round off and complete any of his images without going back to them. Why
then should nature not do for him what she does for the beast? You will,
however, find in general--to go still deeper--that the processes of life
have nothing to do with consciousness, and artistic generation is the
highest of all processes; they differ from the logical precisely in that
they absolutely cannot be traced back to definite factors. Who has ever
closely watched evolution in any of its phases, and what has the
impregnation theory of physiology, in spite of the microscopic detailed
description of the working apparatus, done for the solution of the
fundamental mystery? Can it explain even a humpback? On the other hand,
there can be no complex which it would not be possible to follow up in
all its involutions and finally to resolve. The structure of the
universe is revealed to us, we can, if we like, play the fiddle for the
dance of the heavenly bodies; but the sprouting blade of grass is a
riddle and will always remain one. You would therefore be perfectly
right in laughing at Newton if he wanted to "play the naive child" and
declare that the falling apple had inspired him with the idea of the
system of gravitation, whereas it may very well have given him the
impetus which started him to reflect upon the subject. On the other
hand, you would wrong Dante if you should doubt that Heaven and Hell had
arisen in colossal outline before his soul at the mere sight of a wood,
half in light and half in shadow. For systems are not dreamed, but
neither are works of art made by minute calculations, nor, what amounts
to the same thing, since thinking is only a higher kind of arithmetic,
thought out. The artistic imagination is the organ which drains those
depths of the world which are inaccessible to the other faculties, and
in accordance herewith, my mode of viewing things puts, in place of the
false realism which takes the part for the whole, only the true realism,
which also comprises what does not lie on the surface. For the rest,
this false realism is not curtailed thereby, for even though one can no
more prepare oneself for writing poetry than for dreaming, yet dreams
will always reflect daily and yearly impressions, and no less do poems
reflect the sympathies and antipathies of the author. I believe all
these propositions are simple and comprehensible. Whoever refuses to
recognize them must throw the half of literature overboard, for example
_Edi