"Inspiration," says he, "is rarely immobilized under the traits which
characterized its first appearance.

"Before expressing itself in a work of art or of utility, it was the
embryo of that which it must afterward personify.

"The ancients when relating that a certain divinity sprang, fully armed,
from the head of a god, accredited this belief to instantaneous creation.

"If musicians, painters, poets, and inventors want to be sincere, they
will agree that, between the thought which they qualify as inspiration,
and its tangible realization, a ladder of transformations has been
constructed, and that it is only by progressive steps that they have
attained what seemed to them the nearest to perfection."

Impulse, then, is only distantly related to inspiration and intuition.

Let us add that these gifts are very often only the fruit of an
unconscious mental effort, and that, most of the time, the thoughts,
which in good faith one accepts as inspiration or intuition, are only
nameless reminiscences, whose apparition coincides with an emotional
state of being, which existed at the time of the first perception.

There, again, the presence of reasoning is visible, and also the presence
of common sense, which tries to convert into a work of lasting results
those impressions which would probably remain unproductive without the
aid of these two faculties.

Impulses are, most of the time, the vassals of material sensations.