CHAPTER VII

THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION[139]

When the human mind creates, it can use only two classes of ideas as

materials to embody its idea, viz.:

(1) Natural phenomena, the forces of the organic and inorganic worlds.

In its scientific form, seeking to explain, to know, it ends in the

hypothesis, a disinterested creation. In its industrial aspect, aiming

towards application and utilization, it ends in practical, interested

inventions.

(2) Human, i.e., psychic elements--instincts, passions, feelings,

ideas, and actions. Esthetic creation is the disinterested form, social

invention is the utilitarian form.

Consequently, we may say that invention in science resembles invention

in the fine arts, both being speculative; and that mechanical and

industrial invention approaches social invention through a common

tendency toward the practical. I shall not insist on this distinction,

which, to be definite, rests only on partial characters; I merely wish

to mention that invention, whose role in social, political and moral

evolution is large, must, in order to be a success, adopt certain

processes while neglecting others. This the Utopians do not do.

The development of human societies depends on a multitude of factors,

such as race, geographic and economic conditions, war, etc., which we

need neither enumerate nor study. One only belongs to our topic--the

successive appearance of idealistic conceptions that, like all other

creations of mind, tend to realize themselves, the moral ideal

consisting of new combinations arising from the predominance of one

feeling, or from an unconscious elaboration (inspiration), or from

analogy.

At the beginning of civilizations we meet semi-historic, semi-legendary

persons--Manu, Zoroaster, Moses, Confucius, etc., who were inventors or

reformers in the social and moral spheres. That a part of the inventions

attributed to them must be credited to predecessors or successors is

probable; but the invention, no matter who is its author, remains none

the less invention. We have said elsewhere, and may repeat, that the

expression _inventor_ in morals may seem strange to some, because we are

imbued with the notion of a knowledge of good and evil that is innate,

universal, bestowed on all men and in all times. If we admit, on the

other hand, as observation compels us to do, not a ready-made morality,

but a morality in the making, it must be, indeed, the _creation_ of an

individual or of a group. Everybody recognizes inventors in geometry,

in music, in the plastic and mechanic arts; but there have also been men

who, in their moral dispositions, were very superior to their

contemporaries, and were promoters, initiators.[140] For reasons of

which we are ignorant, analogous to those that produce a great poet or a

great painter, there arise moral geniuses who feel strongly what others

do not feel at all, just as does a great poet, in comparison with the

crowd. But it is not enough that they feel: they must create, they must

realize their ideal in a belief and in rules of conduct accepted by

other men. All the founders of great religions were inventors of this

kind. Whether the invention comes from themselves alone, or from a

collectivity of which they are the sum and incarnation, matters little.

In them moral invention has found its complete form; like all invention,

it is organic. The legend relates that Buddha, possessed with the desire

of finding the perfect road of salvation for himself and all other men,

gives himself up, at first, to an extravagant asceticism. He perceives

the uselessness of this and renounces it. For seven years he meditates,

then he beholds the light. He comes into possession of knowledge of the

means that give freedom from _Karma_ (the chain of causes and effects),

and from the necessity of being born again. Soon he renounces the life

of contemplation, and during fifty years of ceaseless wanderings

preaches, makes converts, organizes his followers. Whether true or

false historically, this tale is psychologically exact. A fixed and

besetting idea, trial followed by failure, the decisive moment of

_Eureka!_ then the inner revelation manifests itself outwardly, and

through the labors of the master and his disciples becomes complete,

imposes itself on millions of men. In what respect does this mode of

creation differ from others, at least in the practical order?

Thus, from the viewpoint of our present study, we may divide ethics into

living and dead. Living ethics arise from needs and desires, stimulate

an imaginative construction that becomes fixed in actions, habits and

laws; they offer to men a concrete, positive ideal which, under various

and often contrary aspects, is always happiness. The lifeless ethics,

from which invention has withdrawn, arise from reflection upon, and the

rational codification of, living ethics. Stored away in the writings of

philosophers, they remain theoretical, speculative, without appreciable

influence on the masses, mere material for dissertation and commentary.

In proportion as we recede from distant origins the light grows, and

invention in the social and moral order becomes manifest as the work of

two principal categories of minds--the fantastic, the positive. The

former, purely imaginative beings, visionaries, utopians, are closely

related to poets and artists. The latter, practical creators or

reformers, capable of organizing, belong to the family of inventors in

the industrial-commercial-mechanical order.

I

The chimerical form of imagination, applied to the social sciences, is

the one that, taking account neither of the external determinism nor of

practical requirements, spreads out freely. Such are the creators of

ideal republics, seeking for a lost or to-be-discovered-in-the-future

golden age, constructing, as their fancy pleases, human societies in

their large outlines and in their details. They are social novelists,

who bear the same relation to sociologists that poets do to critics.

Their dreams, subjected merely to the conditions of an inner logic, have

lived only within themselves, an ideal life, without ever passing

through the test of application. It is the creative imagination in its

unconscious form, restrained to its first phase.

Nothing is better known than their names and their works: The _Republic_

of Plato, Thomas More's _Utopia_, Campanella's _City of the Sun_,

Harrington's _Oceana_, Fenelon's _Salente_, etc.[141] However idealistic

they may be, one could easily show that all the materials of their ideal

are taken from the surrounding reality, they bear the stamp of the

_milieu_, be it Greek, English, Christian, etc., in which they lived,

and it should not be forgotten that in the Utopians everything is not

chimerical--some have been revealers, others have acted as stimuli or

ferments. True to its mission, which is to make innovations, the

constructive imagination is a spur that arouses; it hinders social

routine and prevents stagnation.

Among the creators of ideal societies there is one, almost contemporary,

who would deserve a study of individual psychology--Ch. Fourier. If it

is a question merely of fertility in pure construction, I doubt whether

we could find one superior to him--he is equal to the highest, with the

special characteristic of being at the same time exuberant to delirium

and exact in details to the least minutiae. He is such a fine type of the

imaginative intellect that he deserves that we stop a moment.

His cosmogony seems the work of an omnipotent demiurge fashioning the

universe at will. His conception of the future world with its

"counter-cast" creations, where the present ugliness and troubles of

animal reign become changed into their opposites, where there will be

"anti-lions," "anti-crocodiles," "anti-whales," etc., is one example of

hundreds showing his inexhaustible richness in fantastic visions: the

work of an imagination that is hot and overflowing, with no rational

preoccupation.

On the other hand, his psychogony, based on the idea of metempsychosis

borrowed from the Orient, gives itself up to numerical vagaries.

Assuming for every soul a periodical rebirth, he assigns it first a

period of "ascending subversion," the first phase of which lasts five

thousand years, the second thirty-six thousand; then comes a period of

completion, 9,000 years; and then a period of "descending subversion,"

whose first stage is 27,000 years, and the second 4,000 years--a total

of 81,000 years. This form of imagination is already known to us.[142]

The principal part of his psychology, the theory of the emotions,

questionable in many respects, is relatively rational. But in the

construction of human society, the duality of his imagination--powerful

and minute--reappears. We know his methodical organization: the _group_,

composed of seven to nine persons; the _series_, comprising twenty-four

to thirty-two groups; a _phalanx_ that includes eighteen groups,

constituting the phalanstery; the small city, a general center of

phalanges; the provincial city, the imperial capital, the universal

metropolis. He has a passion for classification and ordering; "his

phalanstery works like a clock."

This rare imaginative type well deserved a few remarks, because of its

mixture of apparent exactness and a natural, unconscious utopianism and

extravagance. For, beneath all these pulsating inventions of precise,

petty details, the foundation is none the less a purely speculative

construction of the mind. Let us add an incredible abuse of analogy,

that chief intellectual instrument of invention, of which only the

reading of his books can give an idea.[143] Heinrich Heine said of

Michelet, "He has a Hindoo imagination." The term would apply still

better to Fourier, in whom coexist unchecked profusion of images and the

taste for numerical accumulations. People have tried to explain this

abundance of figures and calculation as a professional habit--he was for

a long time a bookkeeper or cashier, always an excellent accountant. But

this is taking the effect for cause. This dualism existed in the very

nature of his mind, and he took advantage of it in his calling. The

study of the numerical imagination[144] has shown how it is frequently

met with among orientals, whose imaginative development is unquestioned,

and we have seen why the idealistic imagination agrees so well with the

indefinite series of numbers and makes use of it as a vehicle.

II

With practical inventors and reformers the ideal falls--not that they

sacrifice it for their personal interests, but because they have a

comprehension of possibilities. The imaginative construction must be

corrected, narrowed, mutilated, if it is to enter into the narrow frame

of the conditions of existence, until it becomes adapted and determined.

This process has been described several times, and it is needless to

repeat it here in other terms. Nevertheless, the ideal--understanding by

this term the unifying principle that excites creative work and supports

it in its development--undergoes metamorphosis and must be not only

individual but collective; the creation does not realize itself save

through a "communion of minds," by a co-operation of feelings and of

wills; the work of one conscious individual must become the work of a

social consciousness.

That form of imagination, creating and organizing social groups,

manifests itself in various degrees according to the tendency and power

of creators.

There are the founders of small societies, religious in form--the

Essenes, the earliest Christian communities, the monastic orders of the

Orient and Occident, the great Catholic or Mohammedan congregations, the

semi-lay, semi-religious sects like the Moravian Brotherhood, the

Shakers, Mormons, etc. Less complete because it does not cover the

individual altogether in all the acts of life is the creation of secret

associations, professional unions, learned societies, etc. The founder

conceives an ideal of complete living or one limited to a given end, and

puts it into practice, having for material men grouped of their free

choice, or by cooptation.

There is invention operating on great masses--social or political

invention strictly so called--ordinarily not proposed but imposed,

which, however, despite its coercive power, is subject to requirements

even more numerous than mechanical, industrial, or commercial invention.

It has to struggle against natural forces, but most of all against human

forces--inherited habits, customs, traditions. It must make terms with

dominant passions and ideas, finding its justification, like all other

creation, only in success.

Without entering into the details of this inevitable determination,

which would require useless repetition, we may sum up the role of the

constructive imagination in social matters by saying that it has

undergone a regression--i.e., that its area of development has been

little by little narrowed; not that inventive genius, reduced to pure

construction in images, has suffered an eclipse, but on its part it has

had to make increasingly greater room for experiment, rational elements,

calculation, inductions and deductions that permit foresight--for

practical necessities.

If we omit the spontaneous, instinctive, semi-conscious invention of the

earliest ages, that was sufficient for primitive societies, and keep to

creations that were the result of reflection and of great pretension, we

can roughly distinguish three successive periods:

(1) A very long idealistic phase (Antiquity, Renaissance) when triumphed

the pure imagination, and the play of the free fancy that spends itself

in social novels. Between the creation of the mind and the life of

contemporary society there was no relation; they were worlds apart,

strangers to one another. The true Utopians scarcely troubled themselves

to make applications. Plato and More--would they have wished to realize

their dreams?

(2) An intermediate phase, when an attempt is made to pass from the

ideal to the practical, from pure speculation to social facts. Already,

in the eighteenth century, some philosophers (Locke, Rousseau) drew up

constitutions, at the request of interested persons. During this period,

when the work of the imagination, instead of merely becoming fixed in

books, tends to become objectified in acts, we find many failures and

some successes. Let us recall the fruitless attempts of the

"phalansteries" in France, in Algeria, Brazil, and in the United States.

Robert Owen was more fortunate;[145] in four years he reformed New

Larnak, after his ideal, and with varying fortune founded short-lived

colonies. Saint-Simonism has not entirely died out; the primitive

civilization after his ideal rapidly disappeared, but some of his

theories have filtered into or have become incorporated with other

doctrines.

(3) A phase in which imaginative creation becomes subordinated to

practical life: The conception of society ceases to be purely idealistic

or constructed _a priori_ by deduction from a single principle; it

recognizes the conditions of its environment, adapts itself to the

necessities of its development. It is the passage from the absolutely

autonomous state of the imagination to a period when it submits to the

laws of a rational imperative. In other words, the transition from the

esthetic to the scientific, and especially the practical, form.

Socialism is a well-known and excellent example of this. Compare its

former utopias, down to about the middle of the last century, with its

contemporary forms, and without difficulty we can appreciate the amount

of imaginative elements lost in favor of an at least equivalent quantity

of rational elements and positive calculations.

FOOTNOTES:

[139] This title, as will be seen later, corresponds only in part to

the contents of this chapter.

[140] For facts in support, see the _Psychology of the Emotions_,

Second Part, chapter VIII.

[141] Our author does not mention Bacon's _New Atlantis_, one of the

best specimens of its kind. "Wisest Verulam," active and

distinguished in so many fields, is not amenable to rules, and is

here found among "idealists," as elsewhere among the foremost

empiricists and iconoclasts. (Tr.)

[142] See above, Part III, chapter III.

[143] We recommend to the reader the "Epilogue sur l'Analogie," in

_Le Monde Industriel_, pp. 244 ff., where he will learn that the

"goldfinch depicts the child born of poor parents; the pheasant

represents the jealous husband; the cock is the symbol of the man of

the world; the cabbage is the emblem of mysterious love," etc. There

are several pages in this tone, with alleged reasons in support of

the statements.

[144] See above, chapter II.

[145] For an excellent account of the principles of these movements,

see Rae, _Contemporary Socialism_; for Owen's ideals, his

_Autobiography_; and for an account of some of the trials, Bushee's

"Communistic Societies in the United States," _Political Science

Quarterly_, vol. XX, pp. 625 ff. (Tr.)

CONCLUSION.

CONCLUSION

I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION

Why is the human mind able to create? In a certain sense this question

may seem idle, childish, and even worse. We might just as well ask why

does man have eyes and not an electric apparatus like the torpedo? Why

does he perceive directly sounds but not the ultra-red and ultra-violet

rays? Why does he perceive changes of odors but not magnetic changes?

And so on _ad infinitum_. We will put the question in a very different

manner: Being given the physical and mental constitution of man such as

it is at present, how is the creative imagination a natural product of

this constitution?

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.

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| 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. |

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End of Project Gutenberg's Essay on the Creative Imagination, by Th. Ribot