galton.org 147
Antechamber of Consciousness
147
does good work without the slightest exertion. In composition 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 antechamber
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 connection 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,
