were composed
as in a dream, the main ideas, sometimes even the phrases used, shaping
themselves of their own accord in his consciousness. “Often it happened
to me,” says Goethe, “that I would repeat a song to myself and then be
unable to recollect it; that sometimes I would run to my desk, and,
without taking time to lay my paper straight, would, without stirring
from my place, write out the poem from beginning to end, slopingly. For
the same reason I always preferred to write with a pencil, on account
of its marking so readily. On several occasions, indeed, the scratching
and spluttering of my pen awoke me from my somnambulistic poetising and
distracted me so that it suffocated a little product in its birth.”
(Hirsch’s “Genius and Degeneration,” p. 33.)
Elsewhere Goethe specifically states that his “Werther” was written
“somewhat unconsciously, like a sleepwalker.” And, according to
Vischer, the poet Schiller, Goethe’s almost equally great contemporary,
complained that whenever he was consciously at work creating and
constructing, his imagination was hampered and did not perform “with
the same freedom as it had done when nobody was looking over its
shoulder.”
“It is not I who think,” confesses Lamartine, “but my ideas which think
for me.” Dante had much the same feeling, as recorded in his famous
lines, “I am so constituted that when love inspires me, I attend; and
according as it speaks in me, I express myself.” Voltaire, who wrote
to Diderot that “in the works of genius instinct is everything,” on
seeing one of his own tragedies performed, exclaimed, “Was it really I
who wrote that?”
“My conceptions,” says Rémy de Gourmont, “rise into the field of
consciousness like a flash of lightning or the flight of a bird.”
“One does not work, one listens; it is as though another were speaking
into one’s ear,” writes De Musset. Exactly similar is the statement of
the composer, Hoffman:
“When I compose, I sit down to the piano, shut my eyes, and play what I
hear.”
From other great musicians comes equally emphatic testimony to the
part played by the subconscious in the creation of their works. Mozart
frankly avowed that his compositions came “involuntarily, like dreams.”
Among eminent composers of to-day Saint-Saens has only to listen,
like Socrates, to his Dæmon; and Vincent d’Indy, writing to Dr. Paul
Chabaneix (to whose “Le Subconsciente chez les Artistes, les Savants,
et les Ecrivains” I am indebted for most of these French instances)
relates 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.”
The situation is the same, in whatever field genius finds expression.
Napoleon, by many considered the greatest military genius in the
history of mankind, believed from his own experience that the fate of
battles usually turned not so much on conscious planning and manœuvring
as on tactics dictated by “latent thoughts” arising suddenly in the
mind. “The decisive moment approached; the spark burst forth, and one
was victorious.” In like manner there frequently has come to scientists
and inventors, with the unexpectedness of lightning out of a clear sky,
the discovery of natural laws or mechanical principles of which they
previously had no conscious knowledge whatever.
Everybody has heard the story of Newton, the falling apple, and the
discovery of the law of gravitation; and of Galileo’s invention of the
pendulum, born of the thoughts springing up in his mind while idly
watching the oscillations of the great bronze lamp swinging from the
roof of Pisa Cathedral. Not so well known, but particularly impressive
because of its revelation of the manner in which the desultory
development of a train of thought in the mind of a man of genius may
lead to a subconscious upsurging of the highest value, is Alfred Russel
Wallace’s own account of his epoch-making discovery of the scientific
doctrine of the origin of species—a discovery achieved by him, in the
far-off Malay Archipelago, with no knowledge that the same doctrine had
even then been worked out, though not as yet made public, by Charles
Darwin.
“At the time in question,” Wallace relates, in his “My Life,” “I was
suffering from a sharp attack of intermittent fever, and every day
during the cold and succeeding hot fits had to lie down for several
hours, during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any
subjects then particularly interesting me. One day something brought
to my mind Malthus’s ‘Principle of Population,’ which I had read about
twelve years before. I thought of his clear exposition of the ‘positive
checks to increase’—disease, accidents, war, and famine—which keep down
the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that
of more civilised peoples. It then occurred to me that these causes,
or their equivalents, are continually acting in the case of animals
also; and as animals usually breed much more rapidly than does mankind,
the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order
to keep down the numbers of each species, since they evidently do not
increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long
ago have been densely crowded with those that breed most quickly.
“Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which
this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die
and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best
fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from
enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine,
the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it
suddenly flashed on me that this self-acting process would necessarily
_improve the race_, because in every generation the inferior would
inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, _the
fittest would survive_.
“At once I seemed to see the whole effect of this, that when changes
of land and sea, or of climate, or of food-supply, or of enemies
occurred—and we know that such changes have always been taking
place—and considering the amount of individual variation that my
experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that
all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the
changing conditions would be brought about; and as great changes in the
environment are always slow, there would be ample time for the change
to be effected by the survival of the best fitted in every generation.
In this way every part of an animal’s organisation could be modified
exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the
unmodified would die out, and thus the _definite_ characters and the
clear _isolation_ of each new species would be explained. The more I
thought about it, the more I became convinced that I had at last found
the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin
of species.”
This passage, with its significant phrases, “Then it suddenly flashed
on me,” and “At once I seemed to see the whole effect of this,”
makes very clear the subconscious element in the achieving of the
momentous discovery. It also emphasises another fact indispensable
to a complete understanding not alone of Wallace’s achievement but
of the achievements of all men of genius: the fact that creative
upsurgings from the subconscious would be valueless—would, indeed, be
impossible of occurrence—in any but a mind rendered by conscious study,
observation, and reflection, capable of appreciating their significance.
The subconscious, let me recall, is a kind of workshop where the “ego”
rummages among the memory-images of its past experiences to develop
trains of thought and reach definite conclusions with a minimum of
effort. Obviously the results of its rummaging will depend on the
material it finds to work with; in proportion as this is rich and
abundant, the subconscious upsurgings will be “worth while.” Obviously,
too, both the richness of the material and the character and value of
the subconscious upsurgings will ultimately depend on the character of
the individual’s interests, and the extent to which these impel him to
conscious study, observation, and reflection.
Wherefore it is that all men of genius have been great workers. Even
when, as has been observed in certain cases, they indulge in more
or less protracted periods of idleness, they later make amends by
an unusual industry; and, for that matter, their idleness often is
more seeming than real, their minds being busied all the while with
some baffling problem. Ardent, whole-souled absorption in the thing
he has set himself to do—that, unquestionably, is a distinguishing
characteristic of the man of genius. It is almost as if by instinct he
labours hard to provide his subconsciousness with the data it must have
in order to afford him, by way of recompense, those flashes of insight,
those moments of “inspiration,” that mean acknowledged leadership among
his fellow-men.
I have already quoted Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of what his
subconscious did for him. Let me now give his account of how he toiled
to provide his subconscious with its working material. Never was there
a man who strove more diligently and deliberately to attain success as
an author; and this even while he was a student in college, where most
of those who knew him thought that his chief occupation was “killing
time.” As he tells us:
“All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the
pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end,
which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket,
one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting
what I saw with appropriate words. When I sat by the roadside, I would
either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand,
to write down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting
stanzas.
“Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior
use; it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that
I wished to be an author—though I wished that, too—as that I had vowed
that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me;
and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager
with myself.... I worked in other ways, also; often accompanied my
walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often
exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.
“This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes
tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a
school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was
not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it
only taught me—so far as I have learned them at all—the lower and less
intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and
the right word; things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come
by nature. And regarded as training it had one grave defect; for it set
me no standard of achievement.
“So that there was, perhaps, more profit, as there was certainly more
effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a
passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or
an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some
conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit
down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful,
and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful, and always
unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts I got some practice in
rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and the coordination of parts.”