science; for scientific psychology is a part of natural history, and when in nature we come upon such a notable phenomenon as this, that some men write and write eloquently, we should at once study the antecedents and the conditions under which this occurs; we should try, by experiment if possible, to see what variations in the result follow upon variations in the situation.  At once we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those data of introspection which M. Bergson’s account reproduces.  Does that painful effort, for instance, occur always?  Is it the moral source, as he seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?  Not at all:  such an effort is required only when the writer is overworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the spontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and overflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility, and joyous undirected abundance.  We should further ask whether all the facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and what relation the “thousand other details” have to them; and we should find that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous endowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general circumstances.  And we should perceive at the same time that the momentum which to introspection was so mysterious was in fact the discharge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system (as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and crises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the past, and creation also, are closely attached.  Thus we should utterly refuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended indefinitely or was simplicity itself.  It may be a good piece of literary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it precedes complexity in consciousness.  Consciousness dwindles and flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is simplicity itself.  But it does not arise without real conditions outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what introspection might yield in others.

There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer is said to “plant himself in the very heart of the subject.”  The general tenor of M. Bergson’s philosophy warrants us in taking this quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws its materials is not the man’s present memory nor even his past experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this memory regard:  in other words, what we write about and our latent knowledge are the same thing.  When Shakespeare was composing his Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, he planted himself in the very heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of Egypt herself; what he had gathered from