Antechamber of Consciousness 147
does good work without the slightest exertion. In compo¬
sition it will often produce a better effect than if it acted
with effort, because the essence of good composition is that
the ideas should be connected by the easiest possible
transitions. When a man has been thinking hard and long
upon a subject, he becomes temporarily familiar with
certain steps of thought, certain short cuts, and certain
far-fetched associations, that do not commend themselves
to the minds of other persons, nor indeed to his own at
other times; therefore, it is better that his transitory
familiarity with them should have come to an end before
he begins to write or speak. When he returns to the work
after a sufficient pause he is conscious that his ideas have
settled ; that is, they have lost their adventitious relations
to one another, and stand in those in which they are likely
to reside permanently in his own mind, and to exist in the
minds of others.
Although the brain is able to do very fair work fluently
in an automatic way, and though it will of its own accord
strike out sudden and happy ideas, it is questionable if it
is capable of working thoroughly and profoundly without
past or present effort. The character of this effort seems
to me chiefly to lie in bringing the contents of the ante¬
chamber more nearly within the ken of consciousness,
which then takes comprehensive note of all its contents,
and compels the logical faculty to test them seriatim before
selecting the fittest for a summons to the presence-chamber.
Extreme fluency and a vivid and rapid imagination are
gifts naturally and healthfully possessed by those who rise
to be great orators or literary men, for they could not have
become successful in those careers without it. The curious
fact already alluded to of five editors of newspapers being
known to me as having phantasmagoria, points to a con¬
nection between two forms of fluency, the literary and the
visual. Fluency may be also a morbid faculty, being
markedly increased by alcohol (as poets are never tired of
telling us), and by various drugs ; and it exists in delirium,
insanity, and states of high emotions. The fluency of a
vulgar scold is extraordinary.
In preparing to write or speak upon a subject of which
the details have been mastered, I gather, after some inquiry,