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Inquiries into Human Faculty
that the usual method among persons who have the gift of fluency is to
think cursorily on topics connected with it, until what I have called the
antechamber is well filled with cognate ideas. Then, to allow the ideas to
link themselves in their own way, breaking the linkage continually and
recommencing afresh until some line of thought has suggested itself that
appears from a rapid and light glance to thread the chief topics together.
After this the connections are brought step by step fully into
consciousness, they are short-circuited here and extended there, as found
advisable until a firm connection is found to be established between all
parts of the subject. After this is done the mental effort is over, and the
composition may proceed fluently in an automatic way. Though this, I
believe, is a usual way, it is by no means universal, for there are very
great differences in the conditions under which different persons compose
most readily. They seem to afford as good evidence of the variety of
mental and bodily constitutions as can be met with in any other line of
inquiry.
It is very reasonable to think that part at least of the inward response to
spiritual yearnings is of similar origin to the visions, thoughts, and phrases
that arise automatically when the mind has prepared itself to receive them.
The devout man attunes his, mind to holy ideas, he excludes alien
thoughts, and he waits and watches in stillness. Gradually the darkness is
lifted, the silence of the mind is broken, and the spiritual responses are
heard in the way so often described by devout men of all religions. This
seems to me precisely analogous to the automatic presentation of ordinary
ideas to orators and literary men, and to the visions of which I spoke in
the chapter on that subject. Dividuality replaces individuality, and one
portion of the mind communicates with another portion as with a different
person.
Some persons and races are naturally more imaginative than others,
and show their visionary tendency in every one of the respects named.
They are fanciful, oratorical, poetical, and credulous. The “enthusiastic”
faculties all seem to hang together; I shall recur to this in the chapter on
enthusiasm.
I have already pointed, out the existence of a morbid
