(36 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
present we know next to nothing. The attempts of most psychologists to 
account for the processes of imaginative creation seem to me among the 
weakest things in scientific literature, and admirably adapted to conserve 
the ancient belief that this creation is a mystery which science cannot deal 
with and which must be referred to some supernatural influence. As to 
what goes on when we sleep and dream, physiologists are, I think, agreed 
that we are still in the stage of crude guessing. What seems clear, how- 
ever, in both cases, 1s that the new juxtaposition, the new sequence of 
images, is at bottom an automatic process with which will and conscious 
selection have nothing to do. This is what Mr. Stevenson expresses in 
his own fine manner by saying that it is his little people, the ¢“ Brownies,” 
who do the work for him, both when dreaming and when inventing. This 
dependence of all new imaginative work, whether in a waking or a sleeping 
state, on a sub-conscious mode of cerebral action would lead us to expect 
-hat the two domains of activity might interact. * 
(6) At the same time, the connection between the two spheres of 
:maginative activity is not as close as has been supposed—by Charles Lamb, 
for example. For according to this writer, we ought to be able to gauge 
a man’s poetic faculty by means of his dreams, and we have found that 
this is not so. If my courteous correspondents have been perfectly open 
(and it seems unlikely that they would knowingly understate the value of 
sheir dreams), we should never be able to infer, from the poor things 
which the dream fairy sends to some of them, the graceful and delightful 
forms which their waking imagination throws off. 
And here, again, we appear to find what such knowledge of the mental 
processes as we possess would lead us to anticipate. Whatever sleep may be, 
‘t certainly induces very special cerebral conditions, which conditions make 
any surviving mental activity profoundly dissimilar to that of the normal 
vaking state. Thus there is by common consent during sleep a very con- 
siderable suppression of all that we mean by the regulative or volitional 
factor : we do not reflect and choose ; we look on at whatever happens to 
come. In artistic creation, on the other hand, we have this regulative 
‘actor trained to be a special faculty. Even Mr. Stevenson admits that 
when he writes it is the ¢“ will to live ” which urges him. This volitional 
effort maintains the whole process of imagination as of scientific thought 
—a fact fully attested by the many well-known sayings touching the 
nature of genius. This disparity between the two spheres of imaginative 
activity is emphasized by one of my correspondents, a novelist known and 
appreciated on both sides of the Atlantic, when he writes: “¢ There is no 
narity whatever between the dream-fiction and the thoucht-fiction, the 
* Of course, it may be said that I am making a large assumption in supposing either dreams or waking 
combinations to be absolutely new. Much that seems new to us in a dream may be a revived past, for- 
yotten as such ; and if, with M. Pierre Loti, we extend this idea to the ancestral past, who is to say that 
we ever dream a new thing ? This fascinating conjecture must, however, I fear, for the present be put 
aside as rather far-fetched,