THE UNCONSCIOUS ACTION OF THE BRAIN. 557 



and found there the very opinion which he had been most earnestly 

 endeavoring to recover, lying in his own handwriting. There was no 

 doubt about it whatever, and this opinion he at once saw was the very 

 thing which he had been anxious to be able to give. A case was put 

 on record of a very similar kind only a few years ago by a gentleman 

 well known in London, the Rev. John De Liefde, a Dutch clergyman. 

 This gentleman mentioned it on the authority of a fellow-student who 

 had been at the college at which he studied in early life. He had been 

 attending a class in mathematics, and the professor said to his class 

 one day : " A question of great difficulty has been referred to me by a 

 banker, a very complicated question of accounts, which they have not 

 themselves been able to bring to a satisfactory issue, and they have 

 asked my assistance. I have been trying, and I cannot resolve it. I 

 have covered whole sheets of paper with calculations, and have not 

 been able to make it out. Will you try ? " He gave it as a sort of 

 problem to his class, and said he should be extremely obliged to any 

 one who would bring him the solution by a certain day. This gentle- 

 man tried it over and over again ; he covered many slates w T ith figures, 

 but could not succeed in resolving it. He was a little put on his mettle, 

 and very much desired to attain the solution ; but he went to bed on 

 the night before the solution, if attained, was to be given in, without 

 having succeeded. In the morning, when he went to his desk, he found 

 the whole problem worked out in his own hand. He was perfectly 

 satisfied that it was his own hand ; and this was a very curious part 

 of it that the result was correctly obtained by a process very much 

 shorter than any he had tried. He had covered three or four sheets of 

 paper in his attempts, and this was all worked out upon one page, and 

 correctly worked, as the result proved. He inquired of his " hospita," as 

 she was called I believe our English equivalent is bedmaker, the wo- 

 man who attended to his rooms and she said she was certain that no 

 one had entered his room during the night. It was perfectly clear 

 that this had been worked out by himself. 



Now, there are many cases of this kind, in which the mind has ob- 

 viously worked more clearly and more successfully in this automatic 

 condition, when left entirely to itself, than when we have been cudgel- 

 ling our brains, so to speak, to get the solution. I have paid a good 

 deal of attention to this subject, in this way: I have taken every op- 

 portunity that occurred to me of asking inventors and artists creators 

 in various departments of art musicians, poets, and painters, what 

 their experience has been in regard to difficulties which they have felt, 

 and which they have after a time overcome. And the experience has 

 been almost always the same, that they have set the result which they 

 have wished to obtain strongly before their minds, just as we do when 

 we try to recollect something we have forgotten ; they think of every 

 thing that can lead to it ; but, if they do not succeed, they put it by for 

 a time, and give their minds to something else, and endeavor to ob- 



