“The invisible world, doth greatness make abode.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How are the works of genius produced and manifested? Their creators often insist that credit does not belong to them and that they are merely instruments of powers they cannot command.

The popular picture of a genius is one who is eccentric even abnormal.  A genius is indeed an enigma – a strange mystery that produces masterpieces of art, literature, music, science, technology and other creative spheres that have touched and even changed history.  What inspires these great creative minds?

Some of the greatest of these minds have been studied and had their inspirational accounts recorded. There appears to be a fantastical common thread amongst them all – men and women of genius frequently ascribe their remarkable achievements to sources outside of themselves – something other worldly. In case after case they claim their discoveries and creative manifestations were given to them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed the songs he wrote made him and not he them.

Well known genius of poetry, William Wordsworth,  in his poetry  often spoke of the “sublime invasion” of material.

Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was found one day by his friend Edward John Trelawny among the pine forests near Pisa, Italy.  Sheets of manuscript lie strewn near him with words scored and corrected over and over as if the poet could not cope with the images that came bubbling up in his mind. Shelley told Trelawny , “poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say: ‘I will write poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it.”

The psychical researcher F. W. Myers relayed: “The influence that rises from no discoverable source; for a moment it may startle or bewilder the conscious mind; then it is recognized as a source of knowledge, arriving through inner vision; while the action of the senses is suspected in a kind of momentary trance.”

George Eliot, the novelist, believed that when she was producing her most inspired work, some other personality seemed to take possession of her, dictating as if to a secretary. George Sand, the French writer believed the same thing about her own work. She also left an account of the creative struggle her lover, the composer Frederic Chopin went through to put down on paper the “themes” that had “come” to him.

Other famous authors have spoken about demons or brownies as the originators of their work. Rudyard Kipling said that he learned to trust his personal “demon” for his advice while William Thackery wrote, “I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen.”

Robert Louis Stevenson obtained much of his brilliant material from dreams, one of which was his famous story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – the tale, of course, depicting the realization of dark sinister forces ruling the subconscious. He talked about the role of brownies in his literary works:

“The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my question: “Who are the little people?” They are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank book; they share also in his training; … only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. The part of my work which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention: but that which is done while I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show Brownies have a hand in it even then.”

Socrates, one of the greatest thinkers of all time, was often guided and advised in his affairs by a monitory voice called the divine sign, the divine voice or the demon. On many occasions he claimed that he was warned against taken certain courses of action. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a simple explanation for his genius stating that he was in his own mind a receptor through which some unknown power channeled wondrous music.

Great scientists have also acknowledged  help from and indefinable source of inspiration. The father of organic chemistry, Friedrich August  Kekulé received the nature of the benzene molecule in a waking dream he had while travelling to London on a bus. Bertrand Russell said of his mathematical creativity:

“Every evening (my mathematical) discussion ended with some difficulty and every morning I found that the difficulty of the previous evening had solved itself while I slept.”

Professor William A. Lamberton of the University of Pennsylvania was trying to solve a problem in descriptive geometry. He battled with it for two weeks then deliberately put it aside while occupying his mind with other matters. He woke one morning to see a geometrical figure apparently drawn  on the north wall of his room which had once been a classroom and which still had traces of blackboard visible under the white wall paint. The hallucination not only took the form of a geometrical statement of the problem but also incorporated the auxiliary lines that provided the solution.

"It must be accepted that our conscious personality is little more than a fraction of the human psyche and that most of the psyche is outside consciousness known as the subliminal which contains everything which is not held within consciousness." - Archie Roy

The inspiration of genius can be seen as but another piece of evidence for the existence of this  great uncharted psychic continent where Man goes to play.

http://www.teemingbrain.com/tag/rudyard-kipling/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/percy-bysshe-shelley

http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/a-chapter-on-dreams-by-robert-louis-stevenson

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/

The Genius Within, Roy, Archie,The Unexplained, Vol. 13 pgs 1522-1525

http://web.chemdoodle.com/kekules-dream

http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/wordsworth-and-the-sublime