ABSTRACT
No form of mental and spiritual activity, especially if it be the creative force of genius, flows evenly and constantly through the whole course of life. Rather, in the intellectual life of great men, is there usually a peculiar wave-like course, a coming and going, a welling-up of passionate excitement and an exhausted sinking down again. A genius suddenly gripped by inspiration, finds himself, as an artist, swept up into an overwhelming and varied productivity of pictures and music, or, as a scientist, overpowered by surprising flashes of insight and a rich grasp of relations. He works feverishly, day and night, through weeks and months, to give his ideas shape and form, thereafter to find himself, perhaps for a long time, barren of ideas, incapable of activity and fruitless in execution. This periodic undulation is a definite characteristic peculiarity of much of the work of genius—of really productive mental work in contrast to the reproductive, daily, bread-and-butter activities of the average man, which are regularly supplied from the wells of habit and tradition and unfold themselves evenly from day to day.
