disappearance of the background. How much better have most
poets written in a garret than in a boudoir! Goethe's bare
little room in the garden house at Weimar testifies to the
severe conditions his genius found necessary. Tranquillity
of the background is the condition of self-absorption, or--
and this point seems to me worth emphasizing--a closed circle
of outer activities. I have never believed, for instance, in
the case of the old tale of Walter Scott and the button, that
it was the surprise of his loss that tied the tongue of the
future author's rival. The poor head scholar had simply made
for himself a transitionless experience with that twirling
button, and could then sink his consciousness in its object,--
at that moment the master's questions. It is with many of
us a familiar experience, that of not being able to think
unless in constant motion. Translated into our psychological
scheme, the efficiency of these movements would be explained
thus: Given the "whirling circles,"--the background of
continuous movement sensations, which finally dropped out of
consciousness, and the foreground of continuous thought,--the
first protected, so to speak, the second, since they were
mutually exclusive, and what broke the one destroyed the other.

But to return from this digression, a background fading into
nothingness, either as rest or as a closed circle of automatic
movements, is the first condition of the ecstasy of mental
production. The second is given in the character of its
object. The object of high intellectual creation is a unity,--
a perfect whole, revealed, as Jean Paul says, in a single
movement of genius. Within the enchanted circle of his
creation, the thinker is absorbed, because here too all his