272 BRAINS OF RATS AND MEN 



that their best plots, and often the very words of the 

 story, have been delivered to them ready-made with- 

 out conscious effort of their own. These "brownies of 

 the brain," these willing sprites who work for us 

 without coercion and without reward, have been ac- 

 knowledged by many of our most gifted writers — 

 Scott, Maeterlinck, and Barrie with his M'Connachie, 

 "the unruly half of myself, the writing half." Steven- 

 son in his chapter on "Dreams"^ even goes so far as 

 to tell us in all frankness just which parts of Dr. 

 Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were dictated by his "brownie" 

 and what parts he laboriously wrought out himself. 



We may approach the problem of the significance 

 of the unconscious operations of the brain and their 

 influence upon consciously directed processes by way 

 of what goes on in the search for a forgotten name. 

 Direct voluntary effort fails. I have sat for fifteen 

 minutes exploring every reminiscence of a person try- 

 ing to find a loose end of a memory thread that would 

 lead back to the missing association. Then, upon 

 turning to something else, the name flashes into con- 

 sciousness unsought or the mind relaxes into aimless 

 reverie and after a time turns spontaneously to the 

 missing name by way of some trivial incident quite 

 forgotten so far as voluntary recall is concerned. 



So creative imagination works, assembling past 

 experience in new patterns never before conceived by 



^ In the volume of essays entitled, "Across the plains with other 

 memories and essays," New York, 1904. 



