content. I speak, of course, of intellectual production in
full swing, in the momentum of success. The travail of soul
over apparently hopeless difficulties or in the working out
of indifferent details takes place not only in full self-
consciousness, but in self-disgust; there we can take Carlyle
to witness. But in the higher stages the fixation of truth
and the appreciation of beauty are accompanied by the same
extinction of the feeling of individuality. Of testimony we
have enough and to spare. I need not fill these pages with
confessions and anecdotes of the ecstatical state in which
all great deeds of art and science are done. The question is
rather to understand and explain it on the basis of the formal
scheme to which we have found the religious and the aesthetic
attitudes to conform.

Jean Paul says somewhere that, however laborious the completion
of a great work, its conception came as a whole,--in one flash.
We remember the dreams of Schiller in front of his red curtain
and the resulting musikalische Stimmung,--formless, undirected,
out of which his poem shaped itself; the half-somnambulic
state of Goethe and his frantic haste in fixation of the vision,
in which he dared not even stop to put his paper straight, but
wrote over the corners quite ruthlessly. Henner once said to
a painter who mourned that he had done nothing on his picture
for the Salon, though he saw it before him, "What! You see
your picture! Then it is done. You can paint it in an hour."
If all these traditions be true, they are significant; and
the necessary conditions of such composition seem to be highly
analogous to those of the aesthetic emotion. We have, first
of all, a lack of outward stimulation, and therefore possible