From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



which nevertheless are not at his free disposal; in the 

 desire to reduce large abstract perceptions to concrete 

 analytical work; in the effort to express in words that 

 which he conceives of so well without words; in the 

 necessity which obliges him to submit the work of his 

 highest and conscious Self to the lower organic 

 mechanism. 



Guyau has described this state very vividly. 



* We suffer from a kind of hypertrophy of the 

 intellect. All those who are in travail of thought, 

 all who meditate on life and death, all those who 

 philosophize, end by experiencing the same pain. 

 And so there are great artists who pass their lives 

 in the endeavour to bring to realisation an ideal 

 which is more or less inaccessible to them. They 

 are attracted from all sides, by all the sciences, by 

 all the arts; they desire to enter into all, and are 

 obliged to refrain and to divide themselves. A 

 man feels the greedy brain draw to itself the energy 

 of the whole organism, and he is impelled to subdue 

 it, and to resign himself to vegetate instead of living. 

 He does not so resign himself, but prefers to give 

 himself up to the inner fire which consumes him. 

 His thought becomes enfeebled, it stresses the 

 nervous system, feminizes him; though it does not 

 touch his will which remains virile, unsatisfied, and 

 always on the stretch. From all this arises a long 

 struggle of himself against himself, a weary conflict 

 between the alternative of muscle or nerve, to be 

 a man or a woman. The thinker, the artist, is 

 neither the one nor the other. 



* Oh, if we could only once, and by one huge 

 effort, give birth to the whole world of thought and 

 feeling that we carry within, with what joy would 

 we welcome that power even though the whole 

 organism were to be broken and destroyed in the 



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