[1] Suggested by Physiologie cérébrale: Le Subconscient chez les artistes, les savants, et les écrivains, by Dr. Paul Chabaneix, Paris, J.-B. Baillière. This study was already written when M. Ribot's masterly work, L'Imagination créatrice (July, 1900), appeared.
[2] See in a dream related by Maury (Le Sommeil et les Rêves) the word jardin causing the dreamer to visit Persia, then to read L'Ane mort (Jardin, Chardin, Janin); and in another dream, the syllable lo conducting the mind from the word kilomètre to loto, viâ Gilolo, lobélia, Lopez. However, the poet (by reason of rhyme or alliteration) experiences similar associations, but he must have the ability to render them logical, a thing which rarely happens in dreams pure and simple. Victor Hugo, a veritable incarnation of the Subconscious, rioted in these associations, which were at first involuntary.
[3] With regard to dreams, M. Chabaneix says (p. 17) that those who often think in visual images are subject to dreams in which the images are objectified in amplified form. A personal observation contradicts this, but in mentioning it I am only opposing a single observation to many observations. I refer to a writer who, although besieged, when awake, by internal visual images, sees images but rarely in dreams and never has any characteristic hallucinations. Recently, having reread Maury's book during the day, he experienced that night, for the first time, two or three vague hypnotic hallucinations, caused doubtless by the desire or fear of knowing this state.... This case may serve to explain the contagion of hallucination by books.—He saw kaleidoscopic flashes, then grinning heads, finally a figure clad in green, of life size, of whom the dreamer, looking out of the corner of his right eye, saw only one-half. At this moment, he was awaking. The figure evidently came from an illustrated history of Italian painting, which he had glanced at in the forenoon.
[4] Le Subconscient, p. 11.
[5] Letter to W. von Humboldt, 17 March, 1832 (Le Subconscient, p. 16). Goethe was then eighty-three; he died five days later. The whole letter is quoted by Eckermann.
[6] Le Subconscient, p. 24.
[7] Preface to Le Subconscient.
[8] Jahm, quoted in Le Subconscient, p. 93.
[9] Psychologie des Sentiments.—W. von Humboldt said: "Reason combines, modifies and directs; it cannot create, because the vital principle is not in it" (Ideas on the New French Constitution).