object. Two possibilities occur: (1) The object is worthy of interest but the interest is slight in consequence of dispersion or want of understanding; (2) The object is not worthy of interest, consequently the interest is slight. In both cases an extremely labile connection with consciousness arises which leads to a rapid forgetting. The slight bridge is soon destroyed and the acquired presentation sinks into the unconscious, where it is no longer accessible to consciousness. Should it enter consciousness by means of cryptomnesia, the feeling of strangeness, of its being an original creation, will cling to it because the path by which it entered the sub-conscious has become undiscoverable. Strangeness and original creation are, moreover, closely allied to one another if one recalls the numerous witnesses in belles-lettres to the nature of genius (“possession” by genius).[1]
Apart from certain striking cases of this kind, where it is doubtful whether it is a cryptomnesia or an original creation, there are some cases in which a passage of no essential content is reproduced, and that almost verbally, as in the following example:—
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About that time when Zarathustra lived on the blissful islands, it came to pass that a ship cast anchor at that island on which the smoking mountain standeth; and the sailors of that ship went ashore in order to shoot
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An extract of awe-inspiring import from the log of the ship “Sphinx” in the year 1686, in the Mediterranean. Just. Kerner, “Blätter aus Prevorst,” vol. IV., p. 57. The four captains and a merchant, Mr. Bell, went
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- ↑ “Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any clear conception of what the poets in vigorous ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. The slight remnant of superstition by itself would scarcely have sufficed to reject the idea of being merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely the medium of superior forces. The concept revelation in the sense that quite suddenly, with ineffable certainty and delicacy, something is seen, something is heard, something convulsing and breaking into one’s inmost self, does but describe the fact. You hear—you do not seek; you accept—asking not who is the giver. Like lightning, flashes the thought, compelling, without hesitation as to form—I have had no choice” (Nietzsche’s “Works,” vol. III., p. 482).
