2. Chapter 4 of Essay on the Creative Imagination by Thea Dool Rebo. Part 2. The Development of the Imagination. Chapter 4. The Higher Forms of Invention. We now pass from Primitive to Civilized Man, from Collective to Individual Creation, the characters of which it remains for us to study as we find them in great inventors who exhibit them on a large scale. Fortunately, we may dismiss the treatment of the oft-discussed, never-solved problem of the psychological nature of genius. As we have already noted, their enter into its composition factors other than the creative imagination, although the latter is not the least among them. Besides, great man being exceptions, anomalies, or as the current expression has it, spontaneous variations. We may ask in Lemony whether their psychology is explicable by means of simple formulae, as would the average man, or whether even monographs teach us no more concerning their nature than general theories that are never applicable to all cases. Taking genius, then, as synonymous with great inventor, accepting it de facto historically and psychologically, our task is limited to the attempt to separate characters that seem, from observation and experiment, to belong to it as peculiarly its own. Putting aside vague dissertations and diethyrambics in favor of theories with a scientific tendency as to the nature of genius, we meet first the one attributing to it a pathological origin, hinted at in antiquity, Aristotle, Seneca, etc., suggested in the oft-expressed comparison between inspiration and insanity, it has reached, as we know, through timid, reserved, and partial statements, le lute. Its complete expression in the famous formulae of Maraudeture, genius is a neurosis. Neuropathy was for him the exaggeration of vital properties, and consequently, the most favorable condition for the hatching of works of genius. Later, lumbroso, in a book teeming with doubtful or manifestly false evidence, finding his predecessor's theory too vague, attempts to give it more precision by substituting for neurosis in general a specific neurosis, larvated epilepsy. Alienist, far from eagerly accepting this view, have set themselves to combat it and to maintain that lumbroso has compromised everything in wanting to make the term too precise. There are several possible hypotheses, they say. Either the neuropathic state is the direct, immediate cause of which the higher faculties of genius are affects, or the intellectual superiority through the excessive labor and excitation it involves causes neuropathic disturbances, or there is no relation of cause and effect between genius and neurosis, but mere coexistence. Since there are found very mediocre neuropaths and men above the average without a neurotic blemish, or the two states, the one psychic, the other psychological, are both effects resulting from organic conditions that produce, according to circumstances, genius, insanity, and diverse nervous problems. Every one of these hypotheses can allege facts in its favor. We must, however, recognize that in most men of genius are found so many peculiarities, physical eccentricities, and disorders of all kinds that the pathological theory retains much probability. There remain for consideration the sane geniuses who, despite many efforts and subtleties, have not yet been successfully brought under the foregoing formula, and who have made possible the enunciation of another theory. Recently, Nordau, rejecting the theory of his master lumbroso has maintained that it is just as reasonable to say that genius is a neurosis as that athleticism is a cardiopathy since many athletes are affected with heart disease. For him, the essential elements of genius are judgment and will. Following this definition, he establishes the following hierarchy of men of genius. At the highest rung of the latter are those in whom judgment and will are equally powerful. Men of action who make world history. Alexander, Cromwell, Napoleon. These are masters of men. On the second level are found the geniuses of judgment, with no hyperdevelopment of will. These are masters of matter. Pasteur, Helmholtz, Roentgen. On the third step are geniuses of judgment without energetic will, thinkers and philosophers. What then shall we do with the emotional geniuses, the poets and artists? Theirs is not genius in the strict sense, because it creates nothing new and exercises no influence on phenomena. Without discussing the value of this classification, without examining whether it is even possible, since there is no common measure between Alexander, Pasteur, Shakespeare and Spinoza, and whether, on the other hand, common opinion is not right in putting on the same level the great creators, whoever they be, solely because they are far above the average. This remark is absolutely necessary. In the definition above cited, the creative faculty par excellence, imagination, necessary to all inventors, is entirely left out. We can however derive some benefit from this arbitrary division. Although it is impossible to admit that emotional geniuses create nothing new and have no influence on society, they do form a special group. Creative work requires of them a nervous excitability and a predominance of effective states that rapidly become morbid. In this way they have provided the pathological theory with most of its facts. It would perhaps be necessary to recognize distinctions between the various forms of invention. They require very different organic and psychic conditions in order that some may profit by morbid dispositions that are far from useful to others. This point should deserve a special study never made hitherto. 1. We shall reduce to three the characters ordinarily met in most great inventors. No one of them is without exception. 1. Procosity, which is reducible to innate-ness. The natural bent becomes manifest as soon as circumstances allow. It is the sign of the true vocation. The story is the same in all cases. At one moment the flash occurs. But this is not as frequent as is supposed. False vocations abound. If we deduct those attracted through imitation, environmental influence, exhortations and advice, chance, the attraction of immediate gain, aversion to a career imposed from without, which they shun, an adoption of an opposite one, will there remain many natural and irresistible vocations? We have seen above that the passage from reproductive to constructive imagination takes place toward the end of the third year. According to some authors, this initial period should be followed by a depression about the fifth year. Thanks forward the upward progress is continuous. But the creative faculty, from its nature and content, develops in a very clear chronological order. Music, plastic arts, poetry, mechanical invention, scientific imagination, such is the usual order of appearance. In music, with the exception of a few child prodigies, we hardly find personal creation before the age of 12 or 13. As examples of precocity may be cited, Mozart, at the age of three, Mendelssohn V, Haydn IV, Handel XII, Weber XII, Schubert XI, Cherubini XIII, and many others. Those late in developing, Beethoven, Wagner, etc., are fewer by far. In the plastic arts, vocation and creative aptitude are shown perceptibly later, on the average about the fourteenth year, Giato at X, Van Dyke X, Raphael VIII, Gertchen VIII, Groots VIII, Michelangelo XIII, Albrecht Durer XV, Bernini XII, Rubens and Jordans being also precocious. In poetry, we find no work having any individual character before 16. Chatterton died at that age, perhaps the only example of so young a poet leaving any reputation. Schiller and Byron also began at 16. Besides this, we know that the talent for versification, at least as imitation, is very early in developing. In mechanical arts, children have early a remarkable capacity for understanding and imitating. At nine, Poncele bought a watch that was out of order in order to study it, then took it apart and put it together correctly. Aragot tells that at the same age Fresnel was called by his comrades, a man of genius, because he had determined by correct experiments the length and caliber of children's elderwood toy cannon giving the longest range, also which green or dry woods used in the manufacture of bows have the most strength and lasting power. In general, the average of mechanical invention is later and scarcely comes earlier than that of scientific discovery. The form of abstract imagination requisite for invention in the sciences has no great personal value before the 20th year. There are a goodly number, however, who have given proof of it before that age. Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Auguste Comte, etc. Almost all are mathematicians. These chronological variations result not from chance, but from psychological conditions necessary for the development of each form of imagination. We know that the acquisition of musical sounds is prior to speech. Many children can repeat a scale correctly before they are able to talk. On the other hand, as dissolution follows evolution in inverse order, aphasic patients lacking the most common words can nevertheless sing. Sound images are thus organized before all others, and the creative power when acting in this direction finds very early material for its use. For the plastic arts, a longer apprenticeship is necessary for the education of the senses and movements. To acquire manual dexterity, one must become skilled in observing form, combinations of lines and colors, and apt at reproducing them. Poetry and first attempts at novel writing presuppose some experience of the passions of human life and a certain reflection of which the child is incapable. Invention in the mechanic arts, as in the plastic arts, requires the education of the senses and movements, and further, calculation, rational combination of means, rigorous adaptation to practical necessities. Lastly, scientific imagination is nothing without a high development of the capacity for abstraction, which is a matter of slow growth. Mathematicians are the most precocious because their material is the most simple. They have no need, as in the case of the experimental sciences, of an extended knowledge of facts which is acquired only with time. At this period of its development, the imagination is in large part imitation. We must explain this paradox. The creator begins by imitating. This is such a well-known fact that it is needless to give proof of it, and it is subject to few exceptions. The most original mind is, at first, consciously or unconsciously somebody's disciple. It is necessarily so. Nature gives only one thing, the creative instinct, that is, the need of producing in a determined line. This internal factor alone is insufficient. Aside from the fact that the imagination at first has at its disposal only a very limited material, it lacks technique. The process is indispensable for realizing itself. As long as the creator has not found the suitable form into which to cast his creation, he must indeed borrow it from another. His ideas must suffer the necessity of a provisional shelter. This explains how it is that later the inventor reaching full consciousness of himself in order to complete mastery of his methods often breaks with his models and burns what he at first adorned. 2. A second character consists of the necessity, the fatality of creation. Great inventors feel that they have a task to accomplish. They feel that they are charged with a mission. On this point we have a large number of testimonials and of owls. In the darkest days of his life, Beethoven, haunted by the thought of suicide, wrote, Art alone has kept me back. It seemed to me that I could not leave the world before producing all that I felt within me. Audinarily inventors are apt in only one line. Even when they have a certain versatility they remain bound to their own peculiar manner. They have their mark, like Michelangelo, or if they attempt to change it, if they try to be unfaithful as respects their vocation, they fall much below themselves. This characteristic of irresistible impulsion, which makes the genius create not because he wants to, but because he must do it, has often been likened to instinct. This very widespread view has been examined before in Part 1, Chapter 2. We have seen that there is no creative instinct in general, but particular tendencies orientated in a definite direction, which in most respects resemble instinct. It is contrary to experience and logic to admit that the creative genius follows any path whatever at his choice. A proposition that Weisman, in his horror of inheritance of acquired characters, which are a kind of innateness, is not afraid to support. That is true only of the man of talent, a matter of education and circumstances. The distinction between these two orders of creators, the great and the ordinary, has been made too often to need repetition. Although it is proper to recognize that it is not always easy in practice, that there are names that cause us to hesitate, which we class somewhat at hazard. Yet genius remains, as Schopenhauer used to say, monstrom per excessum, excessive development in one direction. Hypertrophy of a special aptitude often makes genius fall, as far as the others are concerned, below the average level. Even those exceptional men who have given proof of multiple aptitudes, such as Vinci, Michelangelo, Goethe, etc., always have a predominating tendency which, in common opinion, sums them up. 3. A third characteristic is the clearly defined individuality of the great creator. He is the man of his work. He has done this or that, that is his mark. He is representative. There is no other opinion as to this. What is a subject of discussion is the origin, not the nature of this individuality. The Darwinian theory as to the all-powerful action of environment has led to the question whether the representative character of great inventors comes from themselves and from them alone, or must not rather be sought in the unconscious influence of the race and epic of which they are at a given instant only brighter sparks. This debate goes beyond the bounds of our subject. To decide whether social changes are due mostly to the accumulated influences of some individuals and their initiative, or to the environment, to circumstances, to hereditary transmission, is not a problem for psychology to solve. We cannot, however, totally avoid this discussion, for it touches the very springs of creation. Is the inventive genius the highest degree of personality or a synthesis of masses, the result of himself or of others, the expression of an individual activity or of a collective activity? In short, should we look for his representative character within him or without? Both these alternatives have authoritative supporters. For Schopenhauer, Carlisle, Hero Worship, Nietzsche, and others, the Great Man is an autonomous product, a being without a peer, a demigod, ubermensch. He can be explained neither by heredity nor by environment. For others, Tane, Spencer, Grant, Allen, and others, the important factor is seen in the race and external conditions. Gershaw held that a whole family line is summarized some day in a single one of its members. And a whole people in one or several men. For him, Louis XIV and Voltaire are respectively the French king and writer, par excellence. The alleged Great Men, says Tolstoy, are only the labels of history. They give their names to events. Each party explains the same facts according to its own principle and in its own peculiar way. The great historic epics are rich in Great Men. The Greek republics of the 4th century BC, the Roman Republic, the Renaissance, French Revolution, etc. Why? Because, some say, periods put into ferment by the deep working of the masses make this blossoming possible. Because, say the others, this flowering modifies profoundly the social and intellectual condition of the masses and raises their level. For the former, the ferment is deep down, for the latter, it is on top. Not presuming to solve this vexed question, I lean toward the view of individualism pure and simple. It seems to me very difficult to admit that the great creator is only the result of his environment. Since this influence acts on many others, it is very necessary that, in Great Men, there should be in addition a personal factor. Besides, in opposition to the exclusively environmental theory, we may bring the well-known fact that most innovators and inventors at first arouse opposition. We know the invariable sentence on everything novel. It is false or bad. Then it is adopted with the statement that it had been known for a long time. In the hypothesis of collective invention, it seems that the mass of people should applaud inventors, recognizing itself in them, seeing its confused thought take form and body. But most often, the contrary happens. The misoneasm of crowds seems to me one of the strongest arguments in favor of the individual character of invention. We can doubtless distinguish two cases. In the first, the creator sums up and clearly translates the aspirations of his milieu. In the second, he is in opposition to it because he goes beyond it. How many innovators have been disappointed because they came before their time? But this distinction does not reach to the bottom of the question and is not at all sufficient as an answer. Let us leave this problem, which on account of its complexity, we can hardly solve through peremptory reasoning, and let us try to examine objectively the relation between creation and environment in order that we may see to what extent the creative imagination, without losing its individual character, which is impossible, depends on the intellectual and social surrounding. If with the American psychologist, we term the disposition for innovating a spontaneous variation, a Darwinian term explaining nothing but convenient, we may enunciate the following law. The tendency towards spontaneous variation, invention, is always an inverse ratio to the simplicity of the environment. The savage environment is, in its nature, very simple, consequently homogeneous. The lower races show a much smaller degree of differentiation than the higher. In them, as Jastro says, physical and psychic maturity is more precocious, and as the period just before the adult age is the plastic period, per se, this diminishes the chances of a departure from the common type. Thus comparison between whites and blacks, between primitive and civilized peoples, shows that, for equal populations, there is an enormous disproportion as to the number of innovators. The barbarian environment is much more complex and heterogeneous. It contains all the rudiments of civilized life. Consequently, it favors more individual variations and is richer and superior men. But these variations are rarely produced outside of a very restricted field, political, military, religious. So it seems impossible to agree with the Jolie that neither primitive nor barbarian peoples produce superior minds, unless, as he says, by this name we mean those that simply surpass their conjurers. But is there a criterion other than that? I see none. Greatness is altogether a relative idea, and would not our great creators seem to beings better endowed than we, very small? The civilized environment, requiring division of labor and consequently a constantly growing complexity of heterogeneous elements, is an open door for all vocations. Doubtless The social spirit always retains something of that tendency towards stagnation that is the rule in lower social orders. It is more favorable to tradition than to innovation. But the inevitable necessity of a warm competition between individuals and peoples is a natural antidote for that natural inertia. It favors useful variations. Moreover, civilization means evolution. Consequently, the conditions under which the imagination is active change with the times. Let us suppose, Weissman justly says, that in the Samoan Islands there were born a child having the singular and extraordinary genius of Mozart. What could he accomplish? At the most, extend the gamut of three or four tones to seven, and create a few more complex melodies, but he would be as unable to compose symphonies as Archimedes would have been to invent an electric dynamo. How many creators have been wrecked because the conditions necessary for their inventions were lacking? Roger Bacon foresaw several of our great discoveries, Cardin, the differential calculus, van Helmut, chemistry, and it has been possible to write a book on the forerunners of Darwin. We talk so much of the free flight of imagination of the all comprehensive power of the creator that we forget the sociological conditions, not to mention others, on which they are every moment dependent. In this respect, no invention is personal in the strict sense. There always remains in it a little of that anonymous collaboration, the highest expression of which, as we have seen, is the mythic activity. By way of summary, and whatever be the causes, we may say that there is a universal tendency in all living matter toward variation, whether we consider vegetables, animals, or the physical and mental man. The need of innovating is only a special case, rare in the lower races, frequent in the higher. This tendency toward variation is fundamental or superficial. As fundamental, it corresponds to genius, and survives through processes analogous to natural selection, that is, by its own power. As superficial, it corresponds to talent, survives and prospers chiefly through the help of circumstances and environment. Here the orientation comes from without, not from within. According as the spirit of the time inclines rather to poetry or painting or music or scientific research or industry or military art, minds of the second order are dragged into the current, showing that a goodly part of their power is in the appness, not for invention, but for imitation. Four. The determination of the characters belonging to the inventive genius has necessitated some seemingly irrelevant remarks on the action of the environment, let us return to invention strictly so-called. For inventing, there is always required a natural aptitude, sometimes a happy chance. The natural disposition should be accepted as a fact. Why does man create? Because he is capable of forming new combinations of ideas. However naive this answer may be, there is no other. The only thing possible is the determination of the conditions necessary and sufficient for producing novel combinations. This has been done in the first part of this book, and there is no occasion for going over it again. But there is another aspect in creative work to be considered, its psychological mechanism and the form of its development. Every normal person creates little or much. He may, in his ignorance, invent what has been already done a thousand times. Even if this is not a creation as regards the species, it is nonetheless such for the individual. It is wrong to say, as has been said, that an invention is a new and important idea. Novelty only is essential. That is the psychological mark. Importance and utility are accessory, merely social marks. Invention is thus unduly limited when we attribute it to great inventors only. At this moment, however, we are concerned only with these, and in them, the mechanism of invention is easier to study. We have already seen how false is the theory that holds that there is always a sudden stroke of inspiration, followed by a period of rapid or slow execution. On the contrary, observation reveals many processes that apparently differ less in the content of invention than according to individual temperament. I distinguish two general processes of which the rest are variations. In all creation, great or small, there is a directing idea, an ideal, understanding the word not in its transcendental sense, but merely as synonymous with end or goal, or more simply, a problem to solve. The locus of the idea of the given problem is not the same in the two processes. In the one I term complete, the ideal is at the beginning, in the abridged it is in the middle. There are also other differences, which the following tables will make more clear. First process complete. First phase, idea, commencement, special incubation of more or less duration. Second phase, invention or discovery, end. Third phase, verification or application. The idea excites attention and takes a fixed character. The period of brooding begins. For Newton it lasted 17 years, and at the time of definitely establishing his discovery by calculation he was so overcome with emotion that he had to assign to another the task of completing it. The mathematician Hamilton tells us that his method of Craternians burst upon him one day, completely finished, while he was near a bridge in Dublin. In that moment I had the result of 15 years labor. Darwin gathers material during his voyages, spends a long time observing plants and animals, then through the chance reading of Malthus' book hits upon and formulates his theory. In literary and artistic creation, similar examples are frequent. The second phase is only an instant, but essential, the moment of discovery when the creator exclaims his Eureka. With it the work is virtually really ended. Second process, abridged. First phase, general preparation, unconscious. Second phase, idea, commencement, inspiration, eruption. Third phase, constructive and developing period. This is the process in intuitive minds. Such seems to have been the case of Mozart, Poe, etc., without attempting what would be a tedious enumeration of examples We may say that this form of creation comprises two classes, those coming to maturity through an internal impulse, a sudden stroke of inspiration, and those who are suddenly illumined by chance. The two processes differ superficially rather than essentially. Let us briefly compare them. With some, the first phase is long and fully conscious, and others it seems negligible, equal to zero. There is nothing of it because there exists a natural or acquired tendency toward equilibrium. For a long time, says Schumann, I had the habit of racking my brain, and now I scarcely need to scratch my forehead. Everything runs naturally. The second phase is almost the same in both cases. It is only an instant, but it is essential. It is the moment of imaginative synthesis. Lastly, the third phase is very short for some, because the main labor is already done, and there remains only the finishing touch or the verification. It is long for others, because they must pass from the perceived idea to complete realization, and because the preparatory work is faulty, so that for these, the second creative process is shortened in appearance only. Such seem to me the two principal forms of the mechanism of creation. These are genera, they include species and varieties, that a patient and minued study of the processes peculiar to various inventors would reveal to us. We must bear in mind that this work makes no claim of being a monograph on invention, but merely a sketch. Footnote. Paul Hahn distinguishes three kinds of development in invention. One, spontaneous or reasoned, the directing idea persists to the end. Two, transformation, which comprises several contradictory evolutions, succeeding and replacing one another in consequence of impressions and feelings. Three, deviation, which is a composite of the two preceding forms. End of note. The two processes above described seem to correspond on the whole to the often made distinction between the intuitive or spontaneous and the combining or reflective imagination. The intuitive, essentially synthetic form is found principally in the purely imaginative types, children and savages. The mind proceeds from the whole to details. The generative idea resembles those concepts which, in the sciences, are of wide range because they condense a generalization rich in consequences. The subject is at first comprehended as a whole, development is organic, and we may compare it to the embryological process that causes a living being to arise from the fertilized ovum, analogous to an eminent logic. As a type of this creative form there has often been given a letter wherein Mozart explains his mode of conception. Recently, and that is why I do not reprint it here, it has been suspected of being apocryphal. I regret this. It was worthy of being authentic. According to Goethe, Shakespeare's Hamlet could have been created only through an intuitive process, etc. The combining, discursive imagination proceeds from details to the vaguely perceived unity. It starts from a fragment that serves as a matrix and becomes completed little by little. An adventure, an anecdote, a scene, a rapid glance, a detail, suggests a literary or artistic creation, but the organic form does not appear in a space. In science Kepler furnishes a good example of this combining imagination. It is known that he devoted a part of his life trying strange hypotheses, until the day when, having discovered the elliptical orbit of Mars, all his former work took shape and became an organized system. Did we want to make use once more of an embryological comparison, it would be necessary to look for it in the strange conceptions of ancient cosmogenies. They believe that from an earthly slime arose parts of bodies and separate organs which threw a mysterious attraction and happy chance, ended by sticking together and forming living bodies. It is an accepted view that of these two modes, one the abridged or intuitive process is superior to the other. I confess to having held this prejudice. On examination I find it doubtful, even false. There is a difference, not any higher or lower. First of all, both these forms of creation are necessary. The intuitive process can suffice for an invention of short duration, a rhyme, a story, a profile, a motif, an ornamental stroke, a little mechanical contrivance, etc. But as soon as the work requires time and development, the discursive process becomes absolutely necessary. With many inventors one easily perceives the change from one form to the other. We have seen that in the case of Chopin, creation was spontaneous, miraculous, coming complete and sudden. But Jor-San adds, the crisis over then commenced the most heart-rending labor at which I have ever been present, and she pictures him to us agonized for days and weeks running after the bits of lost inspiration. Goethe likewise, in a letter to Humboldt regarding his Faust, which occupied him for sixty years, full of interruptions and gaps, the difficulty has been to get through strength of will what is really to be gotten only by a spontaneous act of nature. Zola, according to his biographer Toulouse, imagines a novel always starting out with a general idea that dominates the work. Then, from induction to induction, he draws out of it the characters and all the story. To sum up, pure intuition and pure combination are exceptional, ordinarily it is a mixed process in which one of the two elements prevails and permits its qualification. If we note in addition that it would be easy to group under these two headings, names of the first rank, we shall conclude that the difference is altogether in the mechanism not in the nature of creation and is consequently accessory, and that this difference is reducible to natural dispositions which we may contrast as follows. Ready-witted minds excelling in conception, making the whole almost out of one piece, versus logically developing minds excelling in elaboration. Work primarily unconscious, versus patience the preponderating role. Work primarily conscious. Actions quick, versus actions slow. Five. Were we to raise monuments to inventors in the arts and sciences, there would be fewer statues to men than to children, animals, and especially fortune. In this wise expressed himself one of the sage thinkers of the 18th century, Turgot. The importance of the last factor has been much exaggerated. Chance may be taken in two senses, one general, the other narrow. One, in its broad meaning, chance depends on entirely internal, purely psychic circumstances. We know that one of the best conditions for inventing is abundance of material, accumulated experience, knowledge which augment the chances of original association of ideas. It has even been possible to maintain that the nature of memory implies the capacity of creating in a special direction. The revelations of inventors, or of their biographers, leave no doubt as to the necessity of a large number of sketches, trials, preliminary drawings, no matter whether it is a matter of industry, commerce, a machine, a poem, an opera, a picture, a building, a plan of campaign, etc. Genius for Discovery, says Jevons, depends on the number of notions and chance thoughts coming to the inventor's mind. To be fertile in hypotheses, that is the first requirement for finding something new. The inventor's brain must be full of forms, of melodies, of mechanical agents, of commercial combinations, of figures, etc., according to the nature of his work. But it is very rare that the ideas we find are exactly those we were seeking in order to find we must think along other lines. Nothing is more true. So much for chance within, it is indisputable, whatever may have been said of it, but it depends finally on individuality. From it arises the non-anticipated synthesis of ideas. The abundance of memory ideas we know is not a sufficient condition for creation, it is not even a necessary condition. It has been remarked that a relative ignorance is sometimes useful for invention, it favors assurance. There are inventions, especially scientific and industrial, that could not have been made had the inventor's been arrested by the ruling and presumably invincible dogmas. The inventor was all the more free, the more he was unaware of them. Then, as it was quite necessary to bow before the accomplished fact, theory was broadened to include the new discovery and explain it. Two, chance in the narrow sense is a fortunate occurrence stimulating invention, but to attribute to it the greater part is a partial erroneous view. Here what we call chance is the meeting and convergence of two factors, one internal, individual genius, the other external, the fortuitous occurrence. It is impossible to determine all that invention owes to chance in this sense. In primitive humanity its influence must have been enormous. The use of fire, the manufacture of weapons, of utensils, the casting of metals. All that came about through accidents as simple as, for example, a tree falling across the stream suggesting the first idea of a bridge. In historic times, and to keep merely to the modern period, the collection of authentic facts would fill a large volume. Who does not know of Newton's Apple, Galileo's lamp, Galvani's frog? Hugens declared that were it not for an unforeseen combination of circumstances the invention of the telescope would require a superhuman genius. It is known that we owe it to children who were playing with pieces of glass in an optician's shop. Schoenbein discovered ozone, thanks to the phosphorus odor of air, traversed by electric sparks. The discoveries of Grimaldi and of Fresnel in regard to interferences, those of Faraday, of Arego, of Foucault, of Fraunhofer, of Kirchhoff, and of hundreds of others owed something to fortune. It is said that the sight of a crab suggested to Watt the idea of an ingenious machine. To chance also many poets, novelists, dramatists, and artists have owed the best part of their inspirations. Literature and art abound in fictitious characters whose real originals are known. So much for the external fortuitous factor. Its role is clear. That of the internal factor is less so. It is not at all apparent to the ordinary mind escaping the unreflecting. Yet it is extremely important. The same fortuitous event passes by millions of men without exciting anything. How many of Pease's inhabitants had seen the lamp of their cathedral before Galileo? He does not necessarily find who wants to find. The happy chance comes only to those worthy of it. In order to profit thereby one must first possess the spirit of observation. Wide awake attention that isolates and fixates the accident. Then if it is a matter of scientific or practical inventions, the penetration that seizes upon relations and finds unforeseen resemblances. If it concerns aesthetic productions, the imagination that constructs, organizes, gives life. Without repeating an evident truism, although it is often misunderstood, we ought to end by remarking that chance is an occasion for, not an agent of, creation. End of second part, chapter four. Second part, chapter five, of essay on the creative imagination. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Essay on the creative imagination by Theadul Rebo. Second part, the development of the imagination, chapter five, law of the development of the imagination. Is imagination so often called a capricious faculty subject to some law, the question thus asked is too simple and we must make it more precise. As the direct cause of invention, great or small, the imagination acts without assignable determination. In this sense, it is what is known as spontaneity, a vague term which we have attempted to make clear. Its appearance is irreducible to any law. It results from the often fortuitous convergence of various factors previously studied. Leaving aside the moment of origin, does the inventive power, considered in its individual and specific development, seem to follow any law, or if this term appear to ambitious, does it present in the course of its evolution any perceptible regularity? Observation separates out an empirical law, that is, extracts directly an abridged formula that is only a condensation of facts. We may enunciate it thus. The creative imagination in its complete development passes through two periods separated by a critical phase, a period of autonomy or efflorescence, a critical moment, a period of definitive constitution presenting several aspects. This formula, being only a summary of experience, should be justified and explained by the latter. For this purpose, we can borrow facts from two distinct sources. A, individual development, which is the safest, clearest, and easiest to observe. B, the development of the species, or historical development, according to the accepted principle that phylogenesis and ontogenesis follow the same general line. One. First period. We are already acquainted with it. It is the imaginative age. In Normal Man it begins at about the age of three, and embraces infancy, adolescence, youth, sometimes a longer, sometimes a shorter period. Play, romantic invention, mythic and fantastic conceptions of the world, sum it up first. After that, in most, imagination is dependent on the influence of the passions, and especially sexual love. For a long time it remains without any rational element. Nevertheless, little by little, the latter wins a place. Reflection, including under the term the working of the intelligence, begins very late, grows slowly, and the proportion as it asserts itself gains an influence over the imaginative activity and tends to reduce it. This growing antagonism is represented in the following figure. The curve I M is that of the imagination during this first period. It rises at first very slowly, then attains a rapid ascent, and keeps at a height that marks its greatest attainment in this earliest form. The dotted line R X represents the rational development that begins later, advances much more slowly, but progressively, and reaches at X the level of the imaginative curve. The two intellectual forms are present like two rivals. The position M X on the ordinate marks the beginning of the second period. Second period. This is a critical period of indeterminate length, in any case, always much briefer than the other two. This critical moment can be characterized only by its causes and results. Its causes are, in the physiological sphere, the formation of an organism and a fully developed brain. In the psychological order, the antagonism between the pure subjectivity of the imagination and the objectivity of the ratio-senative processes. In other words, between mental instability and stability. As for the results, they appear only in the third period, the resultant of this obscure metamorphic stage. Third period. It is definite in some way or another, and in some degree the imagination has become rationalized. But this change is not reducible to a single formula. One. The creative imagination falls as is indicated in the figure where the imagination curve mn' descends rapidly toward the line of abscissus without ever reaching it. This is the most general case. Only truly imaginative minds are exceptions. One falls little by little into the prose of practical life. Such is the downfall of love which is treated as a phantom, the burial of the dreams of youth, etc. This is a regression, not an end. For the creative imagination disappears completely in no man, it only becomes accessory. Two. It keeps up but becomes transformed. It adapts itself to the conditions of rational thought. It is no longer pure imagination, but becomes a mixed form. The fact is indicated in the diagram by the union of the two lines, mn the imagination and xo the rational. This is the case with truly imaginative beings, in whom inventive power long remains young and fresh. This period of preservation of definitive constitution with rational transformation presents several varieties. First and simplest transformation into logical form. The creative power manifested in the first stage remains true to itself and always follows the same trend. Such are the precocious inventors, those whose vocation appeared early and never changed even. Invention loses its childish or juvenile character in becoming viral. There are no other changes. Compare Schiller's robbers written in his teens with his Wallenstein dating from his fortieth year, or the vague sketches of adolescent James Watt with his inventions as a man. Another case is the metamorphosis or deviation of creative power. We know what numbers of men who have left a great name in science, politics, mechanical or industrial invention started out with mediocre efforts in music, painting, and especially poetry, the drama, and fiction. The imaginative impulse did not discover its true direction at the outset. It imitated while trying to invent. What has been said above concerning the chronological development of the imagination would be tiresome repetition. The need of creating, followed from the first, the line of least resistance where it found certain materials ready to hand. But in order to arrive to full consciousness of itself it needed more time, more knowledge, more accumulated experience. We might here ask whether the contrary case is also met with. That is, where the imagination in this third period would return to the inclinations of the first period. This regressive metamorphosis, for I cannot style it otherwise, is rare but not without examples. Audinarily the creative imagination when it has passed its adult stage becomes attenuated by slow atrophy without undergoing serious change of form. Nevertheless, I am able to cite the case of a well-known scholar who began with a taste for art, especially plastic art, went over rapidly to literature, devoted his life to biologic studies in which he gained a very deserved reputation, then in turn became totally disgusted with scientific research, came back to literature and finally to the arts, which have entirely monopolized him. Finally, for there are very many forms in some the imagination, though strong, scarcely passes beyond the first stage, always retains its youthful, almost childish form, hardly modified by a minimum of rationality. Let us note that it is not a question here of the characteristic ingeniousness of some inventors which has caused them to be labeled grown-up children, but of the inherent simplicity of the imagination itself. This exceptional form is hardly reconcilable except with aesthetic creation. Let us add the mystic imagination. It could furnish examples less in its religious conceptions which are without control than in its reveries of a scientific turn. Contemporary mystics have invented adaptations of the world that take us back to the mythology of early times. This prolonged childhood of the imagination which is, in a word, an anomaly produces curiosities rather than lasting works. At this third period in the development of the imagination appears a second subsidiary law, that of increasing complexity. It follows a progressive line from the simple to the complex. Indeed it is not, strictly speaking, a law of the imagination, but of the rational development exerting an influence on it by a counteraction. It is a law of the mind that knows, not of one that imagines. It is needless to show that theoretical and practical intelligence develops as an increasing complex, but from the time that the mind distinguishes clearly between the possible and the impossible, between the fancied and the real, which is a capacity wanting in primitive man, as soon as man has formed rational habits and has undergone experience the impress of which is ineffacable, the creative is subject, nullens, volens to new conditions. It is no longer absolute mistress of itself, it has lost the assurance of its infancy and is under the rules of logical thought which draws it along in its train. Aside from the exceptions given above, and even they are partial exceptions only, creative power depends on the ability to understand which imposes upon it its form and developmental law. In literature and in the arts comparison between the simplicity of primitive creations and the complexity of advanced civilizations has become commonplace. In the practical, technical, scientific and social worlds the higher up we go the more we have to know in order to create and in default of this condition we merely repeat when we think we are inventing. Historically considered in the species the development of the imagination follows the same line of progress in the individual. We will not repeat it. It would be a mere reiteration in a vaguer form of what we have just said. A few brief notes will suffice. Vaiko, whose name deserves to be mentioned here because he was the first to see the good that we can get from myths for the study of the imagination, divided the course of humanity into three successive ages, divine or theocratic, heroic or fabulous human or historic. After which the cycle begins over again. Although this too-hypothetic conception is now forgotten it is sufficient for our purposes. What indeed are those first two stages that have everywhere and always been the harbingers and preparers of civilization if not the triumphant period of the imagination? It has produced myths, religions, legends, epics and martial narratives and imposing monuments erected in honor of gods and heroes. Many nations whose evolution has been incomplete have not gone beyond this stage. Let us now consider this question under a more definite, more limited, better known form the history of intellectual development in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. It shows very distinctly our three periods. No one will question the preponderance of the imagination during the Middle Ages. Intensity of religious feeling ceaselessly repeated epidemics of superstition, the institution of chivalry with all its mysteries, heroic poetry, chivalric romances, courts of love, efflorescence of Gothic art, the beginning of modern music, etc. On the other hand, the quantity of imagination applied during this epic to practical, industrial, commercial invention is very small. Their scientific culture, buried in Latin jargon, is made up partly of antique traditions, partly of fancies. What the ten centuries added to positive science is almost nil. Our figure with its two curves, one imaginative the other rational, thus applies just as well to historical development as to individual development during the first period. No more will anyone question that the Renaissance is a critical moment, a transition period, and a transformation analogous to that which we have noted in the individual, when there rises, opposed to imagination, a rival power. Finally it will be admitted without consent that during the modern period, social imagination has become partly decayed, partly rationalized under the influence of two principal factors, one scientific, the other economic. On the one hand, the development of science, on the other hand the great maritime discoveries by stimulating industrial and commercial inventions have given the imagination a new field of activity. There have arisen points of attraction that have drawn it into other paths, have imposed upon it other forms of creation that have often been neglected or misunderstood and that we shall study in the third part. And of second part, Chapter 5. Third part, preliminary, of Essay on the Creative Imagination. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Essay on the Creative Imagination by Thea Dool Rebo. Third part, the principal types of imagination. Preliminary. After having studied the Creative Imagination in its constitutive elements and in its development, we propose in this last part describing its principal forms. This will be neither analytic nor genetic, but concrete. The reader need not fear weary some repetition. Our subject is sufficiently complex to permit a third treatment without reiteration. The expression, Creative Imagination, like all general terms is an abbreviation and an abstraction. There is no imagination in general, but only men who imagine and who do so in different ways. The reality is in them. The diversities in creation, however numerous, should be reducible to types that are varieties of imagination and the determination of these varieties is analogous to that of character as related to will. Indeed, when we have settled upon the physiological and psychological conditions of voluntary activity, we have only done a work in general psychology. Men being variously constituted, their modes of action bear the stamp of their individuality. In each one, there is a personal factor that whatever its ultimate nature puts its mark on the will and makes it energetic or weak, rapid or slow, stable or unstable, continuous or intermittent. The same is true of the Creative Imagination. We cannot know it completely without a study of its varieties, without a special psychology toward which the following chapters are an attempt. How are we to determine these varieties? Many will be inclined to think that the method is indicated in advance. Have not psychologists distinguished according as one or another of image groups preponderates, visual, auditory, motor and mix types? Is not the way clear and is it not well enough to go in this direction? However natural this solution may appear, it is illusory and can lead to not. It rests on the equivocal use of the word imagination, which at one time means mere reproduction of images and at another time, creative activity, and which consequently keeps up the erroneous notion that in the creative imagination images, the raw materials are the essential part. The materials no doubt are not a negligible element, but by themselves they cannot reveal to us the species and varieties that have their origin in an anterior and superior tendency of mine. We shall see in the sequel that the very nature of constructive imagination may express itself indifferently in sounds, words, colors, lines and even numbers. The method that should allege to settle the various orientations of creative activity according to the nature of images would no more go to the bottom of the matter than would a classification of architecture according to the materials employed, as rock, brick, iron, wood, etc., with no regard for differences of style. This method aside, since the determination must be made according to the individuality of the architect, what method shall we follow? The matter is even more perplexing than the study of character. Although various authors have treated the latter subject, we have attempted it elsewhere, no one of the proposed classifications has been universally accepted. Nevertheless, despite their differences, they coincide in several points, because these have the advantage of resting on a common basis. The large manifestations of human nature, feeling, doing, thinking. In our subject, I find nothing like this and I seek in vain for a point of support. Classifications are made according to the essential dominating attributes. But, as regards the variety of the creative imagination, what are they? We may indeed, as was said above, distinguish two great classes, the intuitive and the combining. From another point of view, we may distinguish invention of free range, aesthetic, religious, mystic, from invention more or less restricted, mechanical, scientific, commercial, military, political, social. But these two divisions are too general, leading to nothing. A true classification should be in touch and this one soars too high. Leaving then to others more skilled or more fortunate, the task of irrational and systematic determination, if it be possible, we shall try merely to distinguish and describe the principal forms, such as experience gives them to us, emphasizing those that have been neglected or misinterpreted. What follows is thus neither a classification nor even a complete enumeration. We shall study at first two general forms of the creative imagination, the plastic and the defluent, and later special forms determined by their content and subject. Vund in a little notice passage of his psychological psychology has undertaken to determine the composition of the principal forms of talent which he reduces to four. The first element is imagination. It may be intuitive, that is, conferring on representations a clearness of sense perception or combining, then it operates on multiple combinations of images. A very marked development in both directions at the same time is uncommon. The author assigns reasons for this. The second element is understanding, verstaund. It may be inductive, that is, inclining toward the collection of facts in order to draw generalizations from them, or deductive, taking general concepts and laws to trace their consequences. If the intuitive imagination is joined to the inductive spirit, we have the talent for observation of the naturalist, the psychologist, the pedagogue, the man of affairs. If the intuitive imagination is combined with the deductive spirit, we have the analytical talent of the systematic naturalist of the geometrician. In Linnaeus and Cuvier, the intuitive element predominates in Gauss, the analytical element. The combining imagination joined to the inductive spirit constitutes the talent for invention strictly so called in industry, in the technique of science. It gives the artist and the poet the power of composing their works. The combining imagination plus the deductive spirit gives the speculative talent of the mathematician and philosopher. Deduction predominates in the former imagination in the latter. And a third part, preliminary. Third part, Chapter 1 of Essay on the Creative Imagination. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Essay on the Creative Imagination by Thea Dool Rebo. Third part, the principal types of imagination. Chapter 1 The Plastic Imagination 1. By plastic imagination I understand that which has for its special characters clearness and precision of form more explicitly those forms whose materials are clear images whatever be their nature approaching perception giving the impression of reality in which to their predominate associations with objective relations determinable with precision. The plastic mark therefore is in the images and in the modes of association of images in somewhat rough terms requiring modifications which the reader himself can make. It is the imagination that materializes. Between perception a very complex synthesis of qualities, attributes and relations and conception which is only the consciousness of equality quantity or relation often of only a single word accompanied by vague outlines and a latent potential knowledge between concrete and abstract the image occupies an intermediate position and can run from one pole to another now full of reality now almost as poor and pale as a concept. The representation here style plastic descends towards its point of origin it is an external imagination arising from sensation rather than from feeling and needing to become objective. Thus its general characters are easy of determination first and foremost it makes use of visual images then of motor images lastly in practical invention of tactile images. In a word the three groups of images present to a great extent the character of externality and objectivity. The clearness of form of these three groups proceeds from their origin because they arise from sensation well determined in space sight, movement, touch. Plastic imagination depends most on spatial conditions. We shall see that its opposite is that which depends least upon that factor or is most free from it. Among these naturally objective elements the plastic imagination chooses the most objective which fact gives its creations an air of reality and life. The second characteristic is inferiority of the effective element it appears only intermittently and is entirely blotted out before sensory impression. This form of the creative imagination coming especially from sensation aims especially at sensation thus it is rather superficial greatly devoid of that internal mark that comes from feeling. But if a chance that both sensory and effective elements are equal in power, if there is at the same time intense vision adequate to reality and profound emotion, violent shock then there arise extraordinary imaginative personages like Shakespeare, Carlisle, Michelet. It is needless to describe this form of imagination excellent pen pictures of which have been given by the critics. Thus Tane says of Carlisle he cannot stick to simple expression at every step he drops into figures gives body to every idea must touch forms. We see that he is possessed and haunted by glittering or saddening visions in him every thought is an explosion a flood of seething passion reaches the boiling point in his brain which overflows the warrant of images runs over the banks and rushes with all its mud and all its splendor. He cannot reason, he must paint. Despite the vigor of this sketch the perusal of ten pages of Sartre Versartes or of the French Revolution teaches more in regard to the nature of this imagination than all the commentaries. Let us merely note that its psychology reduces itself to an alternately ascending and descending movement between the two limiting points of perception and idea. The ascending process assigns to inanimate objects life, desires and feelings. Thus Michelet, the great streams of the Netherlands, tired with their very long course, perish as though from weariness in the unfeeling ocean. For a point of view in criticism that has seemed correct to many on this matter compare the well-known chapter on the pathetic fallacy by Ruskin in his modern painters. Here the great folio begets the octavo which becomes the parent of the small volume of booklets of ephemeral pamphlets invisible spirits flying in the night creating under the very eyes of tyrants the circulation of liberty. The descending process materializes abstractions, gives them body, makes them flesh and bone. The middle ages become a poor child torn from the bowels of Christianity, born amidst tears, grown up in prayer and reverie in anguish of heart, dying without achieving anything. In this dazzle of images there is a momentary return to primitive animism. Two. In order to more fully understand the plastic imagination let us take up its principal manifestations. One. First the arts dealing with form where its necessity is evident. The sculptor, painter, architect must have visual and tactile motor images. It is the material in which their creations are wrapped up. Even leaving out the striking acts requiring such a sure and tenacious external vision, portraits executed from memory, exact remembrance of faces at the end of 20 years as in the case of Gavarni, etc. and limiting ourselves merely to the usual, the plastic arts demand an observant imagination. For the majority of men the concrete image of a face a form, a color usually remains vague and fleeting. Red, blue, black, white tree, animal, head, mouth, arm, etc. are scarcely more than words. Symbols expressing a rough synthesis. For the painter on the other hand, images have a very high precision of details and what he sees beneath the words or in real objects are analyzed facts, positive elements of perception and movement. The role of tactile motor images is not insignificant. There has often been cited the instance of sculptors who, becoming blind, have nevertheless been able to fashion busts of close resemblance to the original. This is memory of touch and of muscular sense entirely equivalent to the visual memory of the portrait painters mentioned above. Practical knowledge of design and modeling, that is of contour and relief, though resulting from natural or acquired disposition and psychological conditions, the development of definite sensory motor regions and their connections and on psychological conditions the acquisition and organization of appropriate images. We learn to paint and carve, wrote a contemporary painter, as we do sewing, embroidery, sawing, filing and turning. In short like all manual labor requiring associated and combined acts. Two, another form of plastic imagination uses words as means for evoking vivid and clear impressions of sight, touch, movement. It is the poetic or literary form. Of it we find in Victor Hugo a Finnish type. As all know we need only open his works at hazard to find a stream of glittering images. But what is their nature? His recent biographers guided by contemporary psychology have well shown that they always paint scenes or movements. It is unnecessary to give proofs. Some facts have a broader range and throw light upon his psychology. Thus we are told that he never dictates or rhymes from memory and composes only in writing, for he believes that writing has its own features and he wants to see the words. Seifiel Gaultier who knows and understands him so well says, I also believe that in the sentence we need most of all an ocular rhythm. A book is made to be read, not to be spoken aloud. It is added that Victor Hugo never spoke his verses, but wrote them out and would often illustrate them on the margin, as if he needed to fixate the image in order to find the appropriate word. After visual representations come those of movement. The steeple pierces the horizon. The mountain rends the cloud. The mountain raises himself and looks about. The cold caverns open their mouths drowsily. The wind lashes the rock into tears with the waterfall. The thorn is an enraged plant and so on indefinitely. A more curious fact is the transposition of sonorous sensation or images of sound, and like them without form or figure into visual and motor images. The ruffles of sound that the pfeifer cuts out. The flute goes up to alto like a frail capital on a column. This thoroughly plastic imagination remains identical with itself, while reducing everything spontaneously, unconsciously, to spatial terms. In literature this altogether foreign mode of creative activity has found its most complete expression among the Parnassians and their Congeners, whose creed is summed up in the formula, Faultless Form and Impassiveness. Théophile Gaultier claims that a poet, no matter what may be said of him, is a workman. It is not necessary that he have more intelligence than a laborer and have knowledge of a state other than his own without which he does badly. I regard as perfectly absurd the mania that people have of hoisting them, the poets, up onto an ideal pedestal. Nothing is less ideal than a poet. For him words have in themselves and outside the meaning they express their own beauty and value just like precious stones not yet cut and mounted in bracelets, necklaces, and rings. They charm the understanding that looks at them and takes them from the finger to the little pile where they are put aside for future use. If this statement, whether sincere or not, is taken literally, I see no longer any difference save as regards the materials employed between the imagination of poets and the imagination active in the mechanical arts. For the usefulness of the one and the uselessness of the other is a characteristic foreign to yourself. 3. In the teeming mass of myths and religious conceptions that the 19th century has gathered with so much care we could establish various classifications according to race, content, intellectual level, and in a more artificial manner but one suitable for our subject according to the degree of precision or fluidity. Neglecting intermediate forms we may indeed divide them into two groups. Some are clear and outline consistent, relatively logical, resembling a definite historical relation. Others are vague, multi-form, incoherent, contradictory, their characters change into one another, the tales are mixed and are imperceptible in the whole. The former types are the work of the plastic imagination. Such are, if we eliminate oriental influences, most of the myths belonging to Greece when on emerging from the earliest period they attain their definite constitution. It has been held that the plastic character of these religious conceptions is an effect of aesthetic development. Statues, boss reliefs, poetry, and even painting have made definite the attributes of the gods and their history. Without denying this influence we must nevertheless understand that it is only auxiliary. To those who would challenge this opinion let us recall that the Hindus have had gigantic poems, have covered their temples with sculptures, and yet their fluid mythology is the opposite of the Greek. Among the peoples who have incarnated their divinities in no statue, in no human or animal form, we find the Germans and the Celts. But the mythology of the former is clear, well kept within large lines, and that of the latter is fleeting and inconsistent, the despair of scholars. It is then certain that myths of the plastic kind are the fruits of an innate quality of mind, of a mode of feeling and of translating, at a given moment in its history, the preponderating characters of a race, in short, of a form of imagination and ultimately of a special cerebral structure. Four, the most complete manifestation of the plastic imagination is met with in mechanical invention and what is allied there too, in consequence of the need of very exact representations of qualities and relations. But this is a specialized form and as its importance has been too often misunderstood, it deserves a separate study, C Chapter 5, Infra. Three, such are the principle traits of this type of imagination, clearness of outline, both of the whole and of the details. It is not identical with the form called realistic, it is more comprehensive, it is a genus of which realism is a species. Moreover, the latter expression being reserved by custom for aesthetic creation, I purposely digress in order to dwell on this point, that the aesthetic imagination has no essential character belonging exclusively to it and that it differs from other forms, scientific, mechanical, etc., only in its materials and in its end, not in its primary nature. On the whole the plastic imagination could be summed up in the expression, clearness and complexity. It always preserves the mark of its original source. That is, in the creator and those disposed to enjoy and understand him, it tends to approach the clearness of perception. Would it be improper to consider as a variety of the genus a mode of representation that could be expressed as clearness and simplicity? It is the dry and rational imagination. Without depreciating it, we may say that it is rather a condition of imaginative poverty. We hold with delay that the average Frenchman furnishes a good example of it. The Frenchman, says he, does not usually have a very strong imagination. His internal vision has neither the hallucinative intensity nor the exuberant fancy of the German and Anglo-Saxon mind. It is an intellectual and distant view, rather than a sensitive resurrection or an immediate contact with and possession of the things themselves. Inclined to deduce and construct, our intellect excels less in representing to itself real things than in discovering relations between possible or necessary things. In other words, it is a logical and combining imagination that takes pleasure in what has been termed the abstract view of life. The Chateaubriand's, Hugo's, Flaubert's, Zola's are exceptional with us. We reason more than we imagine. Its psychological constitution is reducible to two elements. Slightly concrete images, schemas approaching general ideas. For their association, relations predominantly rational, more the products of the logic of the intellect than of the logic of the feelings. It lacks the sudden, violent shock of emotion that gives brilliancy to images, making them arise and grouping them in unforeseen combinations. It is a form of invention and construction that is more the work of reason than of imagination proper. Consequently is it not paradoxical to relate it to plastic imagination as species to genus? It would be idle to enter upon a discussion of the subject here without attempting a classification. Let us merely note the likenesses and differences. Both are above all objective, the first because it is sensory, the other because it is rational. Both make use of analogous modes of association, dependent more on the nature of things than on the personal impression of the subject. Opposition exists only on one point. The former is made up of vivid images that approach perception.  Rational imagination is plastic imagination desiccated and simplified. And of third part, chapter one. Third part, chapter two, of essay on the creative imagination. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Essay on the creative imagination by Thea Dill-Ribo. Third part, the principal types of imagination. Chapter two, the defluent imagination. One. The defluent imagination is another general form, but one that is completely opposed to the foregoing. It consists of vaguely outlined indistinct images that are evoked and joined according to the least rigorous modes of association. It presents then two things for our consideration. The nature of the images and of their associations. One. It employs neither the clear-cut, concrete, reality penetrated images of the plastic imagination, nor the semi-schematic representations of the rational imagination, but those midway in that ascending and descending scale extending from perception to conception. This determination however is insufficient and we can make it more precise. Analysis indeed discovers a certain class of ill-understood images which I call emotional abstractions and which are the proper material for the defluent imagination. These images are reduced to certain qualities or attributes of things taking the place of the whole and chosen from among the others for various reasons, the origin of which is effective. We shall comprehend their nature better through the following comparison. Intellectual or rational abstraction results from the choice of a fundamental or at least principal character which becomes the substitute for all the rest that is omitted. Thus extension, resistance or impenetrability come to represent through simplification and abbreviation what we call matter. Emotional abstraction on the other hand results from the permanent or temporary predominance of an emotional state. Some aspect of a thing, essential or not, comes into relief solely because it is in direct relation to the disposition of our sensibility with no other preoccupation. A quality and attribute is spontaneously arbitrarily selected because it impresses us at the given instant in the final analysis because it somehow pleases or displeases us. The images of this class have an impressionist mark. They are abstractions in the strict sense. That is, extracts from and simplifications of the sensory data. They act less through a direct influence than by evoking, suggesting, whispering. They permit a glance, a passing glimpse. We may justly call them crepuscular or twilight ideas. 2. As for the forms of association, the relations linking these images, they do not depend so much on the order and connections of things, as on the changing dispositions of the mind. They have a very marked subjective character. Some depend on the intellectual factor. The most usual are based on chance, on distant and vacillating analogies, further down even on assonance and alliteration. Others depend on the effective factor and are ruled by the disposition of the moment, association by contrast, especially those alike in emotional basis, which have been previously studied. See first part, chapter 2. Thus the different imagination is, trait for trait, the opposite of the plastic imagination. It has a general character of inwardness, because it arises less from sensation than from feeling, often from a simple and fugitive impression. Its creations have not the organic character of the other, lacking a stable center of attraction, but they act by diffusion and inclusion. 2. By its very nature it is du jour, if not de facto, excluded from certain territories. If it ventures therein, it produces only abortions. This is true of the practical sphere, which permits neither vague images nor approximate constructions, and of the scientific world, where the imagination may be used only to create a theory or invent processes of discovery, experiments, schemes of reasoning. Even with these exceptions, there is still left for it a very wide range. Let us rapidly pass over some very frequent, very well-known manifestations of the different imagination, those obliterated forms in which it does not reach complete development and cannot give the full measure of its power. 1. Reverie and related states. This is perhaps the purest specimen of the kind, but it remains embryonic. 2. The romantic turn of mind. This is seen in those who, confronted by any event whatever, or an unknown person, make up spontaneously, involuntarily, in spite of themselves, a story out of whole cloth. I shall later give examples of it according to the written testimony of several people. In whatever concerns themselves or others, they create an imagined world, which they substitute for the real. 3. The fantastic mind. Here we come away from the vague forms. The defluent imagination becomes substantial and asserts itself through its permanence. At bottom, this fantastic form is the romantic spirit tending toward objectification. The invention, which was at first only a thoroughly internal construction, and recognized as such, aspires to become external, to become realized, and when it ventures into a world other than its own, one requiring the rigorous conditions of the practical imagination, it is wrecked, or succeeds only through chance, and that very rarely. To this class belong those inventors known to everyone who are fertile in methods of enriching themselves or their country by means of agricultural, mining, industrial, or commercial enterprises, the makers of the utopias of finance, politics, society, etc. It is a form of imagination unnaturally oriented toward the practical. 4. The list increases with myths and religious conceptions, the imagination in its diffuse form here finds itself on its own ground. Depending on linguistics, it has recently been maintained that, among the Aryans at least, the imagination created at first only momentary gods, Auchenblikskutter. Every time that primitive man in the presence of a phenomenon experienced a perceptible emotion, he translated it by a name. The manifestation of what was imagined, the divine part in the emotion, is called. Every religious emotion gives rise to a new name, that is, a new divinity. But the religious imagination is never identical with itself. Though produced by the same phenomenon, it translates itself at two different moments by two different words. As a consequence, during the early periods of the human race religious names must have been applied not to classes of beings or events, but to individual beings or events. When worshipping the comet or the fig tree, men must have worshipped each one of the comets they beheld crossing the sky, every one of the fig trees that their eyes saw. Later, with advancing capacity for generalization, these instantaneous divinities would be condensed into more consistent gods. If this hypothesis, which has aroused many criticisms, be sound, if this state were met with, it would be the ideal type of imaginative instability in religious order. Nearer to us, authentic evidence shows that certain peoples, at given stages of their history, have created such vague, fluid myths that we cannot succeed in delimiting them. Every god can change himself into another, different, or even opposite one. The Semitic religions might furnish examples of this. There has been established the identity of Ishtar, Astart, T'nit, Beloth, T'rketo, Milita, Ascara, and still others. But it is in the early religion of the Hindus that we perceive best this kaleidoscopic process applied to divine beings. In the Vedic hymns not only are the clouds now serpents, now cows, and later fortresses, the retreats of the dark Asuras. But we see Agni, fire becoming Kama, desire or love, and Indra becoming Varuna, and so on. We cannot imagine, says T'nit, such a great clearness. The myth here is not of the skies, but an expression. No language is more true and more supple. It permits a glimpse of, or rather it causes us to discern the forms of clouds, movements of the air, changes of seasons, all the happenings of sky, fire, storm. External nature has never met a mind so impressionable and pliant in which to mirror itself in all the inexhaustible variety of its appearances. However changeable nature may be, this imagination corresponds to it. It has no fixed gods, they are changeable, like the things themselves. They blend into one another. Every one of them is in turn the supreme deity. No one of them is a distinct personality. Every one is only a moment of nature, able, according to the aperception of the moment, to include its neighbor or to be included by it. In this fashion they swarm and team. Every moment of nature and every aperceptive moment may furnish one of them. Let us indeed note that for the worshipper the God to whom he addresses himself and while he is praying is always the greatest and most powerful. The assignment of attributes passes suddenly from one to the other, regardless of the contradiction. In this versatility some writers believe they have discovered a vague pantheistic conception. Nothing is more questionable fundamentally than this interpretation. It is more in harmony with the psychology of these naive minds to assume simply an extreme state of impressionism explicable by the logic of feeling. Thus there is a complete antithesis between the imagination that has created the clear cut and definite polytheism of the Greeks and that once have issued those fluctuating divinities that allow the presentation of the future doctrine of Maya, of universal illusion, another more refined form of the defluent imagination. Finally let us note that the Hellenic imagination realized its gods through anthropomorphism. They are the ideal forms of human attributes or as it has been expressed human qualities raised to their highest power. Majesty beauty, power, wisdom etc. The Hindu imagination proceeds through symbolism. Its divinities have several heads, several arms, several legs, to symbolize limitless intelligence, power, etc. or better still, animal forms, as for example Ganesa, the god of wisdom with the head of the elephant reputed the wisest of animals. Five, it would be easy to show by the history of literature and the fine arts that the vague forms have been preferred according to people's times and places. Let us limit ourselves to a single contemporary example that is complete and systematically created the art of the symbolists. It is not here a question of criticism of praise or even of appreciation but merely of a consideration of it as a psychological fact likely to instruct us in regard to the nature of the defluent imagination. This form of art despises the clear and exact representation of the outer world. It replaces it by a sort of music that aspires to express the changing and fleeting awareness of the human soul. It is the school of the subject who wants to know only mental states. To that end it makes use of a natural or artificial lack of precision. Everything floats in a dream. Men as well as things often without mark in time and space. Something happens. One knows not where or when. It belongs to no country, is of no period in time. It is the forest, the traveler, the city, the night, the wood, less frequently even, he, she, it. In short, all the vague and unstable characters of the pure, contentless, effective state. This process of suggestion sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails. The word is the sign par excellence. As according to the symbolist, it should give us emotions rather than representations. It is necessary that it lose partially its intellectual function and undergo a new adaptation. A principle process consists of employing usual words and changing their ordinary acceptation. Or rather associating them in such a way that they lose their precise meaning and appear vague and mysterious. These are the words written in the depths. The writers do not name, they leave it for us to infer. They banish common places through lack of precision and leave to things only the power of moving. A rose is not described by the particular sensations that it causes, but by the general condition that it excites. Another method is the employment of new words or words that have fallen into disuse. Ordinary words retain, in spite of everything, somewhat of their customary meaning, associations and thoughts, condensed in them through long habit. Words forgotten during four or five centuries escape this condition. They are coins without fixed value. Lastly, a still more radical method is the attempt to give two words an exclusively emotional valuation. Unconsciously or as the result of reflection, some symbolists have come to this extreme trial, which the logic of events imposed upon them. Ordinarily, thought expresses itself in words, feeling, in gestures, cries, interjections, change of tone. It finds its complete and classic expression in music. The symbolists want to transfer the role of sound to words, to make them the instrument for translating and suggesting emotion through sound alone. Words have to act not as signs, but as sounds. They are musical notes in the service of an impassioned psychology. All this, indeed, concerns only imagination expressing itself in words. But we know that the symbolic school has applied itself to the plastic arts to treat them in its own way. The difference, however, is in the vesture that the aesthetic ideal assumes. The pre-Raphaelites have attempted by effacing forms, outlines, semblances, colors to cause things to appear as mere sources of emotion in a word to paint emotions. To sum up, in this form of the defluent imagination, the emotional factor exercises supreme authority. May the type of imagination the chief manifestations of which we have just enumerated be considered as identical with the idealistic imagination? This question is similar to that asked in the preceding chapter, and permits the same answer. In idealistic art, doubtless, the material element furnished in perception, form, color, touch, effort, is minimized, subtleized, sublimated, refined. So as to approach as nearly as possible to a purely internal state. By the nature of its favorite images, by its preference for vague associations and uncertain relations, it presents all the characteristics of defluent imagination. But the latter covers a much broader field. It is the genus of which the other is a species. Thus it would be erroneous to regard the fantastic imagination as idealistic. It has no claim to the term. On the contrary, it believes itself adapted for practical work and acts in that direction. In addition it must be recognized that were we to make a complete review of all the forms of aesthetic creation, we should frequently be embarrassed to classify them. Because there are among them, as in the case of characters, mixed or composite forms. Here for example are two kinds seemingly belonging to the defluent imagination which, however, do not permit it to completely include them. A. The wonder class fairy tales, the thousand and one nights, romances of chivalry, Ariosto's poem, etc. is a survival of the mythic epic. When the imagination is given free play without control or check. Whereas in the course of centuries, art and especially literary creation becomes, as we have already said, a decadent and rationalized mythology. This form of invention consists neither of idealizing the external world nor reproducing it with the minuteness of realism. But remaking the universe to suit oneself without taking into account natural laws and despising the impossible. It is a liberated realism. Often in an environment of pure fancy where only caprice reigns the characters appear clear, well fashioned, living. The wonder class belongs then to the vague as well as to the plastic hallucination. More or less to one or to the other according to the temperament of the creator. B. The fantastic class develops under the same conditions. Its chiefs, Hoffman, Poe, and others, are classed by critics as realist. They are such by virtue of their vision intensified to hallucination, the precision in details, the rigorous logic of characters and events. They rationalize the improbable. The same statement holds good as regards the temptations of St. Anthony and other analogous subjects that have often attracted painters. On the other hand the environment is strange, shrouded in mystery. Men and things move in an unreal atmosphere where one feels rather than perceives. It is thus proper to remark that this class easily glides into the deeply sad, the horrible, terrifying, nightmare-producing, satanic literature. Goya's paintings of robbers and thieves being garreted words a genius, bizarre to the point of extravagance, who paints only suicides or the heads of guillotine criminals. Religious conceptions could also furnish a fine lot of examples. Dante's Inferno, the twenty-eight hells of Buddhism, which are perhaps the masterpieces of this class, etc. But all this belongs to another division of our subject, one that I have expressly eliminated from this essay, the mythology of the creative imagination. Three, there yet remains for us to study two important varieties that I connect with the defluent imagination. Numerical Imagination Under this head I designate the imagination that takes pleasure in the unlimited in infinity of time and space under the form of number. It seems at first that these two terms imagination and number must be mutually exclusive. Every number is precise, rigorously determined, since we can always reduce it to a relation with unity. It owes nothing to fancy. But the series of numbers is unlimited in two directions. Starting from any term in the series we may go on ever increasingly or ever decreasingly. The working of the mind gives rise to a possible infinity that is limitless. It thus traces a root for the movement of the imagination. The number, or rather the series of numbers, is less an object than a vehicle. This form of imagination is produced in two principal ways in religious conceptions and cosmogenies and in science. One, numerical imagination has nowhere been more exuberant than among the peoples of the Orient. They have played with number with magnificent audacity and prodigality. Caldean Cosmogeny relates that Owain's The Fish God devoted 259,200 years to the education of mankind. Then came a period of 432,000 years taken up with the reigns of mythical personages. And at the end of these 691,000 years the deluge renewed the face of the earth. The Egyptians also were liberal with millions of years and in the face of the brief and limited chronology of the Greeks another kind of imagination were want to exclaim, you are only children. But the Hindus have done better than all that. They have invented enormous units to serve as basis in content for their numerical fancies. The Koti equivalent to 10 millions the Kalpa or the age of the world between two destructions 4,328,000,000 years. Each Kalpa is merely one of 365 days of divine life. I leave to the reader if he is so inclined the work of calculating this appalling number. The Jhanas divide time into two periods one ascending the other descending each is a fabulous duration. Two quadrillion oceans of years, each ocean being itself equivalent to one quadrillion years. If there were a lofty rock 16 miles in each dimension and one touched it once in a hundred years with a bit of the finest Bonaire's linen it would be reduced to the size of a Wango stone before a fourth of one of these Kalpas had rolled by. In the sacred books of Buddhism poor, dry, colorless as they ordinarily are imagination in its numerical forms is triumphant. The Lalita Vistara is full of nomenclatures and enumerations of fatiguing monotony. Buddha is seated on a rock shaded by 100,000 parasols surrounded by minor gods forming an assemblage of 68,000 Kotes that is 30 million persons. And this surpasses all the rest. He had experienced many vicitudes during 10 billion 100 million Kalpas. This makes one dizzy. Two, numerical imagination in the sciences does not take on these delirious forms. It has the advantage of resting on an objective basis. It is the substitute of an unrepresentable reality. Scientific culture, which people often accuse of stifling imagination on the contrary, opens to it a field much faster than aesthetics. Astronomy delights in infinitudes of time and space. It sees worlds arise burn at first with the feeble light of a nebular mass, glow like suns, become chilled, covered with spots, and then become condensed. Geology follows the development of our earth through upheavals and cataclysms. It foresees a distant future when our globe, deprived of the atmospheric vapors which protect it will perish of cold. The hypotheses of physics and chemistry in regard to atoms and molecules are not less reckless than the speculations of the Hindu imagination. Physicists have determined the volume of a molecule and referring to the numbers that they give we find that a cube, a millimeter each way, scarcely the volume of a silkworm's egg would contain a number of molecules at least equal to the cube of 10 million. That is, unity followed by 21 zeros. One scientist has calculated that if one had to count them and could separate in thought a million per second, it would take more than 250 million years. The being who commenced the task at the time that our solar system could have been no more than a formless nebula would not yet have reached the end. Biology with its protoplasmic elements, its plastids, gemmules, hypotheses on hereditary transmission by means of infinitesimal subdivisions, the theory of evolution which speaks offhand of periods of 100,000 years and many other scientific theses that I omit, offer fine material for the numerical imagination. More than one scientist has even made use of this form of imagination for the pleasure of developing a purely fanciful notion. Thus van Baer supposing that we might perceive the portions of duration in another way, imagines the changes that would result therefrom in our outlook on nature. Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly instead of barely 10 as now. If our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions it might be 1,000 times as short. We should live less than a month and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer and believe in the heats of the Carboniferous Era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only 1,000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time and consequently to live 1,000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations. Annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water springs. The motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannonballs. The sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. The psychological conditions of this variety of the creative imagination are then these absence of limitation in time and space whence the possibility of an endless movement in all directions and the possibility of filling either with a myriad of dimly perceived events. These events not being susceptible of clear representation as to their nature and quantity escaping even a schematic representation the imagination makes its constructions with substitutes that are in this case numbers. For musical imagination musical imagination deserves a separate monograph. As the task requires in addition to psychological capacity a profound knowledge of musical history and technique it cannot be undertaken here. I propose only one thing namely to show that it has its own individual mark that it is the type of effective imagination. I have elsewhere attempted to prove that contrary to the general opinion of psychologists there exists in many men at least an effective memory that is a memory of emotions strictly so called and not merely of the intellectual conditions that caused or accompanied them. I hold that there exists also a form of the creative imagination that is purely emotional the contents of which are wholly made up of states of mind, dispositions, wants, aspirations, feelings and emotions of all kinds and that it is the characteristic of the composer of genius of the born musician. The musician sees in the world what concerns him he carries in his head a coherent system of tone images in which every element has its place and value he perceives delicate differences of sound of timber he succeeds through exercise in penetrating into their most varied combinations and the knowledge of harmonious relations is for him what design and the knowledge of color are for the painter intervals and harmony rhythm and tone qualities are, as it were standards to which he relates his present perceptions and which he causes to enter into the marvelous constructions of his fancy these sound elements and their combinations are the words of a special language that is very clear for some impenetrable for others people have spoken to a tiresome extent of the vagueness of musical expression some have been pleased to hold that everyone may interpret it in his own way we must surely recognize that emotional language does not possess the precision of intellectual language but in music it is the same as in any other idiom there are those who do not understand at all those who have understand and consequently always give wrong renderings and those who understand well and in this last category there are grades as varying as the aptitude for perceiving Mendelssohn wrote to an author who composed verses for his leader music is more definite than speech and to want to explain it by means of words is to make the meaning obscure I do not think that word suffice for that end and where I persuaded to the contrary I would not compose music there are people who accuse music of being ambiguous who allege that words are always understood for me it is just the other way words seem to me vague, ambiguous, unintelligible if we compare them to the true music that fills the soul with a thousand things better than words what the music that I like expresses to me seems to me too definite rather than too indefinite for anyone to be able to match words to it the materials necessary for this form of imaginative construction are gathered slowly many centuries passed between the early ages when man's voice and the simple instruments imitating it translated simple emotions to the period when the efforts of antiquity and of the middle ages finally furnished the musical imagination with the means of expressing itself completely and allowed complex and difficult constructions in sound the development of music slow and belated as compared to the other arts has perhaps been due, in part at least to the fact that the effective imagination imitative, descriptive, picturesque music being only an episode and accessory being made up, contrary to sensorial imagination of tenuous, subtle, fugitive states has been long in seeking its methods of analysis and of expression however it be, Bach and the contrapuntist by their treatment in an independent manner of the different voices constituting harmony have opened a new path henceforth memory will be able to develop and give rise to the richest combinations we shall be able to associate various melodies sing them at the same time or in alternation assign them to various instruments vary indefinitely the pitch of singing and concerted voices the boundless realm of musical combinations is open it has been worthwhile to take the trouble to invent modern polyphony with its power of expressing at the same time different even opposing feelings is a marvelous instrument for a form of imagination which alien to the forms clear cut in space moves only in time what furnishes us the best entrance into the psychology of this form of imagination is the natural transposition operative in musicians it consists in this an external or internal impression any occurrence whatever a metaphysical idea undergoes change of a certain kind which the following examples will make better understood than any amount of commentary Beethoven said of Kloppstock's Messiah always Maistoso written in D-flat major in his fourth symphony he expressed musically the destiny of Napoleon in the ninth symphony he tries to give a proof of the existence of God by the side of a dead friend in a room draped in black improvises the adagio of the sonata and C-sharp minor the biographers of Mendelssohn relate analogous instances of transposition under musical form during a storm that almost engulfed Jor-son Chopin alone in the house under the influence of his agony and half unconsciously composed one of his preludes the case of Schumann is perhaps the most curious of all from the age of eight he would amuse himself with sketching what might be called musical portraits drawing by means of various turns of song and varied rhythms the shades of character and even the physical peculiarities of his young comrades he sometimes succeeded in making such striking resemblances that all would recognize with no further designation the figure indicated by the skillful fingers that genius was already guiding he said later I feel myself affected by all that goes on in the world men, politics, literature I reflect on all that in my own way and it issues outwards in the form of music that is why many of my compositions are so hard to understand they relate to events of distant interest though important but everything remarkable that has furnished me by the period I must express musically let us recall again that Weber interpreted in one of the finest scenes of his Freischultz the bullet casting scene near the falls of Geralt's Hall at the hour when the moon's rays cause the basin in which the water rushes and boils to glisten like silver in short the events go into the composer's brain mixed there and come out changed into a musical structure the plastic imagination furnishes us a counter-proof it transposes inversely the musical impression traverses the brain sets it in turmoil but comes out transformed into visual images we have already cited examples from Victor Hugo in chapter one Goethe, we know, had poor musical gifts after having the young Mendelssohn render an overture from Bach he exclaimed, how pompous and grand that is it seems to me like a procession of grand personages in gala attire descending the steps of a gigantic staircase we might generalize the question and ask whether or no there exists a natural antagonism between true musical imagination and plastic imagination an answer in the affirmative seems scarcely liable to be challenged I had undertaken an investigation which, at the outset, made for a different goal it happens that it answered clearly enough the question propounded above the conclusion has arisen of itself unsought, which fact saves me from any charge of a preconceived opinion the question asked orally of a large number of people was this does hearing or even remembering a bit of symphonic music excite visual images in you and of what kind are they for self-evident reasons dramatic music was expressly excluded the appearance of the theater stage and scenery imposed on the observer visual perceptions that have a tendency to be repeated later in the form of memories the result of observation and of the collected answers are summed up as follows those who possess great musical culture and, this is by far more important taste or passion for music generally have no visual images if these arise it is only momentarily and by chance I give a few of the answers I see absolutely nothing I am occupied altogether with the pleasure of the music I live entirely in a world of sound in accordance with my knowledge of harmony I analyze the harmonies but not for long I follow the development of the phrases I see nothing I am given up wholly to my impressions I believe that the chief effect of music is to heighten in everyone the predominating feelings those who possess little musical culture and especially those having little taste for music have very clear visual representations it must nevertheless be admitted that it is very hard to investigate these people because of their anti-musical natures they avoid concerts or at the most resign themselves to sit through an opera however since the nature and quality of the music does not matter here we may quote hearing a Barbary organ in the street I picture the instrument to myself I see the man turning the crank if military music sounds from afar I see a regiment marching an excellent pianist plays for a friend Beethoven's sonata in C sharp minor putting into its execution all the pathos of which he is capable the other sees in it the tumult and excitement of affair here the musical rendering is misinterpreted through misapprehension I have several times noted this in people familiar with design or painting music calls up pictures and various scenes one of these persons says that he is besieged by visual images here the hearing of music evidently acts as excitant in a word insofar as it is permissible in psychology to make use of general formulas and with the proviso that they apply to most, not to all cases we may say that during the working of the musical imagination the appearance of visual images is the exception that when this form of imagination is weak the appearance of images is the rule furthermore this result of observation is altogether in accord with logic there is an irreducible antithesis between effective imagination the characteristic of which is interiority and visual imagination basically objective intellectual language speech is an arrangement of words that stand for objects, qualities relations, extracts of things in order to be understood they must call up in consciousness the corresponding images emotional language, music is an appropriate ordering of successive or simultaneous sounds of melodies and harmonies that are signs of effective states in order to be understood they must call up in consciousness the corresponding effective modifications but in the non-musically inclined the evocative power is small sonorous combinations excite only superficial and unstable internal states the exterior excitation that of the sounds follows the line of least resistance and acting according to the psychic nature of the individual objective images, pictures visual representations well or ill adapted to sum up, in contrast to sensorial imagination which has its origin without effective imagination begins within the stuff of its creation is found in the mental states enumerated above and in their enumerable combinations which it expresses and fixes in language peculiar to itself of which it has been able to make wonderful use taking it altogether the only great division possible between the different types of imagination is perhaps reducible to this to speak more exactly there are exterior and interior imaginations these two chapters have given a sketch of them there now remains for us to study the less general forms of the creative power End of third part chapter 2