Man is able to create for two principal reasons. The first, motor in nature, is found in the action of his needs, appetites, tendencies, desires. The second is the possibility of a spontaneous revival of images that become grouped in new combination.

1. We have already shown in detail[146] that the hypothesis of a "creative instinct," if the expression is used not as an abbreviated or metaphorical formula but in the strict sense, is a pure chimera, an empty entity. In studying the various types of imagination we have always been careful to note that every mode of creation may be reduced, as regards its beginnings, to a tendency, a want, a special, determinate desire. Let us recall for the last time these initial conditions of all invention—these desires, conscious or not, that excite it.

The wants, tendencies, desires—it matters not which term we adopt—the whole of which constitutes the instinct of individual preservation, have been the generators of all inventions dealing with food-getting, housing, making of weapons, instruments, and machines.

The need for individual and social expansion or extension has given rise to military, commercial, and industrial invention, and in its disinterested form, esthetic creation.

As for the sexual instinct, its psychic fertility is in no way less than the physical—it is an inexhaustible source of imagination in everyday life as well as in art.

The wants of man in contact with his fellows have engendered, through instinctive or reflective action, the numerous social and practical creations regulating human groups, and they are rough or complex, stable or unstable, just or unjust, kindly or harsh.

The need of knowing and of explaining, well or ill, has created myths, religions, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses.

Every want, tendency or desire may, then, become creative, by itself or associated with others, and into these final elements it is that analysis must resolve "creative spontaneity." This vague expression corresponds to a sum, not to a special property.[147] Every invention, then, has a motor origin; the ultimate basis of the constructive imagination is motor.

2. But needs and desires by themselves cannot create—they are only a stimulus and a spring. Whence arises the need of a second condition—the spontaneous revival of images.

In many animals that are endowed only with memory the return of images is always provoked. Sensation from without or from within bring them into consciousness under the form, pure and simple, of former experience; whence we have reproduction, repetition without new associations. People of slight imagination and used to routine approach this mental condition. But, as a matter of fact, man from his second year on, and some higher animals, go beyond this stage—they are capable of spontaneous revival. By this term I mean that revival that comes about abruptly, without apparent antecedents. We know that these act in a latent form, and consist of thinking by analogy, affective dispositions, unconscious elaboration. This sudden appearance excites other states which, grouped into new associations, contain the first elements of the creative act.

Taken altogether, and however numerous its manifestations, the constructive imagination seems to me reducible to three forms, which I shall call sketched, fixed, objectified, according as it remains an internal fancy, or takes on a material but contingent and unstable form, or is subjected to the conditions of a rigorous internal or external determinism.

(a) The sketched form is primordial, original, the simplest of all; it is a nascent moment or first attempt. It appears first of all in dreaming—an embryonic, unstable and uncoordinated manifestation of the creative imagination—a transition-stage between passive reproduction and organized construction. A step higher is revery, whose flitting images, associated by chance, without personal intervention, are nevertheless vivid enough to exclude from consciousness every impression of the external world—so much so that the day-dreamer re-enters it only with a shock of surprise. More coherent are the imaginary constructions known as "castles in Spain"—the works of a wish considered unrealizable, fancies of love, ambition, power and wealth, the goal of which seems to be forever beyond our reach. Lastly, still higher, come all the plans for the future conceived vaguely and as barely possible—foreseeing the end of a sickness, of a business enterprise, of a political event, etc.

This vague and "outline" imagination, penetrating our entire life, has its peculiar characters—the unifying principle is nil or ephemeral, which fact always reduces it to the dream as a type; it does not externalize itself, does not change into acts, a consequence of its basically chimerical nature or of weakness of will, which reduces it to a strictly internal and individual existence. It is needless to say that this kind of imagination is a permanent and definite form with the dreamers living in a world of ceaselessly reappearing images, having no power to organize them, to change them into a work of art, a theory, or a useful invention.

The "sketched" form is or remains an elementary, primitive, automatic form. Conformably to the general law ruling the development of mind—passage from indefinite to definite, from the incoherent to the coherent, from spontaneity to reflection, from the reflex to the voluntary period—the imagination comes out of its swaddling-clothes, is changed—through the intervention of a teleological act that assigns it an end; through the union of rational elements that subdue it for an adaptation. Then appear the other two forms.

(b) The fixed form comprises mythic and esthetic creations, philosophical and scientific hypotheses. While the "outline" imagination remains an internal phenomenon, existing only in and for a single individual, the fixed form is projected outwards, made something else. The former has no reality other than the momentary belief accompanying it; the latter exists by itself, for its creator and for others; the work is accepted, rejected, examined, criticised. Fiction rests on the same level as reality. Do not people discuss seriously the objective value of certain myths, and of metaphysical theories? the action of a novel or drama as though it were a matter of real events? the character of the dramatis personae as though they were living flesh and blood?

The fixed imagination moves in an elastic frame. The material elements circumscribing it and composing it have a certain fluidity; they are language, writing, musical sounds, colors, forms, lines. Furthermore, we know that its creations, in spite of the spontaneous adherence of the mind accepting them, are the work of a free will; they could have been otherwise—they preserve an indelible imprint of contingency and subjectivity.

(c) This last mark is rubbed out without disappearing (for a thing imagined is always a personal thing) in the objectified form that comprises successful practical inventions—whether mechanical, industrial, commercial, military, social, or political. These have no longer an arbitrary, borrowed reality; they have their place in the totality of physical and social phenomena. They resemble creations of nature, subject like them to fixed conditions of existence and to a limited determinism. We shall not dwell longer on this last character, so often pointed out.

In order the better to comprehend the distinction between the three forms of imagination let us borrow for a moment the terminology of spiritualism or of the common dualism—merely as a means of explaining the matter clearly. The "outline" imagination is a soul without a body, a pure spirit, without determination in space. The "fixed" imagination is a soul or spirit surrounded by an almost immaterial sheath, like angels or demons, genii, shadows, the "double" of savages, the peresprit of spiritualists, etc. The objectified imagination is soul and body, a complete organization after the pattern of living people; the ideal is incarnated, but it must undergo transformation, reductions and adaptations, in order that it may become practical—just as the soul, according to spiritualism, must bend to the necessities of the body, to be at the same time the servant of, and served by, the bodily organs.

According to general opinion the great imaginers are found only in the first two classes, which is, in the strict sense of the word, true; in the full sense of the word false. As long as it remains "outline," or even "fixed," the constructive imagination can reign as supreme mistress. Objectified, it still rules, but shares its power with competitors; it avails nought without them, they can do nothing without it. What deceives us is the fact that we see it no longer in the open. Here the imaginative stroke resembles those powerful streams of water that must be imprisoned in a complicated network of canals and ramifications varying in shape and in diameter before bursting forth in multiple jets and in liquid architecture.[148]

II

THE IMAGINATIVE TYPE.

Let us try now, by way of conclusion, to present to the reader a picture of the whole of the imaginative life in all its degrees.

If we consider the human mind principally under its intellectual aspect—i.e., insofar as it knows and thinks, deducting its emotions and voluntary activity—the observation of individuals distinguishes some very clear varieties of mentality.

First, those of a "positive" or realistic turn of mind, living chiefly on the external world, on what is perceived and what is immediately deducible therefrom—alien or inimical to vain fancy; some of them flat, limited, of the earth earthy; others, men of action, energetic but limited by real things.

Second, abstract minds, "quintessence abstractors," with whom the internal life is dominant in the form of combinations of concepts. They have a schematic representation of the world, reduced to a hierarchy of general ideas, noted by symbols. Such are the pure mathematicians, the pure metaphysicians. If these two tendencies exist together, or, as happens, are grafted one on the other, without anything to counterbalance them, the abstract spirit attains its perfect form.

Midway between these two groups are the imaginers in whom the internal life predominates in the form of combinations of images, which fact distinguishes them clearly from the abstractors. The former alone interest us, and we shall try to trace this imaginative type in its development from the normal or average stage to the moment when ever-growing exuberance leads us into pathology.

The explanation of the various phases of this development is reducible to a well-known psychologic law—the natural antagonism between sensation and image, between phenomena of peripheral origin and phenomena of central origin; or, in a more general form, between the outer and inner life. I shall not dwell long on this point, which Taine has so admirably treated.[149] He has shown in detail how the image is a spontaneously arising sensation, one that is, however, aborted by the opposing shock of real sensation, which is its reducer, producing on it an arresting action and maintaining it in the condition of an internal, subjective fact. Thus, during the waking hours, the frequency and intensity of impressions from without press the images back to the second level; but during sleep, when the external world is as it were suppressed, their hallucinatory tendency is no longer kept in check, and the world of dreams is momentarily the reality.

The psychology of the imaginer reduces itself to a progressively increasing interchange of roles. Images become stronger and stronger states; perceptions, more and more feeble. In this movement opposite to nature I note four steps, each of which corresponds to particular conditions: (1) The quantity of images; (2) quantity and intensity; (3) quantity, intensity and duration; (4) complete systematization.

(1) In the first place the predominance of imagination is marked only by the quantity of representations invading consciousness; they teem, break apart, become associated, combine easily and in various ways. All the imaginative persons who have given us their experiences either orally or in writing agree in regard to the extreme ease of the formation of associations, not in repeating past expedience, but in sketching little romances.[150] From among many examples I choose one. One of my correspondents writes that if at church, theatre, on a street, or in a railway station, his attention is attracted to a person—man or woman—he immediately makes up, from the appearance, carriage and attractiveness his or her present or past, manner of life, occupation—representing to himself the part of the city he or she must dwell in, the apartments, furniture, etc.—a construction most often erroneous; I have many proofs of it. Surely this disposition is normal; it departs from the average only by an excess of imagination that is replaced in others by an excessive tendency to observe, to analyze, or to criticise, reason, find fault. In order to take the decisive step and become abnormal one condition more is necessary—intensity of the representations.

2. Next, the interchange of place, indicated above, occurs. Weak states (images) become strong; strong states (perceptions) become weak. The impressions from without are powerless to fulfill their regular function of inhibition. We find the simplest example of this state in the exceptional persistence of certain dreams. Ordinarily, our nocturnal imaginings vanish as empty phantasmagorias at the inrush of the perceptions and habits of daily life—they seem like faraway phantoms, without objective value. But, in the struggle occurring, on waking, between images and perceptions, the latter are not always victorious. There are dreams—i.e., imaginary creations—that remain firm in face of reality, and for some time go along parallel with it. Taine was perhaps the first to see the importance of this fact. He reports that his relative, Dr. Baillarger, having dreamt that one of his friends had been appointed editor of a journal, announced the news seriously to several persons, and doubt arose in his mind only toward the end of the afternoon. Since then contemporary psychologists have gathered various observations of this kind.[151] The emotional persistence of certain dreams is known. So-and-so, one of our neighbors, plays in a dream an odious role; we may have a feeling of repulsion or spite toward him persisting throughout the day. But this triumph of the image, accidental and ephemeral in normal man, is frequent and stable in the imaginers of the second class. Many among them have asserted that this internal world is the only reality. Gerard de Nerval "had very early the conviction that the majority is mistaken, that the material universe in which it believes, because its eyes see it and its hands touch it, is nothing but phantoms and appearances. For him the invisible world, on the contrary, was the only one not chimerical." Likewise, Edgar Allan Poe: "The real things of the world would affect me like visions, and only so; while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became in turn not only the feeding ground of my daily existence but positively the sole and entire existence itself." Others describe their life as "a permanent dream." We could multiply examples. Aside from the poets and artists, the mystics would furnish copious examples. Let us take an exaggerated instance: This permanent dream is, indeed, only a part of their existence; it is above all active through its intensity; but, while it lasts, it absorbs them so completely that they enter the external world only with a sudden, violent and painful shock.

(3) If the changing of images into strong states preponderating in consciousness is no longer an episode but a lasting disposition, then the imaginative life undergoes a partial systematization that approaches insanity. Everyone may be "absorbed" for a moment; the above-mentioned authors are so frequently. On a higher level this invading supremacy of the internal life becomes a habit. This third degree is but the second carried to excess.

Some cases of double personality (those of Azam, Reynolds) are known in which the second state is at first embryonic and of short duration; then its appearances are repeated, its sphere becomes extended. Little by little it engrosses the greater part of life; it may even entirely supplant the earlier self. The growing working of the imagination is similar to this. Thanks to two causes acting in unison, temperament and habit, the imaginative and internal life tends to become systematized and to encroach more and more on the real, external life. In an account by Fere[152] one may follow step by step this work of systematization which we abridge here to its chief characteristics.

The subject, M......, a man thirty-seven years old, had from childhood a decided taste for solitude. Seated in an out-of-the-way corner of the house or out of doors, "he commenced from that time on to build castles in Spain that little by little took on a considerable importance in his life. His constructions were at first ephemeral, replaced every day by new ones. They became progressively more consistent.... When he had well entered into his imaginary role, he often succeeded in continuing his musing in the presence of other people. At college, whole hours would be spent in this way; often he would see and hear nothing." Married, the head of a prosperous business house, he had some respite; then he returned to his former constructions. "They commenced by being, as before, not very durable or absorbing; but gradually they acquired more intensity and duration, and lastly became fixed in a definite form."

"To sum up, here is what this ideal life, lasting almost from his fourth year, meant: M...... had built at Chaville, on the outskirts of the forest, an imaginary summer residence surrounded by a garden. By successive additions the pavilion became a chateau; the garden, a park; servants, horses, water-fixtures came to ornament the domain. The furnishings of the inside had been modified at the same time. A wife had come to give life to the picture; two children had been born. Nothing was wanting to this household, only the being true.... One day he was in his imaginary salon at Chaville, occupied in watching an upholsterer who was changing the arrangement of the tapestry. He was so absorbed in the matter that he did not notice a man coming toward him, and at the question, 'M......, if you please—?' he answered, without thinking, 'He is at Chaville.' This reply, given in public, aroused in him a real terror. 'I believe that I was foolish,' he said. Coming to himself, he declared that he was ready to do anything to get rid of his ideas."

Here the imaginative type is at its maximum, at the brink of insanity without being over it. Associations and combinations of images form the entire content of consciousness, which remains impervious to impressions from without. Its world becomes the world. The parasitic life undermines and corrodes the other in order to become established in its place—it grows, its parts adhere more closely, it forms a compact mass—the imaginary systematization is complete.

(4) The fourth stage is an exaggeration of the foregoing. The completely systematized and permanent imaginative life excludes the other. This is the extreme form, the beginning of insanity, which is outside our subject, from which pathology has been excluded.

Imagination in the insane would deserve a special study, that would be lengthy, because there is no form of imagination that insanity has not adopted. In no period have insane creations been lacking in the practical, religious, or mystic life, in poetry, the fine arts, and in the sciences; in industrial, commercial, mechanical, military projects, and in plans for social and political reform. We should, then, be abundantly supplied with facts.[153]

It would be difficult, for, if in ordinary life we are often perplexed to decide whether a man is sane or not, how much more then, when it is a question of an inventor, of an act of the creative faculty, i.e., of a venture into the unknown! How many innovators have been regarded as insane, or as at least unbalanced, visionary! We cannot even invoke success as a criterion. Many non-viable or abortive inventions have been fathered by very sane minds, and people regarded as insane have vindicated their imaginative constructions through success.

Let us leave these difficulties of a subject that is not our own, in order to determine merely the psychological criterion belonging to the fourth stage.

How may we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic—there are two distinct forms of existence.

One, subjective, having no reality except in consciousness, for the one experiencing it, its reality being due only to belief, to that first affirmation of the mind so often described.

The other, objective, existing in consciousness and outside of it, being real not only for me but for all those whose constitution is similar or analogous to mine.

This much borne in mind, let us compare the last two degrees of the development of the imaginative life.

For the imaginer of the third stage, the two forms of existence are not confounded. He distinguishes two worlds, preferring one and making the best of the other, but believing in both. He is conscious of passing from one to the other. There is an alternation. The observation of Fere, although extreme, is a proof of this.

At the fourth stage, in the insane, imaginative labor—the only kind with which we are concerned—is so systematized that the distinction between the two kinds of existence has disappeared. All the phantoms of his brain are invested with objective reality. Occurrences without, even the most extraordinary, do not reach one in this stage, or else are interpreted in accordance with the diseased fancy. There is no longer any alternation.[154]

By way of summary we may say: The creative imagination consists of the property that images have of gathering in new combinations, through the effect of a spontaneity whose nature we have attempted to describe. It always tends to realize itself in degrees that vary from mere momentary belief to complete objectivity. Throughout its multiple manifestations, it remains identical with itself in its basic nature, in its constitutive elements. The diversity of its deeds depends on the end desired, the conditions required for its attainment, materials employed which, as we have seen, under the collective name "representations" are very unlike one another, not only as regards their sensuous origin (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) but also as regards their psychologic nature (concrete, symbolic, affective, emotional-abstract images; generic and schematic images, concepts—each group itself having shades or degrees).

This constructive activity, applying itself to everything and radiating in all directions, is in its early, typical form a mythic creation. It is an invincible need of man to reflect and reproduce his own nature in the world surrounding him. The first application of his mind is thinking by analogy, which vivifies everything after the human model and attempts to know everything according to arbitrary resemblances. Myth-making activity, which we have studied in the child and in primitive man, is the embryonic form whence arise by a slow evolution religious creations—gross or refined; esthetic development, which is a fallen, impoverished mythology; the fantastic conceptions of the world that may little by little become scientific conceptions, with, however, an irreducible residuum of hypotheses. Alongside of these creations, all bordering upon what we have called the fixed form, there are practical, objective creations. As for the latter, we could not trace them to the same mythic source except by dialectic subtleties which we renounce. The former arise from an internal efflorescence; the latter from urgent life-needs; they appear later and are a bifurcation of the early trunk: but the same sap flows in both branches.

The constructive imagination penetrates every part of our life, whether individual or collective, speculative and practical, in all its forms—IT IS EVERYWHERE.

FOOTNOTES:

[146] See above, Part I, chapter II.

[147] It is a postulate of contemporary physiology that all the neurones taken together cannot spontaneously, that is, of themselves, give rise to any movement—they receive from without, and expend their energy outwards. Nevertheless, between the two moments that, in reflex and instinctive actions, seem continuous, a third interposes, which, for the higher psychic acts, may be of long duration. Thus, reasonings in logical form and reflection regarding a decision to be made have a feeble tendency to become changed into acts; their motor effects are indirect, and at a long range. But this intermediate moment is par excellence the moment for psychology. It is also the moment of the personal equation: every man receives, transforms, and restores outwards according to his own organization, temperament, idiosyncrasies, character—in a word, according to his personality, of which needs, tendencies, desires, are the direct and immediate expression. So we come back, by another route, to the same definition of spontaneity.

[148] Besides these three principal forms, there are intermediate forms, transitions from one category to another, that are hard to classify: certain mythic creations are half-sketched, half-fixed; and we find religious and social and political conceptions, partly theoretic or fixed, partly practical or objective.

[149] Taine, On Intelligence, Part I, Book II, ch. I.

[150] See Appendix E.

[151] Sante de Santis, I Sogni, chapter X; Dr. Tissie, Les Reves, esp. p. 165, the case of a merchant who dreams of having paid a certain debt, and several weeks afterward meets his creditor, and maintains that they are even, giving way only to proof.

[152] For the complete account, see his Pathologie des emotions, pp. 345-49. (Paris, F. Alcan.)

[153] Dr. Max Simon, in an article on "Imagination in Insanity" (Annales medico-psychologiques, December, 1876), holds that every kind of mental disease has its own form of imagination that expresses itself in stories, compositions, sketches, decorations, dress, and symbolic attributes. The maniac invents complicated and improbable designs; the persecuted, symbolic designs, strange writings, bordering on the horrible; megalomaniacs look for the effect of everything they say and do; the general paralytic lives in grandeur and attributes capital importance to everything; lunatics love the naive and childishly wonderful.

There are also great imaginers who, having passed through a period of insanity, have strongly regretted it "as a state in which the soul, more exalted and more refined, perceives invisible relations and enjoys spectacles that escape the material eyes." Such was Gerard de Nerval. As for Charles Lamb, he would assert that he should be envied the days spent in an insane asylum. "Sometimes," he said in a letter to Coleridge, "I cast a longing glance backwards to the condition in which I found myself; for while it lasted I had many hours of pure happiness. Do not believe, Coleridge, that you have tasted the grandeur and all the transport of fancy if you have not been insane. Everything seems to me now insipid in comparison." Quoted by A. Barine, Nevroses, p. 326.

[154] There has often been cited the instance of certain maniacs at Charenton, who, during the Franco-Prussian War, despite the stories that were told them, the papers that they read, and the shells bursting under the walls of the asylum, maintained that the war was only imagined, and that all was only a contrivance of their persecutors.



APPENDICES



APPENDIX A

THE VARIOUS FORMS OF INSPIRATION[155]

Among the descriptions of the inspired state found in various authors, I select only three, which are brief and have each a special character.

I. Mystic inspiration, in a passive form, in Jacob Boehme (Aurora): "I declare before God that I do not myself know how the thing arises within me, without the participation of my will. I do not even know that which I must write. If I write, it is because the Spirit moves me and communicates to me a great, wonderful knowledge. Often I do not even know whether I dwell in spirit in this present world and whether it is I myself that have the fortune to possess a certain and solid knowledge."

II. Feverish and painful inspiration in Alfred de Musset: "Invention annoys me and makes me tremble. Execution, always too slow for my wish, makes my heart beat awfully, and weeping, and keeping myself from crying aloud, I am delivered of an idea that is intoxicating me, but of which I am mortally ashamed and disgusted next morning. If I change it, it is worse, it deserts me—it is much better to forget it and wait for another; but this other comes to me so confused and misshapen that my poor being cannot contain it. It presses and tortures me, until it has taken realizable proportions, when comes the other pain, of bringing forth, a truly physical suffering that I cannot define. And that is how my life is spent when I let myself be dominated by this artistic monster in me. It is much better, then, that I should live as I have imagined living, that I go to all kinds of excess, and that I kill this never-dying worm that people like me modestly term their inspiration, but which I call, plainly, my weakness."[156]

III. The poet Grillparzer[157] analyzes the condition, thus:

"Inspiration, properly so called, is the concentration of all the faculties and aptitudes on a single point which, for the moment, should include the rest of the world less than represent it. The strengthening of the state of the soul comes from the fact that its various faculties, instead of being disseminated over the whole world, find themselves contained within the limits of a single object, touch one another, reciprocally upholding, reenforcing, completing themselves. Thanks to this isolation, the object emerges out of the average level of its milieu, is illumined all around and put in relief—it takes body, moves, lives. But to attain this is necessary the concentration of all the faculties. It is only when the art-work has been a world for the artist that it is also a world for others."

FOOTNOTES:

[155] See Part One, chapter III.

[156] George Sand, Elle et Lui, I.

[157] In Oelzelt-Newin, op. cit., p. 49.



APPENDIX B

ON THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR

We have seen that in the question of the unconscious there must be recognized a positive part—facts, and an hypothetical part—theories.[158]

Insofar as the facts are concerned, it would be well, I think, to establish two categories—(1) static unconscious, comprising habits, memory, and, in general, all that is organized knowledge. It is a state of preservation, of rest; very relatively, since representations suffer incessant corrosion and change. (2) Dynamic unconscious, which is a state of latent activity, of elaboration and incubation. We might give a multitude of proofs of this unconscious rumination. The well-known fact that an intellectual work gains by being interrupted; that in resuming it one often finds it cleared up, changed, even accomplished, was explained by some psychologists prior to Carpenter by "the resting of the mind." It would be just as valid to say that a traveler covers leagues by lying abed. The author just mentioned[159] has brought together many observations in which the solution of a mathematical, mechanical, commercial problem appeared suddenly after hours and days of vague, undefinable uneasiness, the cause of which is unknown, which, however, is only the result of an underlying cerebral working; for the trouble, sometimes rising to anguish, ceases as soon as the unawaited conclusion has entered consciousness. The men who think the most are not those who have the clearest and "most conscious" ideas, but those having at their disposal a rich fund of unconscious elaboration. On the other hand, shallow minds have a naturally poor unconscious fund, capable of but slight development; they give out immediately and rapidly all that they are able to give; they have no reserve. It is useless to allow them time for reflection or invention. They will not do better; they may do worse.

As to the nature of the unconscious working, we find disagreement and darkness. One may doubtless maintain, theoretically, that in the inventor everything goes on in subconsciousness and in unconsciousness, just as in consciousness itself, with the exception that a message does not arrive as far as the self; that the labor that may be followed, in clear consciousness, in its progress and retreats, remains the same when it continues unknown to us. This is possible. Yet it must at least be recognized that consciousness is rigorously subject to the condition of time, the unconscious is not. This difference, not to mention others, is not negligible, and could well arouse other problems.

The contemporary theories regarding the nature of the unconscious seem to me reducible to two principal positions—one psychological, the other physiological.

1. The physiological theory is simple and scarcely permits any variations. According to it, unconscious activity is simply cerebral; it is an "unconscious cerebration." The psychic factor, which ordinarily accompanies the activity of the nervous centers, is absent. Although I incline toward this hypothesis, I confess that it is full of difficulties.

It has been proven through numerous experiments (Fere, Binet, Mosso, Janet, Newbold, etc.) that "unconscious sensations"[160] act, since they produce the same reactions as conscious sensations, and Mosso has been able to maintain that "the testimony of consciousness is less certain than that of the sphygmograph." But the particular instance of invention is very different; for it does not merely suppose the adaptation to an end which the physiological factor would suffice to explain; it implies a series of adaptations, corrections, rational operations, of which nervous activity alone furnishes us no example.[161]

2. The psychological theory is based on an equivocal use of the word consciousness. Consciousness has one definite mark—it is an internal event existing, not by itself, but for me and insofar as it is known by me. But the psychological theory of the unconscious assumes that if we descend from clear consciousness progressively to obscure consciousness, to the subconscious, to the unconscious that manifests itself only through its motor reactions, the first state thus successively impoverished, still remains, down to its final term, identical in its basis with consciousness. It is an hypothesis that nothing justifies.

No difficulty arises when we bear in mind the legitimate distinction between consciousness of self and consciousness in general, the former entirely subjective, the latter in a way objective (the consciousness of a man captivated by an attractive scene; better yet, the fluid form of revery or of the awaking from syncope). We may admit that this evanescent consciousness, affective in nature, felt rather than perceived, is due to a lack of synthesis, of relations among the internal states, which remain isolated, unable to unite into a whole.

The difficulty commences when we descend into the region of the subconscious, which allows stages whose obscurity increases in proportion as we move away from clear consciousness, "like a lake in which the action of light is always nearing extinction" (in double coexisting personalities, automatic writing, mediums, etc.). Here some postulate two currents of consciousness existing at the same time in one person without reciprocal connection. Others suppose a "field of consciousness" with a brilliant center and extending indefinitely toward the dim distance. Still others liken the phenomenon to the movement of waves, whose summit alone is lighted up. Indeed, the authors declare that with these comparisons and metaphors they make no pretense of explaining; but certainly they all reduce unconsciousness to consciousness, as a special to a general case, and what is that if not explaining?

I do not intend to enumerate all the varieties of the psychological theory. The most systematic, that of Myers, accepted by Delboef and others, is full of a biological mysticism all its own. Here it is in substance: In every one of us there is a conscious self adapted to the needs of life, and potential selves constituting the subliminal consciousness. The latter, much broader in scope than personal consciousness, has dependent on it the entire vegetative life—circulation, trophic actions, etc. Ordinarily the conscious self is on the highest level, the subliminal consciousness on the second; but in certain extraordinary states (hypnosis, hysteria, divided consciousness, etc.) it is just the reverse. Here is the bold part of the hypothesis: Its authors suppose that the supremacy of the subliminal consciousness is a reversion, a return to the ancestral. In the higher animals and in primitive man, according to them, all trophic actions entered consciousness and were regulated by it. In the course of evolution this became organized; the higher consciousness has delegated to the subliminal consciousness the care of silently governing the vegetative life. But in case of mental disintegration there occurs a return to the primitive state. In this manner they explain burns through suggestion, stigmata, trophic changes of a miraculous appearance, etc. It is needless to dwell on this conception of the unconscious. It has been vehemently criticised, notably by Bramwell, who remarks that if certain faculties could little by little fall into the domain of subliminal consciousness because they were no longer necessary for the struggle for life, there are nevertheless faculties so essential to the well-being of the individual that we ask ourselves how they have been able to escape from the control of the will. If, for example, some lower type had the power of arresting pain, how could it lose it?

At the foundation of the psychological theory in all its forms is the unexpressed hypothesis that consciousness may be likened to a quantity that forever decreases without reaching zero. This is a postulate that nothing justifies. The experiments of psychophysicists, without solving the question, would support rather the opposite view. We know that the "threshold of consciousness" or minimum perceptible quantity, appears and disappears suddenly; the excitation is not felt under a determinate limit. Likewise in regard to the "summit of perception" or maximum perceptible, any increase of excitation is no longer felt if above a determinate limit. Moreover, in order that an increase or diminution be felt between these two extreme limits, it is necessary that both have a constant relation—differential threshold—as is expressed in Weber's law. All these facts, and others that I omit, are not favorable to the thesis of growing or diminishing continuity of consciousness. It has even been maintained that consciousness "has an aversion for continuity."

To sum up: The two rival theories are equally unable to penetrate into the inner nature of the unconscious factor. We have thus had to limit ourselves to taking it as a fact of experience and to assign it its place in the complex function that produces invention.

The observations of Flournoy (in his book, mentioned above, Part I, chapter III) have a particular interest in relation to our subject. His medium, Helene S......—very unlike others, who are satisfied with forecasts of the future, disclosures of unknown past events, counsel, prognosis, evocation, etc., without creating anything, in the proper sense—is the author of three or four novels, one of which, at least, is invented out of whole cloth—revelations in regard to the planet Mars, its countries, inhabitants, dwellings, etc. Although the descriptions and pictures of Helene S. are found on comparison to be borrowed from our terrestrial globe, and transposed and changed, as Flournoy has well shown, it is certain that in this "Martian novel," to say nothing of the others, there is a richness of invention that is rare among mediums: the creative imagination in its subliminal (unconscious) form encloses the other in its eclat. We know how much the cases of mediums teach us in regard to the unconscious life of the mind. Here we are permitted, as an exceptional case, to penetrate into the dark laboratory of romantic invention, and we can appreciate the importance of the labor that is going on there.

FOOTNOTES:

[158] See Part I, Chapter III.

[159] Mental Physiology, Book II, chapter 13.

[160] This expression is put in quotation marks because in American and English usage "sensation" is defined in terms of consciousness, and such an expression as "unconscious sensation" is paradoxical, and would lead to futile discussion. (Tr.)

[161] For the detailed criticism of unconscious cerebration, see Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion: A research into the subconscious nature of Man and Society, New York, Appletons, 1898, pp. 121-127. The author, who assumes the coexistence of two selves—one waking, the other subwaking, and who attributes to the latter all weakness and vice (according to him the unconscious is incapable of rising above mere association by contiguity; it is "stupid," "uncritical," "credulous," "brutal," etc.) would be greatly puzzled to explain its role in creative activity.



APPENDIX C

COSMIC AND HUMAN IMAGINATION[162]

For Froschammer, Fancy is the original principle of things. In his philosophical theory it plays the same part as Hegel's Idea, Schopenhauer's Will, Hartmann's Unconscious, etc. It is, at first, objective—in the beginning the universal creative power is immanent in things, just as there is contained in the kernel the principle that shall give the plant its form and construct its organism; it spreads out into the myriads of vegetable and animal existences that have been succeeded or that still live on the surface of the Cosmos. The first organized beings must have been very simple; but little by little the objective imagination increases its energy by exercising it; it invents and realizes increasingly more complex images that attest the progress of its artistic genius. So Darwin was right in asserting that a slow evolution raises up organized beings towards fulness of life and beauty of form.

Step by step, it succeeds in becoming conscious of itself in the mind of man—it becomes subjective. Generative power, at first diffused throughout the organism, becomes localized in the generative organs, and becomes established in sex. "The brain, in living beings, may form a pole opposed to the reproductive organs, especially when these beings are very high in the organic scale." Thus changed, the generative power has become capable of perceiving new relations, of bringing forth internal worlds. In nature and in man it is the same principle that causes living forms to appear—objective images in a way, and subjective images, a kind of living forms that arise and die in the mind.[163]

This metaphysical theory, one of the many varieties of mens agitat molem, being, like every other, a personal conception, it is superfluous to discuss or criticise its evident anthropomorphism. But, since we are dealing with hypotheses, I venture to risk a comparison between embryological development in physiology, instinct in psychophysiology, and the creative imagination in psychology. These three phenomena are creations, i.e., a disposition of certain materials following a determinate type.

In the first case, the ovum after fertilization is subject to a rigorously determined evolution whence arises such and such an individual with its specific and personal characters, its hereditary influences, etc. Every disturbing factor in this evolution produces deviations, monstrosities, and the creation does not attain the normal. Embryology can follow these changes step by step. There remains one obscure point in any event, and that is, the nature of what the ancients called the nisus formativus.

In the case of instinct, the initial moment is an external or internal sensation, or rather, a representation—the image of a nest to be built, in the case of the bird; of a tunnel to be dug, for the ant; of a comb to be made, for the bee and the wasp; of a web to be spun, for the spider, etc. This initial state puts into action a mechanism determined by the nature of each species, and ends in creations of special kinds. However, variations of instinct, its adaptation to various conditions, show that the conditions of the determinism are less simple, that the creative activity is endowed with a certain plasticity.

In the third case, creative imagination, the ideal, a sketched construction, is the equivalent of the ovum; but it is evident that the plasticity of the creative imagination is much greater than that of instinct. The imagination may radiate in several very different ways, and the plan of the invention, as we have seen,[164] may arise as a whole and develop regularly in an embryological manner, or else present itself in a fragmentary, partial form that becomes complete after a series of attractions.

Perhaps an identical process, forming three stages—a lower, middle, and higher—is at the root of all three cases. But this is only a speculative hypothesis, foreign to psychology proper.

FOOTNOTES:

[162] See above, Part One, Chapter IV.

[163] Those who, not having the courage to read the 575 pages of Froschammer's book, want more details, may profitably consult the excellent analysis that Seailles has given (Rev. Philos., March, 1878, pp. 198-220). See also Ambrosi, Psicologia dell' immaginazione nella storia della filosofia, pp. 472-498.

[164] See above, Part II, chapter IV.



APPENDIX D

EVIDENCE IN REGARD TO MUSICAL IMAGINATION[165]

The question asked above,[166] Does the experiencing of purely musical sounds evoke images, universally, and of what nature and under what conditions? seemed to me to enter a more general field—the affective imagination—which I intend to study elsewhere in a special work. For the time being I limit myself to observations and information that I have gathered, picking from them several that I give here for the sake of shedding light on the question. I give first the replies of musicians; then, those of non-musicians.

1. M. Lionel Dauriac writes me: "The question that you ask me is complex. I am not a 'visualizer;' I have infrequent hypnagogic hallucinations, and they are all of the auditory type.

"... Symphonic music aroused in me no image of the visual type while I remained the amateur that you knew from 1876 to 1898. When that amateur began to reflect methodically on the art of his taste, he recognized in music a power of suggesting:

"1. Sonorous, non-musical images—thunder, clock. Example, the overture of William Tell.

"2. Psychic images—suggestion of a mental state—anger, love, religious feeling.

"3. Visual images, whether following upon the psychic image or through the intermediation of a programme.

"Under what condition, in a symphonic work, is the visual image, introduced by the psychic image, produced? In the event of a break in the melodic web (see my Psychologie dans l'Opera, pp. 119-120). Here are given, without orderly arrangement, some of the ideas that have come to me:

"Beethoven's symphony in C major appears to me purely musical—it is of a sonorous design. The symphony in D major (the second) suggests to me visual-motor images—I set a ballet to the first part and keep track altogether of the ballet that I picture. The Heroic Symphony (aside from the funeral march, the meaning of which is indicated in the title) suggests to me images of a military character, ever since the time that I noticed that the fundamental theme of the first portion is based on notes of perfect harmony—trumpet-notes and, by association, military. The finale of this symphony, which I consider superior to other parts, does not cause me to see anything. Symphony in B flat major—I see nothing there—this may be said without qualification. Symphony in C minor—it is dramatic, although the melodic web is never broken. The first part suggests the image, not of Fate knocking at the gate, as Beethoven said, but of a soul overcome with the crises of revolt, accompanied by a hope of victory. Visual images do not come except as brought by psychic images."

F. G., a musician, always sees—that is the rule, notably in the Pastoral, and in the Heroic Symphony. In Bach's Passion he beholds the scene of the mystic lamb.

A composer writes me: "When I compose or play music of my own composition I behold dancing figures; I see an orchestra, an audience, etc. When I listen to or play music by another composer I do not see anything." This communication also mentions three other musicians who see nothing.

2. D......, so little of a musician that I had some trouble to make him understand the term "symphonic music," never goes to concerts. However, he went once, fifteen years ago, and there remains in his memory very clearly the principal phrase of a minuet (he hums it)—he cannot recall it without seeing people dancing a minuet.

M. O. L...... has been kind enough to question in my behalf sixteen non-musical persons. Here are the results of his inquiry:

Eight see curved lines.

Three see images, figures springing in the air, fantastic designs.

Two see the waves of the ocean.

Three do not see anything.

FOOTNOTES:

[165] See Part Three, Chapter II.

[166] Ibid., IV.



APPENDIX E

THE IMAGINATIVE TYPE AND ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS[167]

I have questioned a very great number of imaginative persons, well known to me as such, and have chosen preferably those who, not making a profession of creating, let their fancy wander as it wills, without professional care. In all the mechanism is the same, differing scarcely more than temperament and degree of culture. Here are two examples.

B......, forty-six years of age, is acquainted with a large part of Europe, North America, Oceania, Hindoostan, Indo-China, and North Africa, and has not passed through these countries on the run, but, because of his duties, resided there some time. It is worthy of remark, as will be seen from the following observation, that the remembrance of such various countries does not have first place in this brilliant, fanciful personage—which fact is an argument in favor of the very personal character of the creative imagination.

"In a general way, imagination, very lively in me, functions by association of ideas. Memory or the outer world furnishes me some data. On this data there is not always, though there should be, imaginative work proper, and then things remain as they are, without end.

"But when I meet a construction—it matters little whether ancient or in the course of erection—the formula, 'That ought to be fixed,' is one that rises mechanically to my mind in such a case; often it happens that I think aloud and say it, although alone. When going away from the architectural subject[168] under consideration, I make up infinite variations upon it, one after another. Sometimes the things start from a reflex...."

After having noted his preference for the architecture of the Middle Ages, B...... adds (here he touches on the unconscious factor):

"Were I to explain or attempt to explain how the Middle Ages have such an attraction for my mind, I should see therein an atavistic accumulation of religious feeling fixed in my family, on the female side no doubt, and of religiousness in ecclesiastical architecture—these touch.

"Another example illustrating the role of association of ideas in the same matter. One Sunday night I left Noumea in the carriage of Dr. F...... who was going to visit a nunnery five leagues from there. At the moment of our arrival the doctor asked what time it was. 'Half-past two,' I said, looking at my watch. As we stopped in the convent court in front of the chapel I heard the lusty conclusion of a psalm. 'They are singing vespers,' I remarked to the doctor. He commenced to laugh. 'What time are vespers sung in your town?' 'At half-past two,' I answered. I opened the chapel door in order to show the doctor that vespers had just been held: the chapel was vacant. As I stood there, somewhat non-plussed, the doctor remarked, 'Cerebral automatism.'

"I may add here, by association of ideas. The doctor had seen through me, and had with fine insight perceived why I had heard the end of the psalm. The incident made a great impression on me, all the more as ever since the age of eight my memory testifies to a like hallucination, but of sight in place of hearing. It was at L...... that on Good Friday they rang at the cathedral with all their might. It was the very moment before the bells remain silent for three days, and it is known that this silence, ordained in the liturgy, is explained to children by telling them that during these two days the bells have flown to Rome. Naturally I was treated to this little tale, and as they finished telling it, I saw a bell flying at an angle that I could still describe.

"But this transforming power of my imagination is not present in me to the same extent as regards all things. It is much more operative in relation to Romano-Gothic architecture, mystic literature, and sociological knowledge than in relation, for instance, to my memories of travels. When I see again, in the mind's eye, the Isle of Bourbon, Niagara, Tahiti, Calcutta, Melbourne, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, the graphic representation is intellectually perfect. The objects live again in all their external surroundings. I feel the Khamsinn, the desert wind that scorched me at the foot of Pompey's Column; I hear the sea breaking into foam on the barrier reef of Tahiti. But the image does not lead to evocation of related or parallel ideas.

"When, on the other hand, I take a walk over the Comburg moor, the castle weighs upon me in all its massiveness; the recollections of the Memoires d'Outre-tombe besiege me like living pictures. I see, like Chateaubriand himself, the family of great famished lords in their feudal castle. With Chateaubriand I return in the twinkling of an eye to the Niagara that we have both seen. In the fall of the waters I find the deep and melancholy note that he himself found; and after that I think of that dark cathedral of Dol that evidently suggested to the author his Genie du Christianisme.

"In literature, things are very unequally suggestive to me. Classic literature has only few paths outwards for me—Tacitus, Lucretius, Juvenal, Homer, and Saint-Simon excepted. I read the other authors of this class partly for themselves, without making a comparison. On the other hand, the reading of Dante, Shakespeare, St. Jerome's compact verses on the Hebrew, and Middle Age prose excites within me a whole world of ideas, like Wagner's music, canto-fermo, and Beethoven. Certain things form a link for me from one order of ideas to another. For example, Michaelangelo and the Bible, Rembrandt and Balzac, Puvis de Chavannes and the Merovingian narratives.

"To sum up: There are in me certain milieux especially favorable to imagination. When any circumstance brings me into one of them, it is rare that an imaginative network does not occur; and, if one is produced, association of ideas will perform the work. When I give myself up to serious work, I have to mistrust myself: and in this connection I shall surprise people when I say that in the class of ideas above indicated the subject exciting the most ideas in me is sociology."

M......, sixty years of age, artistic temperament. Because of the necessities of life, he has followed a profession entirely opposite to his bent. He has given me his "confession" in the form of fragmentary notes made day by day. Many are moral remarks on the subject of his imagination—I leave them out. I note especially the unconquerable tendency to make up little romances and some details in regard to visual representation, and a dislike for numbers.

"It happens that I experience sharp regret when I see the photograph of a monument, e.g., the Pantheon, the proportions of which I have constructed according to the descriptions of the monument and the idea that I had of the life of the Greeks. The photograph mars my dream.

"From the seen to the unknown. In the S. G. library. A slender young woman, smartly dressed—spotless black gloves—between her fingers a small pencil and a tiny note-book. What business has this affectation this morning in a classic and dull building, in a common environment of poor workmen? She is not a servant-maid, and not a teacher. Now for the solution of the unknown. I follow the woman to her family, into her home, and it is quite a task.

"In the same library. I want to get an address from the Almanach Bottin. A young man, perhaps a student, has borrowed the ridiculous volume. Bent over it, his hands in his hair, he turns the leaves with the sage leisure of a scholar looking for a commentary. From the empty dictionary he often draws out a letter. He must have received this letter this morning from the country. His family advises him to apply to so-and-so. It is a question of money and employment. He must locate the people who, provincial ignorance said, are near him. And so goes the wandering imagination.

"When I feel myself drawn to anyone, I prefer seeing images or portraits rather than the reality. That is how I avoid making unforeseen discoveries that would spoil my model.

"If I make numerical calculations, in the absence of concrete factors, the imagination goes afield, and the figures group themselves mechanically, harkening to an inner voice that arranges them in order to get the sense.

"There may be an imagination devoted to arithmetical calculations—forms, beings intrude, even the outline of the figure 3, for example; and then the addition or any other calculation is ruined.

"I revert to the impossibility of making an addition without a swerve of imagination, because plastic figures are always ready before the calculator. The man of imagination is always constructing by means of plastic images.[169] Life possesses him, intoxicates him, so he never gets tired."

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[167] See Conclusion, II, above.

[168] B...... is not an architect.

[169] We see that the speaker is a visualizer.



INDEX.

Absent images, Association of, 94.

Abstraction, 15; Late appearance of, 146.

Abulics, 11.

Activity, normal end of imagination, 11.

Adaptation of means to end, 264.

Advance plans in commerce, 288.

Adventure, Eras of, 287.

Affective states, Role of, 8.

Alcoholic liquors, 74.

Alembert, d', 87.

Alexander, 138, 142, 143.

Alfieri, 56.

Allen, 150.

Americans, change occupations, 257.

Analogy, 299; Abuse of, 305; based on qualitative resemblance, 26; essential to creative imagination, 25; not trustworthy in science, 27; Role of, in primitive life, 125; Thinking by, 117.

Anatomical conditions, 65.

Anger, 34.

Animal fancy, 97.

Animals, Association fibers or centers, lacking in, 100; Discoveries of, 98; Imagination in, 93, 94; Usefulness of, to man, 274.

Animism, 107, 189; of primitives, 123.

Anticipations of later inventions, 277.

Apollo, 50.

Apperception, Importance of, 16.

Apprehensio simplex, a logical figment, 110.

Arago, 145.

Aristotle, vi, 134, 141.

Art, Indefiniteness of modern, 203; Realistic, 250; Various theories of, 46.

Artificial motors, Use of, a late development, 275.

Aryan race, 129.

Association, 22, 23; Forms of, 196; Laws of, 23; of ideas, 59, 353; of ideas, Criticism of the term, 23; of ideas, Discovery depends on, 250; suggests cause, 261.

Associational systems, 67.

Astral influences, 261.

Asyllogistic deduction, 283.

Attention, 86.

Australians, 285.

Automatisms, 71.

Azam, 325.

Bach, 69, 214, 216.

Bacon, Roger, 245, 303 n.

Baillarger, Dr., 324.

Baldwin, 104.

Barter, 286.

Baudelaire, 39, 55.

Beethoven, 52, 71, 148, 218.

Bernard, Claude, 52; idee directrice of, 250.

Binet, 340.

Bipartite division of the brain, 67.

Bismarck, 271.

Blood circulation, Importance of, 70.

Boehme, Jacob, 335.

Bonnal, 298 n.

Borgia, Lucretia, 139.

Bossuet, 225.

Boulogne, De, 283.

Bourdeau, L., 272.

Brain- development and abstraction, 100; regions, Development of, 67; weights, 66.

Bramwell, 343.

Breguet, 277.

Brown-Sequard, 77.

Buddha, Life of, 301.

Buffon, 52, 73.

Byron, 145.

Cabalists, 234.

Cabalistic mysticism, 226.

Cabanis, 78.

Campanella, 303.

Carlyle, 150, 186.

Carpenter, 284, 339.

Carthage, 282.

Categories of images, 16.

Causality, Search for, 260.

Charcot, 6.

Charlemagne, 138.

Chateaubriand, 76.

Chatterton, 145.

Cherubini, 145.

Child, Adult misinterpretation of, 104; Creative imagination in the, 103 ff.; Exaggeration of his intelligence, 115; Oscillation of belief and doubt in the, 113; Stages of development, 105.

Child-study, Difficulties of, 104.

Chopin, 52, 215.

Chorea, 101.

Cid, The, 140.

Classes of discoverers, 249.

Classification, 181.

Coleridge, 37.

Colored hearing, 38.

Columbus, Christopher, 89.

Commerce, Combative element in, 295.

Commercial imagination, Conditions of, 281; development due to increasing substitution, 287; development, Stages of, 285.

Common factor in comparison, 40.

Complementary scientists, 246.

Complete images impossible, 16.

Comte, 146.

Condillac, 243.

Confucius, 300.

Confusion of impressions, 18.

Conjecture, beginning of science, 245.

Conscious imagination, a special case, 58.

Constellation, 59, 126.

Constitutions by philosophers, 309.

Contiguity and resemblance, 24.

Contrapuntists, 214.

Contrast, Association by, 40.

Cooperation, 309; of intellect and feeling, 43.

Copernicus, 246.

Counter-world, 304.

Creation hindered by complete redintegration, 22; in physiological inhibition, 6; Motor basis of, 258; Physiological and imaginative, 76; versus repetition, 5.

Creative imagination, a growth, 9; Composite character of, 12; conditioned by knowledge, 173; either esthetic or practical, 44; implies feeling, 32; Neglect of, by writers on psychology, vii; Reasons for, 313.

Creative instinct, non-existent, 42.

Crisis, not essential, 58.

Critical stage of investigation, 252.

Cromwell, 144.

Cumulative inventions, 272.

Curiosity, 99; of primitive man, 45, 131.

Cuvier, 183.

Daedalus, 269.

Dante, 205.

Darwin, 117, 346.

Dauriac, 350.

Deduction, Process of, 283.

Deffant, Madame du, 48.

Deities, Coalescence of, 200; Momentary, 199; Multiplicity of Roman, 125.

Delboef, 342.

DeQuincy, 55.

Descartes, 73, 294.

Determinism, Neglect of, by idealists, 303; of art, 278; of invention, 264.

Dewey, John, 132 n.

Dialectic, Hegelian, 254.

Diffluent imagination, 196 ff.

Dii minores, 269.

Disinterestedness of the artist, 35.

Dissociation, 15, 268; by concomitant variations, 21; of series, 19.

Double personality, 325.

Dreams, 38; Emotional persistence of, 324.

Drugs, Effect of, 55; Use of, as excitants, 70.

Dualism of Fourier, 306.

Duerer, 145.

Egypt, 135.

Egyptian conception of causality, 260.

Emotion, and sensation, 38; material for imagination, 33; presupposes unsatisfied needs, 32; Realization of, 80.

Emotional abstraction, 196; factor, 31 ff.

Empedocles, 136.

Epic, Rise of the, 138.

Essenes, 307.

Esthetic imagination, contrasted to mechanical, 264; Fixity of, 264.

Ethics, Living and dead, 302.

Euclid, 244, 245.

Eureka, Moment of, 247, 302.

Evolution of commerce, Law's statement of, 294.

Exact knowledge requisite in commerce, 289.

Expansion of self, 314.

Experience requisite for literary invention, 146.

External factors, 21.

Facts and general ideas, 252.

Faith, 112; -cure, 6; highest in semi-science, 241; Role of, 7.

Fancy, 346; in animals, 97; Source of, 260.

Fear, 34.

Fenelon, 303.

Fere, 325, 340.

Fiduciary money, 286.

Fixed ideas, 88, 89.

Flechsig, 67, 68, 100, 103.

Flournoy, 38, 344.

Forel, 96.

Fouillee, 193.

Fourier, 304.

French, not strong in imagination, 193; Revolution, 151.

Fresnel, 145.

Fromentin, 17.

Froschammer, 75, 346.

Fuegians, 285.

Gauss, 69, 183.

Gautier, Theophile, 55, 189, 190.

Gavarni, 187.

Generic image, 18.

Genius, and brain structure, 68; depends on subliminal imagination, 57; exceptional, 149; No common measure of, 143.

Geniuses, of judgment, 142; of mastery over men, and matter, 142.

Gilman, 219 n.

Gnostics, 234.

Goethe, 29, 149, 150, 216.

Gold, Curative powers of, 261.

Goncourt, 74.

Goya, 39, 206.

Greece, 282.

Greek republics, 151.

Gretry, 73.

Grillparzer, 85, 336.

Groos, 35, 47, 99, 227.

Guericke, Otto de, 276.

Habits, 22.

Hamilton, 19, 58, 60.

Handel, 145.

Hanseatic League, 287.

Harrington, 303.

Hartmann, 254, 346.

Hauey, 247.

Haydn, 145.

Hegel, 254, 346.

Heine, 306.

Hellenic imagination, anthropomorphic, 202.

Helmholtz, 20, 87, 142.

Henry IV, 139.

Hephaestos, 269.

Hercules, 137.

Hero, 270.

Herodotus, 260.

Hesiod, 130.

Hindoo imagination, symbolic, 202.

Hindoos, 128.

Hodgson, 35.

Hoeffding, 41.

Hoffman, 39, 206.

Homo duplex, 43.

Homonomy, 120.

Howe, 60 n.

Huber, 96.

Hugo, Victor, 188, 189, 216, 229; Animism in, 189.

Human force, beginning of invention, 273.

Hume, 111.

Huyghens, 270.

Hyperaemia, 70.

Hyperesthesia, Temporary, 74.

Hypermnesia, 54.

Hypothesis, 251; Progressive, 244.

Icarus, 269.

Idea and emotion, Equivalence of, 80.

Ideal modified in practice, 306.

Idealistic conceptions, 300.

Idealization, Process of, 38.

Illusion, 107; and legend, 137; Conscious, of mystic, 228.

Illusions, valuable to scientist, 251.

Image, Modification of, 18, 291.

Images, 80; abbreviations of reality, 232; Categories of, 16; Concrete, 222; provoked, 188; sketched type, 81; Symbolic, 222; Visual, provoked by music, 217.

Imagination, and abulia, 11; and foresight, 284; anthropocentric, 10; basis of the cosmic process, 75; Commercial, 281; complete in animals, 95; condensed in common objects, 276; Conditions of, 44; Development of, 167 ff.; Diffluent, 196 ff.; Esthetic, 264; fixed form, 318; in animals, 93; in experimentation, 248; in primitive man, 118; Mechanical and technical, 257; Motives of different sorts of, 251; Musical, 212 ff., 350; Mystic, 221 ff.; Mystical, different from religious, 231; not opposed to the useful, 263; Numerical, 207 ff.; Periods of development of, 144; Plastic, 184 ff.; Poetical, 267; Practical, 256 ff.; present in all activities, viii; Quality of, same in many lives, 265; Scientific, 236 ff.; sketched form, 316; substitute for reason, 29; Varieties of, 180.

Imaginative type, 320.

Imitation, through pleasure, 98.

Imitative music, 214.

Impersonality, 52, 86.

Incomplete images, 18.

Incubation, Periods of, 278.

Individual variations, 179.

Individuality of genius, 149.

Inductive reasoning, 132.

Infantile insanity, 101.

Inhibition by representation, 6.

Initial moment of discovery, 276.

Inspiration, 50, 85; and intoxication, 55; Characteristic of, 57; characterized by suddenness and impersonality, 51; resembles somnambulism, 56; Subjective feeling of, untrustworthy, 59.

Instinct, 75; answer to specific needs, 42; Creative, 313; Resemblance of invention to, 48.

Intellectual factor, 15.

Intuition, 282, 285.

Introspectors, 321.

Intentional combination of images, 95.

Interest, a factor in creation, 82.

Interesting, defined, 36.

Invention arises to satisfy a need, 271; Higher forms of, 140 ff.; in morals, 300; in successive parts, 296; of monopolies, 282; Pain of, 51; Spontaneity of, 51; subjected to tradition, 269.

Inventions, Amplifiers of, 270; largely anonymous, 275; Mechanical, neglected by psychologists, 263; Stratification of, 272.

Inventors deified, 269; Oddities of, 72.

James, William, 21, 25, 37, 83, 112.

Janet, 340.

Jealousy, stimulates imagination, 34.

Jordaens, 145.

Joy, 34.

Kant, 248.

Kepler, 246, 247.

Klopstock, 215.

Kuehn, 129.

Lagrange, 71.

Lamennais, 73.

Lang, 128, 261.

Language, Origin of, 120.

Laplace, 250.

Larvated epilepsy, 141.

Lavoisier, 246.

Law, 294.

Lazarus, 47.

Leibniz, 73, 74, 146, 253, 296 n.

Lelut, 141.

Leurechon, 277.

Liebig, 244.

Linnaeus, 183.

Literal mysticism, 226.

Localization, 65.

Loch Lomond, 58.

Locke, 309.

Lombroso, 141, 142.

Louis XIV, 150.

Love, 34; and hate, 134.

Love-plays, 99.

Machiavelli, 73.

Machines, counterfeits of human beings, 279.

Man and animals, Specific quality of, 273.

Manu, 300.

Mastery, Spirit of, 114.

Materials of imagination, 299.

Maury, A., 6 n.

Mechanic and poet, 279.

Mechanical aptitude, 145.

Mechanical imagination, Ideal of, 268.

Mediate association, 59.

Memory, Predominant tendencies in, 61; untrustworthy, 17.

Men, Great, as makers of history, 150.

Mendelssohn, 145, 213 n., 215, 216.

Mental chemistry, 82.

Merchant sailors, 282.

Metamorphosis, 28; of deities, 129; Regressive, 171.

Metaphysical speculation, 251; thought, Stages of, 252.

Metaphysics, 252 ff.

Methods of invention, 243.

Meynert, 100.

Michaelangelo, 145, 148, 149.

Michelet, 186, 306.

Middle Ages, predominantly imaginative, 174.

Military invention, 295; Conditions of, 297.

Mill, John Stuart, 82, 284.

Milton, 73.

Mimicry, 98.

Mind, Varieties of, 320.

Mission, Consciousness of, 148.

Misunderstanding of the new, 151.

Mobility of inventors, 258.

Monadology, 253.

Money, Invention of, 286; sought as an end, 289.

Monge, 237.

Moses, 300.

More, 303, 309.

Morgan, Lloyd, 99.

Mormons, 307.

Monoideism, 87.

Montgolfier, 277.

Moral geniuses, 301.

Moravian brotherhood, 307.

Mosso, 71, 340.

Motor elements in all representation, 4; elements, Role of, 7; manifestation basis of creation, 9.

Movements, Importance of, in imagination, 3.

Mozart, 73, 145.

Mueller, Max, 120, 129, 130.

Mummy powder, 261.

Muensterberg, 60.

Muses, 50.

Music an emotional language, 220; Precocity in, 144.

Musical imagination, 212, 350.

Musset, Alfred de, 335.

Myers, 342.

Mystic imagination, 221 ff., 335.

Mystics, Abuse of allegory, by, 225; Belief of, 227; Metaphorical style of, 224.

Mysticism by suggestion, 229.

Myth, defined, 123; Depersonification of, 133; in Plato, 134; in science, 134; Subjective and objective factors in, 122.

Myths, Significance of, 119; Variations in, 127.

Myth-making activity, viii, 331.

Napoleon, 10, 66, 71, 142; his war practice, 298.

Natural, and human phenomena, 299; law, Uniformity of, opposed to dissociation, 21; motors, Use of, 275.

Naville, 245.

Need of knowing, 314.

Neglect of details in sensation, 20.

Nerval, Gerard de, 229, 324.

Nervous overflow, 71.

New Larnak, 309.

Newbold, 340.

Newcomen, 270.

Newton, 58, 87, 146.

Nietzsche, 150.

Nomina Numina, 120, 262.

Nordau, 142.

Numerical imagination, 207 ff.; mysticism, 226; series unlimited, 207.

Objective study of inventors, 71.

Oddities of inventors, 72.

Oelzelt-Newin, 33, 95.

Old age, Effect of, on imagination, 77.

Organic conditions, 65.

Orientation conditioned by individual organization, 48; Personal, 270.

Owen, Robert, 309.

Paradox of belief, 242.

Paralysis by ideas, 6.

Pascal, 146, 244.

Pasteur, 142, 143, 251.

Pathological view of genius, 141.

Pathology and physiology, 74.

Perception, 15; and conception, 184; and imagination, 106.

Perez, B., 115.

Persistence of ideas due to feeling, 79.

Personification, 186; characteristic of aborigines and children, 27; source of myth, 28.

Phalanges, Organization of society into, 305.

Philippe, J., 17 n.

Philosophy, a transformation of mystic ideas, 233.

Phlogiston, 248.

Physiological states, 70.

Physiology and pathology, 74.

Plastic art and mythology, 191; imagination, 184 f.

Plato, 134, 303, 309.

Platonic ideas, 81, 253.

Play, 47, 97; Uses of, for man, 114.

Plotinus, 234.

Poe, 39, 206, 324.

Poet, a workman, 190.

Poetical imagination, general characters, 267; Inspiration in, 268; special characters, 270.

Poetical invention, Stages of, 266.

Polyideism, 87.

Polynomy, 120.

Poncelet, 143.

Positive minds, 318.

Powers of nature, Exploitation of 271.

Practical imagination, Ubiquity of, 254.

Practice, essential in motor creation, 186.

Precocity, 144; in poetry, 145; of mathematicians, 147.

Pre-Raphaelites, 204.

Preyer, 117.

Primitive man, 45; and myth, 118 ff.

Principle of unity, 250.

Progressive stages of imagination, 84.

Prometheus, 269.

Provoked revival, 94.

Pseudo-science, 240.

Psychic atoms, 19; paralysis, 6.

Psychological regressions, 248.

Puberty, Influence of, on imagination, 76.

Pythagoras, 226, 246.

Pythagoreans, 134.

Qualities, Attribution of, to objects, 124.

Raphael, 145.

Rational Metaphysics, 234.

Reason, Objectivity of, 10.

Reciprocal working of scientific and practical discoveries, 249.

Recuperative theory of play, 97.

Redintegration, Law of, 19; Total, 36.

Regis, 54.

Religion, Universality of, 128.

Renaissance, 151, 175.

Reni, Guido, 73.

Repetition versus creation, 5, 23.

Representation and belief inseparable, 110.

Representations, Interchange of, 323; Number of, 322.

Revery, 38, 198, 316.

Reymond, Du Bois, 52.

Reynolds, 6, 325.

Roland, 138.

Roman Republic, 151.

Romans, 125.

Romanes, 94, 95, 96.

Romantic invention, 115.

Roentgen, 142.

Rossini, 73.

Rousseau, 309.

Rubens, 145.

Ruedinger, 69.

Saint-Simonism, 309.

Sand, George, 52, 215.

Satanic literature, 206.

Schelling, 253.

Schematic images, 18, 291.

Schiller, 47, 72, 73, 145.

Schopenhauer, 37, 149, 150, 253, 346.

Schubert, 145.

Schumann, 215.

Science, 45; Conjecture beginning of, 245; prescribes conditions and limits to imagination, 236; Three movements in growth of, 239.

Scientific imagination, 236 ff.

Scripture, 60.

Self-feeling, 35.

Semi-science, 240.

Seneca, 141.

Sensation changed in memory, 17.

Sensorial insanity, 101.

Sexual instinct, 314.

Shakers, 307.

Shakespeare, 143, 186.

Shelly, 56.

Social aims in finance, 294; invention, limited by the past, 308; wants, 314.

Socialism, Utopian and scientific, 310.

Societies for special ends, 307.

Sorrow, 34.

Special modes of scientific imagining, 237.

Specific, not general imagination, 179.

Spencer, 47, 131, 150.

Spinoza, 110, 143, 254.

Spirits, Belief in, 51.

Spontaneity, 296.

Spontaneous revival, 94, 315.

Spontaneous variations, 140.

Stages of passage from percept to concept, 292.

Stallo, 134.

State credit, Law's system of, 294.

Stewart, Dugald, 111.

Stigmata, etc., unprecedented in individual's experience, 7.

Stigmatized individuals, 6.

Subjective factors, 20.

Subliminal imagination, 57.

Sully, 21.

Summa, 254.

Summary, 330.

Superstition and religion, 259.

Symbolism of Hindoos, 202.

Taine, 18, 111, 117, 129, 150, 200.

Teleological character of will and imagination, 10.

Thales, 134.

Titchener, 83.

Tolstoi, 151.

Tools, 274.

Tours, Moreau de, 55, 78, 141.

Triptolemus, 269.

Tropisms, 75.

Tycho-Brahe, 73, 246, 270.

Tylor, 99, 123, 125, 131, 139.

Tyndall, 238.

Tyre, 282.

Unconscious, Nature of the, 339; physiological theory, 340, 341.

Unconscious cerebration, 53; factor, 50 ff.; factor, not a distinct element in invention, 64.

Units of exchange, 286.

Unity, Principle of, 79.

Universale post rem, 84.

Utopias, based on author's milieu, 303.

Utopian imagination, 299.

Utopians, indifferent to realization, 309.

Van Dyck, 145.

Vaucanson, 48.

Vedic epoch, 129.

Vesication, 5, 7.

Vicavakarma, 269.

Vico, 174.

Vignoli, 128.

Vinci, Leonardo da, 58, 149.

Vis a fronte and a tergo, 11.

Vocation, Change of, 172; Choice of, 144.

Voltaire, 150.

Voluntary activity analogous to creative imagination, 9.

Von Baer, 210.

Von Hartmann, 224.

Wagner, 145.

Wahle, 62.

Wallace, 96, 99.

Wallaschek, 99.

Watch, Evolution of the, 270.

Watt, James, 66, 244, 270.

Wealth, desired from artistic motives, 290.

Weber, E. F., 5, 145, 216.

Weismann, 148.

Wernicke, 100.

Wiertz, 39, 206.

Will, The broad meaning of, 112; a coordinating function, 9; Effect of, on physiological functioning, 5.

Words, Role of, 96.

Wundt, 24, 40, 182.

Zeller, 226.

Ziehen, 61, 62.

Zoroaster, 300.

Transcriber's Notes: Page 23: Fn. 8: Phychology amended to Psychology Page 25: Missing footnote marker in original. Added footnote marker after James quote. Page 35: casual amended to causal Page 38: haphazard amended to haphazardly; grouping amended to groupings Page 39: subejct amended to subject Page 54: vender sic Page 56: "Under the influence of alcoholic drinks and of poisonous intoxicants attention and will always fall into exhaustion." sic Possibly the word "does" or similar is missing before "and," or "and" is superfluous. Page 55: subtances amended to substances Page 75: images amended to image Page 84: unisersale amended to universale Page 85: The following lines transposed: "which, for the time being, should represent the" and "all the forces and capacities upon a single point" Page 123: fill amended to fills Page 151: duplicate "the" removed ("the the deep working of the masses") Page 155: Section II amended to IV Page 163: Section III amended to V Page 193: Saxin amended to Saxon Page 200: everyone amended to every one Page 208: apalling amended to appalling Page 213: Missing footnote marker in original. Added footnotemarker after last paragraph on page. Page 226: caballists amended to cabalists Page 229: plant and tree amended to plants and trees Page 236: In Chapter IV, "The Scientific Imagination," there are sections II, III, IV and V, but no section I. Page 250: dyssymetry amended to dyssymmetry Page 280: Missing footnote marker in original. Added footnote marker after "... inorganic life." Page 286: Fn. 132: Evolution amended to Evolution Page 292: acording amended to according Page 294: managable amended to manageable Page 297: opoprtune amended to opportune Page 319: or amended to of ("the double of savages") Page 321: quintescence amended to quintessence Page 338: Footnote marker and number added to note on page. Footnote marker added at end of first paragraph. Page 348: quivalent amended to equivalent Page 351: l'Opera amended to l'Opera Page 365: Lammennais amended to Lamennais Page 365: Michelangelo amended to Michaelangelo Part II, Chapter II: The chapter heading in the table of contents differs from that shown on page 102. Left as is. Accented letters, italicisation and the punctuation of abbreviations have been standardised. Where a word is spelt differently and there is an equal number of instances, the variant spellings have been left as is: Hephaestos/Hephaestos; Jordaens/Jordaens; Linnaeus/Linnaeus.

THE END