Stages of Control

So far, in this book, I have discussed two problems which are preliminary to any formulation of an art of thought: first, what conception of the human organism and human consciousness best indicates the general facts with which such an art must deal; and, secondly, what is the “natural” thought-process which such an art must attempt to modify. In this chapter, I shall ask at what stages in that thought-process the thinker should bring the conscious and voluntary effort of his art to bear. Here we at once meet the difficulty that unless we can recognize a psychological event, and distinguish it from other events, we cannot bring conscious effort to bear directly upon it; and that our mental life is a stream of intermingled psychological events, all of which affect each other, any of which, at any given moment, may be beginning or continuing or ending, and which, therefore, are extremely hard to distinguish from each other.

We can, to some degree, avoid this difficulty if we take a single achievement of thought—the making of a new generalization or invention, or the poetical expression of a new idea—and ask how it was brought about. We can then roughly dissect out a continuous process, with a beginning and a middle and an end of its own. Helmholtz, for instance, the great German physicist, speaking in 1891 at a banquet on his seventieth birthday, described the way in which his most important new thoughts had come to him. He said that after previous investigation of the problem ‘in all directions . . . happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration. So far as I am concerned, they have never come to me when my mind was fatigued, or when I was at my working table... . They came particularly readily during the slow ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day.” Helmholtz here gives us three stages in the formation of a new thought. The first in time I shall call Preparation, the stage during which the problem was “investigated . . . in all directions”; the second is the stage during which he was not consciously thinking about the problem, which I shall call Incubation; the third, consisting of the appearance of the “happy idea” together with the psychological events which immediately preceded and accompanied that appearance, I shall call Illumination.

And I shall add a fourth stage, of Verification, which Helmholtz does not here mention. Henri Poincaré, for instance, in the book Science and Method, which I have already quoted (p. 75), describes in vivid detail the successive stages of two of his great mathematical discoveries. Both of them came to him after a period of Incubation (due in one case to his military service as a reservist, and in the other case to a journey), during which no conscious mathematical thinking was done, but, as Poincaré believed, much unconscious mental exploration took place. In both cases Incubation was preceded by a Preparation stage of hard, conscious, systematic, and fruitless analysis of the problem. In both cases the final idea came to him “with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty” (p. 54). Each was followed by a period of Verification, in which both the validity of the idea was tested, and the idea itself was reduced to exact form. “It never happens,” says Poincaré, in his description of the Verification stage, “that unconscious work supplies ready-made the result of a lengthy calculation in which we have only to apply fixed rules. . . . All that we can hope from these inspirations, which are the fruit of unconscious work, is to obtain points of departure for such calculations. As for the calculations themselves, they must be made in the second period of conscious work which follows the inspiration, and in which the results of the inspiration are verified and the consequences deduced. The rules of these calculations are strict and complicated; they demand discipline, attention, will, and consequently, consciousness” (pp. 62, 63). In the daily stream of thought these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a business man going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other.

If we accept this analysis, we are in a position to ask to what degree, and by what means, we can bring conscious effort, and the habits which arise from conscious effort, to bear upon each of the four stages. I shall not, in this chapter, deal at any length with the stage of Preparation. It includes the whole process of intellectual education. Men have known for thousands of years that conscious effort and its resulting habits can be used to improve the thought-processes of young persons, and have formulated for that purpose an elaborate art of education. The “educated” man can, in consequence, “put his mind on’ to a chosen subject, and “turn his mind off” in a way which is impossible to an uneducated man. The educated man has also acquired, by the effort of observation and memorizing, a body of remembered facts and words which gives him a wider range in the final moment of association, as well as a number of those habitual tracks of association which constitute “thought-systems” like ‘French policy” or “scholastic philosophy” or “biological evolution,” and which present themselves as units in the process of thought.

The educated man has, again, learnt, and can, in the Preparation stage, voluntarily or habitually follow out, rules as to the order in which he shall direct his attention to the successive elements in a problem. Hobbes referred to this fact when in the Leviathan he described “regulated thought,” and contrasted it with that “wild ranging of the mind” which occurs when the thought process is undirected. Regulated thought is, he says, a “seeking.” “Sometimes,” for instance, “a man seeks what he has lost. . . . Sometimes a man knows a place determinate, within the compass whereof he is to seek; and then his thoughts run over all the parts thereof, in the same manner as one would sweep a room to find a jewel; or as a spaniel ranges the field, till he find a scent; or as a man should run over the alphabet, to start a rhyme.” A spaniel with the brain of an educated human being could not, by a direct effort of will, scent a partridge in a distant part of the field. But he could so “quarter” the field by a preliminary voluntary arrangement that the less-voluntary process of smelling would be given every chance of successfully taking place.

Included in these rules for the preliminary “regulation” of our thought, are the whole traditional art of logic, the mathematical forms which are the logic of the modern experimental sciences, and the methods of systematic and continuous examination of present or recorded phenomena which are the basis of astronomy, sociology and the other “observational” sciences. Closely connected with this voluntary use of logical methods is the voluntary choice of a “problem-attitude” (Aufgabe). Our mind is not likely to give us a clear answer to any particular problem unless we set it a clear question, and we are more likely to notice the significance of any new piece of evidence, or new association of ideas, if we have formed a definite conception of a case to be proved or disproved. A very successful thinker in natural science told me that he owed much of his success to his practice of following up, when he felt his mind confused, the implications of two propositions, both of which he had hitherto accepted as true, until he had discovered that one of them must be untrue. Huxley on that point once quoted Bacon, “Truth comes out of error much more rapidly than it comes out of confusion,” and went on, “If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong you must some of these days have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all right again.” This is, of course, a production, by conscious effort, of that “dialogue form” of alternate suggestion and criticism which Varendonck describes as occurring in the process of uncontrolled thought.? It is, indeed, sometimes possible to observe such an automatic “dialogue” at a point where a single effort of will would turn it into a process of preparatory logical statement. On July 18, 1917, I passed on an omnibus the fashionable church of St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Miss Ashley, the richest heiress of the season, was being gorgeously married, and the omnibus conductor said to a friend, “Shocking waste of money! But, there, it does create a lot of labour, I admit that.” Perhaps I neglected my duty as a citizen in that I did not say to him, “Now make one effort to realize that inconsistency, and you will have prepared yourself to become an economist.”

And though I have assumed, for the sake of clearness, that the thinker is preparing himself for the solution of a single problem, he will often (particularly if he is working on the very complex material of the social sciences) have several kindred problems in his mind, on all of which the voluntary work of preparation has been, or is being done, and for any of which, at the Illumination stage, a solution may present itself.

The fourth stage, of Verification, closely resembles the first stage, of Preparation. It is normally, as Poincaré points out, fully conscious, and men have worked out much the same series of mathematical and logical rules for controlling Verification by conscious effort as those which are used in the control of Preparation.

There remain the second and third stages, Incubation and Illumination. The Incubation stage covers two different things, of which the first is the negative fact that during Incubation we do not voluntarily or consciously think on a particular problem, and the second is the positive fact that a series of unconscious and involuntary (or foreconscious and forevoluntary) mental events may take place during that period. It is the first fact about Incubation which I shall now discuss, leaving the second fact—of subconscious thought during Incubation, and the relation of such thought to Illumination—to be more fully discussed in connection with the Illumination stage. Voluntary abstention from conscious thought on any particular problem may, itself, take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent either in conscious mental work on other problems, or in a relaxation from all conscious mental work. The first kind of Incubation economizes time, and is therefore often the better. We can often get more result in the same time by beginning several problems in succession, and voluntarily leaving them unfinished while we turn to others, than by finishing our work on each problem at one sitting. A well-known academic psychologist, for instance, who was also a preacher, told me that he found by experience that his Sunday sermon was much better if he posed the problem on Monday, than if he did so later in the week, although he might give the same number of hours of conscious work to it in each case. It seems to be a tradition among practising barristers to put off any consideration of each brief to the latest possible moment before they have to deal with it, and to forget the whole matter as rapidly as possible after dealing with it. This fact may help to explain a certain want of depth which has often been noticed in the typical lawyer-statesman, and which may be due to his conscious thought not being sufficiently extended and enriched by subconscious thought.

But, in the case of the more difficult forms of creative thought, the making, for instance, of a scientific discovery, or the writing of a poem or play or the formulation of an important political decision, it is desirable not only that there should be an interval free from conscious thought on the particular problem concerned, but also that that interval should be so spent that nothing should interfere with the free working of the unconscious or partially conscious processes of the mind. In those cases, the stage of Incubation should include a large amount of actual mental relaxation. It would, indeed, be interesting to examine, from that point of view, the biographies of a couple of hundred original thinkers and writers. A. R. Wallace, for instance, hit upon the theory of evolution by natural selection in his berth during an attack of malarial fever at sea; and Darwin was compelled by ill-health to spend the greater part of his waking hours in physical and mental relaxation. Sometimes a thinker has been able to get a sufficiency of relaxation owing to a disposition to idleness, against which he has vainly struggled. More often, perhaps, what he has thought to be idleness, is really that urgent craving for intense and uninterrupted day-dreaming which Anthony Trollope describes in his account of his boyhood.

One effect of such a comparative biographical study might be the formulation of a few rules as to the relation between original intellectual work and the virtue of industry. There are thousands of idle “geniuses” who require to learn that, without a degree of industry in Preparation and Verification, of which many of them have no conception, no great intellectual work can be done, and that the habit of procrastination may be even more disastrous to a professional thinker than it is to a man of business. And yet a thinker of good health and naturally fertile mind may have to be told that mere industry is for him, as it was for Trollope in his later years, the worst temptation of the devil. Cardinal Manning was a man of furious industry, and the suspension of his industry as an Anglican archdeacon during his illness in 1847 was, for good or evil, an important event in the history of English religion. Some of those who, like myself, live in the diocese of London, believe that we have reason to regret an insufficiency of intellectual leadership from our present bishop. The bishop himself indicated one of the causes of our discontent in a letter addressed, in September, 1922, to his clergy. ‘I come back to an autumn of what, from a human point of view, is unrelieved toil. October 1st to Christmas Day is filled every day, except for the one day off every week, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.” Then comes a long list of administrative and pastoral engagements, including “three days interviewing 110 Harrow boys to be confirmed,” “a critical Bill to see through the House of Lords,” and “some sixty sermons and addresses already arranged in the diocese, besides the daily letters and interviews.” “All this,” he says, “might justify the comment of a kindly man of the world, ‘Why, Bishop, you live the life of a dog! But this is precisely, though on a larger scale, the life of every one of you.” It is clear that the bishop considers that he and his clergy ought to be admired for so spending their time; and that he conceives the life of a turnspit dog to be the most likely to enable them to be successful in the exercise of their office. One sometimes, however, wonders what would be the result if our bishop were kept for ten weeks in bed and in silence, by an illness neither painful nor dangerous, nor inconsistent with full mental efficiency.

Mental relaxation during the Incubation stage may of course include, and sometimes requires, a certain amount of physical exercise. I have already quoted Helmholtz’s reference to “the ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day.” A. Carrel, the great New York physiologist, is said to receive all his really important thoughts while quietly walking during the summer vacation in his native Brittany. Jastrow says that “thinkers have at all times resorted to the restful inspiration of a walk in the woods or a stroll over hill and dale.” When I once discussed this fact with an athletic Cambridge friend, he expressed his gratitude for any evidence which would prove that it was the duty of all intellectual workers to spend their vacations in Alpine climbing. Alpine climbing has undoubtedly much to give both to health and to imagination, but it would be an interesting quantitative problem whether Goethe, while riding a mule over the Gemmi Pass, and Wordsworth, while walking over the Simplon, were in a more or in a less fruitful condition of Incubation than are a modern Alpine Club party ascending, with hands and feet and rope and ice-axe, the Finster-Aarhorn. In this, however, as in many other respects, it may be that the human organism gains more from the alternation of various forms of activity than from a consistent devotion to one form. In England, the administrative methods of the older universities during term-time may, I sometimes fear, by destroying the possibility of Incubation, go far to balance any intellectual advantages over the newer universities which they may derive from their much longer vacations. At Oxford and Cambridge, men on whose powers of invention and stimulus the intellectual future of the country may largely depend, are made personally responsible for innumerable worrying details of filling up forms and sending in applications. Their subconscious minds are set on the duty of striking like a clock at the instant when Mr. Jones’s fee must be paid to the Registrar. In the newer English universities, the same duties are rapidly and efficiently performed by a corps of young ladies, with card-catalogues, typewriters, and diaries.

But perhaps the most dangerous substitute for bodily and mental relaxation during the stage of Incubation is neither violent exercise nor routine administration, but the habit of industrious passive reading. Schopenhauer wrote that “to put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is the sin against the Holy Ghost.” During the century from 1760 to 1860, many of the best brains in England were prevented from acting with full efficiency by the way in which the Greek and Latin classics were then read. It is true that Shelley’s imagination was stung into activity by Plato and Æschylus, and that Keats won a new vision of life from Chapman’s translation of Homer; but even the ablest of those who then accepted the educational ideals of Harrow and Eton and Oxford and Cambridge did not approach the classical writers with Shelley’s or Keats’s hunger in their souls. They plodded through Horace and Sophocles and Virgil and Demosthenes with a mild conscious esthetic feeling, and with a stronger and less conscious feeling of social, intellectual and moral superiority; any one who was in the habit of reading the classics with his feet on the fender must certainly, they felt, be not only a gentleman and a scholar but also a good man.

Carlyle once told Anthony Trollope that a man, when travelling, “should not read, but sit still and label his thoughts.’ On the other hand, Macaulay, before he went out to India in 1834 to be Legislative Member of the Supreme Council, wrote to his sister: “The provision which I design for the voyage is Richardson, Voltaire’s works, Gibbon, Sismondi’s History of the French, Davila, Orlando in Italian, Don Quixote in Spanish, Homer in Greek, Horace in Latin. I must also have some books of jurisprudence, and some to initiate me in Persian and Hindustanee”; and, at the end of the four months’ voyage, he wrote: “Except at meals, I hardly exchanged a word with any human being. . . . During the whole voyage I read with keen and increasing enjoyment. I devoured Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English; folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos.” If he had followed Carlyle’s advice, he would have had a better chance of thinking out a juristic and educational policy for India which would not have been a mere copy of an English model. One understands why Gladstone’s magnificent enthusiasm and driving force was never guided by sufficient elasticity or originality of mind, when one reads, in Mrs. Gladstone’s Life, how she and her sister married the two most splendid Etonians of their time —Gladstone and his friend Lord Lyttelton—and spent a honeymoon of four in Scotland. “Any little waiting time as at the railway stations,” says her daughter, Mrs. Drew, “was now spent in reading—both husbands carrying the inevitable little classics in their pockets.” During the days when new knowledge, new forms of thought, new methods in industry and war and politics, and the rise of new nations were transforming Western civilization, “Lord Lyttelton was to be seen at cricket-matches in the playing field at Eton, lying on his front, reading between the overs, but never missing a ball.” 2

So far in this chapter I have inquired how far we can voluntarily improve our methods of thought at those stages—Preparation, Incubation (in its negative sense of abstention from voluntary thought on a particular problem), and Verification—over which our conscious will has comparatively full control. I shall now discuss the much more difficult question of the degree to which our will can influence the less controllable stage which I have called Illumination. Helmholtz and Poincaré, in the passages which I quoted above, both speak of the appearance of a new idea as instantaneous and unexpected. If we so define the Illumination stage as to restrict it to this instantaneous “flash,” it is obvious that we cannot influence it by a direct effort of will; because we can only bring our will to bear upon psychological events which last for an appreciable time. On the other hand, the final “flash,” or “click,” as I pointed out in Chapter III, is the culmination of a successful train of association, which may have lasted for an appreciable time, and which has probably been preceded by a series of tentative and unsuccessful trains. The series of unsuccessful trains of association may last for periods varying from a few seconds to several hours. H. Poincaré, who describes the tentative and unsuccessful trains as being, in his case, almost entirely unconscious, believed that they occupied a considerable proportion of the whole Incubation stage. ‘We might,” he wrote, “say that the conscious work, [i.e., what I have called the Preparation stage], proved more fruitful because it was interrupted [by the Incubation stage], and that the rest restored freshness to the mind. But it is more probable that the rest was occupied with unconscious work, and that the result of this work was afterwards revealed.” }

Different thinkers, and the same thinkers at different times, must, of course, vary greatly as to the time occupied by their unsuccessful trains of association; and the same variation must exist in the duration of the final and successful train of association. Sometimes the successful train seems to consist of a single leap of association, or of successive leaps which are so rapid as to be almost instantaneous. Hobbes’s “Roman penny” train of association occurred between two remarks in an ordinary conversation, and Hobbes, as I have said, ends his description of it with the words, “and all this in a moment of time, for thought is quick.” (Leviathan, Chap. III). Hobbes himself was probably an exceptionally rapid thinker, and Aubrey may have been quoting Hobbes’s own phrase when he says that Hobbes used to take out his note-book “as soon as a thought darted.”

But if our will is to control a psychological process, it is necessary that that process should not only last for an appreciable time, but should also be, during that time, sufficiently conscious for the thinker to be at least aware that something is happening to him. On this point, the evidence seems to show that both the unsuccessful trains of association, which might have led to the ‘flash’ of success, and the final and successful train are normally either unconscious, or take place (with “risings” and “fallings” of consciousness as success seems to approach or retire), in that periphery or “fringe” of consciousness which surrounds our “focal” consciousness as the sun’s “corona” surrounds the disk of full luminosity. This “fringe-consciousness” may last up to the “flash” instant, may accompany it, and in some cases may continue beyond it. But, just as it is very difficult to see the sun’s corona unless the disk is hidden by a total eclipse, so it is very difficult to observe our “fringe-consciousness” at the instant of full Illumination, or to remember the preceding “fringe” after full Illumination has taken place. As William James says, “When the conclusion is there, we have always forgotten most of the steps preceding its attainment” (Principles, Volume I, p. 260).

It is obvious that both Helmholtz and Poincaré had either not noticed, or had forgotten any “fringe-conscious” psychological events which may have preceded and have been connected with the “sudden” and “unexpected” appearance of their new ideas. But other thinkers have observed and afterwards remembered their “fringe-conscious” experiences both before and even at the moment of full Illumination. William James himself, in that beautiful and touching, though sometimes confused introspective account of his own thinking which forms Chapter IX of his Principles, says: “Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it” (Principles, Vol. I, p. 255).

I find it convenient to use the term “Intimation” for that moment in the Illumination stage when our fringe-consciousness of an association-train is in the state of rising consciousness which indicates that the fully conscious flash of success is coming. A high English civil servant described his experience of Intimation to me by saying that when he is working at a difficult problem, “I often know that the solution is coming, though I don’t know what the solution will be,” and a very able university student gave me a description of the same fact in his case almost in the same words. Many thinkers, indeed, would recognize the experience which Varendonck describes when he says that on one occasion: ‘When I became aware that my mind was simmering over something, I had a dim feeling which is very difficult to describe; it was like a vague impression of mental activity. But when the association had risen to the surface, it expanded into an impression of joy.” His phrase ‘expanded into an impression of joy,” clearly describes the rising of consciousness as the “flash” approaches.

Most introspective observers speak, as I have done, of Intimation as a “feeling,” and the ambiguity of that word creates its usual crop of difficulties. It is often hard to discover in descriptions of Intimation whether the observer is describing a bare awareness of mental activity with no emotional colouring, or an awareness of mental activity coloured by an emotion which may either have originally helped to stimulate the train of thought, or may have been stimulated by the train of thought during its course. Mr. F. M. McMurry seems to refer to little more than awareness when he says, in his useful text-book, How to Study (p. 278), “Many of the best thoughts, probably most of them, do not come, like a flash, fully into being but find their beginnings in dim feelings, faint intuitions that need to be encouraged and coaxed before they can be surely felt and defined.” Dewey, on the other hand, is obviously describing awareness coloured by emotion when he says that a problem may present itself “as a more or less vague feeling of the unexpected, of something queer, strange, funny, or disconcerting.” Wundt was more ambiguous when he said (in perhaps the earliest description of Intimation) that feeling is the pioneer of knowledge, and that a novel thought may come to consciousness first of all in the form of a feeling.2 My own students have described the Intimation preceding a new thought as being sometimes coloured by a slight feeling of discomfort arising from a sense of separation from one’s accustomed self. A student, for instance, told me that his first recognition that he was reaching a new political outlook came from a feeling, when, in answer to a question, he was stating his habitual political opinions, that he “was listening to himself.” I can just remember that a good many years ago, in a period preceding an important change of my own political position, I had a vague, almost physical, recurrent feeling as if my clothes did not quite fit me. If this feeling of Intimation lasts for an appreciable time, and is either sufficiently conscious, or can by an effort of attention be made sufficiently conscious, it is obvious that our will can be brought directly to bear on it. We can at least attempt to inhibit, or prolong, or divert, the brain-activity which Intimation shows to be going on. And, if Intimation accompanies a rising train of association which the brain accepts, so to speak, as plausible, but would not, without the effort of attention, automatically push to the “flash” of conscious success, we can attempt to hold on to such a train on the chance that it may succeed.

It is a more difficult and more important question whether such an exercise of will is likely to improve our thinking. Many people would argue that any attempt to control the thought-process at this point will always do more harm than good. A schoolboy sitting down to do an algebra sum, a civil servant composing a minute, Shakespeare re-writing a speech in an old play, will, they would say, gain no more by interfering with the ideas whose coming is vaguely indicated to them, before they come, than would a child by digging up a sprouting bean, or a hungry man in front of a good meal, by bringing his will to bear on the intimations of activity in his stomach or his salivary glands. A born runner, they would say, achieves a much more successful co-ordination of those physiological and psychological factors in his organism which are concerned in running, by concentrating his will on his purpose of catching the man in front of him, than by troubling about the factors themselves. And a born orator will use better gestures if, as he speaks, he is conscious of his audience than if he is conscious of his hands. This objection might be fatal to the whole conception of an art of thought if it did not neglect two facts, first that we are not all “born” runners or orators or thinkers, and that a good deal of the necessary work of the world has to be done by men who in such respects have to achieve skill instead of receiving it at birth; and, secondly, that the process of learning an art should, even in the case of those who have the finest natural endowment for it, be more conscious than its practice. Mr. Harry Vardon, when he is acquiring a new grip, is wise to make himself more conscious of the relation between his will and his wrists than when he is addressing himself to his approach-shot at the decisive hole of a championship. The violinist with the most magnificent natural temperament has to think of his fingers when he is acquiring a new way of bowing; though on the concert-platform that acquirement may sink beneath the level of full consciousness. And, since the use of our upper brain for the discovery of new truth depends on more recent and less perfect evolutionary factors than does the use of our wrists for hitting small objects with a stick, or for causing catgut to vibrate in emotional patterns, conscious art may prove to be even more important, as compared to spontaneous gift, in thought than in golf or violin-playing. Here, again, individual thinkers, and the same thinker at different times and when engaged on different tasks, must differ greatly. But my general conclusion is that there are few or none among those whose work in life is thought who will not gain by directing their attention from time to time to the feeling of Intimation, and by bringing their will to bear upon the cerebral processes which it indicates.

On this point the most valuable evidence that I know of is that given by the poets. Poets have, more constantly than other intellectual workers, to “make use” (as Varendonck says) “of foreconscious processes for conscious ends.” The production of a poem is a psychological experiment, tried and tested under severer conditions than those of a laboratory, and the poet is generally able to describe his “fringe-consciousness” during the experiment with a more accurate and sensitive use of language than is at the command of most laboratory psychologists. Several of the younger living English poets have given admirable descriptions of Intimation, often using metaphors derived from our experience in daily life of a feeling that there is something which we have mislaid, and which we cannot find because we have forgotten what it is. Mr. John Drinkwater, for instance, says:

“Haunting the lucidities of life

That are my daily beauty, moves a theme

Beating along my undiscovered mind.” And Mr. James Stephens says:

“I would think until I found

Something I can never find,

Something lying on the ground

In the bottom of my mind.” Mr. J. Middleton Murry, in his Problem of Style (1922, p. 93), points out the psychological truth of Shakespeare’s well-known description of the poet’s work:

. .. “as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings

A local habitation and a name.” “Forms of things unknown” and “airy nothings” are vivid descriptions of the first appearance of Intimation; and “local habitation and a name” indicates the increasing verbal clearness of thought as Intimation approaches the final moment of Illumination; and may also indicate that Shakespeare was a much more conscious artist than many of his admirers believe.

Some English poets and students of poetry have given descriptions not only of the feeling of Intimation, but also of the effort of will by which a poet may attempt to influence the mental events indicated by Intimation, and the dangers to the thought itself involved in such an effort. In these descriptions they often use metaphors drawn from a boy’s attempts to catch in his hand an elusive fish, or a bird which will dart off if the effort is made a fraction of a second too soon or too late. Mr. Robert Graves allows me to quote in full a charming little poem, called ‘A Pinch of Salt,” in which he expands and plays with this metaphor:

“When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, Oh, then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much. Dreams are like a bird that mocks, Flirting the feathers of his tail. When you seize at the salt-box Over the hedge you’ll see him sail. Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff; They watch you from the apple bough and laugh. Poet, never chase the dream. Laugh yourself and turn away. Mask your hunger, let it seem Small matter if he come or stay; But when he nestles in your hand at last, Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.”[1]

In this respect, the most obvious danger against which the thinker has to guard is that the association-train which the feeling of Intimation shows to be going on may either drift away of itself, as most of our dreams and day-dreams do, into mere irrelevance and forgetfulness, or may be interrupted by the intrusion of other trains of association. All thinkers know the effect of the ringing of the telephone bell, or the entrance of some one with a practical question which must be answered, during a promising Intimation. Aristophanes, when in the Clouds he makes Socrates complain that his disciple by asking him a question had caused a valuable thought to “miscarry,” was probably quoting some saying of Socrates himself, whose mother was a midwife, and who was fond of that metaphor. If, therefore, the feeling of Intimation presents itself while one is reading, it is best to look up from one’s book and so avoid the danger that the next printed sentence may “start a new hare.” Varendonck describes how, in one of his day-dreams, “The idea that manifested itself ran thus: ‘There is something going on in my foreconsciousness which must be in direct relation to my subject. I ought to stop reading for a little while, and let it come to the surface.” And, besides such negative precautions against the interruption of an association-train, it is often necessary to make a conscious positive effort of attention to secure success. Vincent d'Indy, speaking of musical creation, said 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.” But even the effort of attention to a train of association may have the effect of interrupting or hindering it. Schiller is reported by Vischer to have said that when he was fully conscious of creation his imagination did not function “with the same freedom as it had done when nobody was looking over my shoulder.”

To a modern thinker, however, the main danger of spoiling a train of association occurs in the process of attempting—perhaps before the train is complete—to put its conclusion into the words. Mr. Henry Hazlitt, in his Thinking as a Science (1916), p. 82, says, “Thoughts of certain kinds are so elusive that to attempt to articulate them is to scare them away, as a fish is scared by the slightest ripple. When these thoughts are in embryo, even the infinitesimal attention required for talking cannot be spared”; and a writer on Montaigne in The Times Literary Supplement for January 31, 1924, says, “We all indulge in the strange pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light.” In the case of a poet, this danger is increased by the fact that for the poet the finding of expressive words is an integral part of the more or less automatic thought-process indicated by Intimation. The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” A modern professed thinker must, however, sooner or later in the process of thought, make the conscious effort of expression, with all its risks. A distant ancestor of ours, some Aurignacian Shelley, living in the warm spell between two ice ages, may have been content to lie on the hillside, and allow the songs of the birds and the loveliness of the clouds to mingle with his wonder as to the nature of the universe in a delightful uninterrupted stream of rising and falling reverie, enjoyed and forgotten as it passed. But the modern thinker has generally accepted, willingly or unwillingly, the task of making permanent his thought for the use of others, as the only justification of his position in a society few of whose members have time or opportunity for anything but a life of manual labour.

The interference of our will should, finally, vary— with the variations of the subject-matter of our thought —not only in respect of the point in time at which it should take place, but also in respect to the element in a complex thought-process with which we should interfere. A novelist who had just finished a long novel, and who must constantly have employed his conscious will while writing it, to make sure of a good idea or phrase, or to improve a sentence, or rearrange an incident, told me that he had spoilt his book by interfering with the automatic development of his main story and of its chief characters, in order to follow out a preconceived plot. Dramatists and poets constantly speak of the need of allowing their characters to “speak for themselves”; and a creative artist often reaches maturity only when he has learnt so to use his conscious craftsmanship in the expression of his thought as not to silence the promptings of that imperfectly co-ordinated whole which is called his personality. It is indeed at the stage of Illumination with its fringe of Intimation that the thinker should most constantly realize that the rules of his art will be of little effect unless they are applied with artistic delicacy of apprehension.

Notes

1 See Rignano, Psychology of Reasoning (1923), pp. 267-8. See also Plato, Symposium (210): “He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and has learned to see beautiful things in due order and succession, when he comes to the end, will suddenly perceive a beauty wonderful in its nature”; and Remy de Goncourt: “My conceptions rise into the field of consciousness like a flash of lightning or the flight of a bird” (quoted by H. A. Bruce, Psychology and Parenthood, 1919, p. 89).

1See Sir H. Taylor in my Our Social Heritage, Chap. II.

1 “Science and Art and Education,” Huxley, Collected Essays, Vol. III, p. 174. 2 See above, p. 68.

1 Church Times, Sept. 22, 1922.

1J. Jastrow, The Subconscious (1906), p. 94.

1 Schopenhauer, ‘Selbstdenken,” § 260, Parerga und Paralipomena (1851), Vol. II, p. 412.

* Trollope’s Autobiography (edition of 1921); p. 94. *G. O. Trevelyan, Life of Macaulay (edition of 1881), pp. 256 and 262.

1 Catherine Gladstone, by Mary Drew, p. 32.

+H. Poincaré, Science and Method (trans., pp. 54 and 55). On the other hand, one of the ablest of modern mathematical thinkers told me that he believed that his Incubation period was, as a rule, spent in a state of actual mental repose for all or part of his brain, which made the later explosion of intense and successful thought possible. His belief may have been partly due to the fact that his brain started fewer unsuccessful and more successful association-trains than the brains of other men.

1See my The Great Society, (1914), p. 201. 2 I take the word “fringe” from William James, who says in his Principles, Vol. I, p. 258: “Let us use the words psychic overtone, suffusion, or fringe, to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly per-

ceived.” The characteristics of our “fringe-consciousness” may be a result of the “hormic” character of the human organism which I discussed in Chapter I. The “over” and “under” tones of a piano indicate the simultaneous vibration of other strings under the influence of the string which was originally struck. The “fringe-consciousness” of a human being may sometimes indicate that the activity of the main centre of his consciousness is being accompanied by the imperfectly co-ordinated activity of other factors in his organism.

1 The Psychology of Day Dreams, p. 282.

1 How we Think (1910), p. 74. *Wundt (quoted by E. B. Titchener, Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes, p. 103). Wundt’s words are “In diesem Sinn ist das Gefühl der Pionier der Erkenntniss” (Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie, Vol. II, 1893, p. 521).

1 The Psychology of Day Dreams, p. 152.

1J. Drinkwater, Loyalties, p. 50 (“The Wood”). ? Georgian Poetry (1913-15), “The Goat Path,” p. 189.

1 Georgian Poetry (1916-17), Pp. 107.

* Day Dreams, p. 190. (The italics are Varendonck’s.)

1 See Paul Chabanei, Le Subconscient chez les Artistes, etc. (quoted by H. A. Bruce, Psychology and Parenthood, p. 90). 2 Quoted by H. A. Bruce, Psychology and Parenthood (1915), p. 88.