Essay on the Creative Imagination Part 21

Their dreams, subjected merely to the conditions of an inner logic, have lived only within themselves, an ideal life, without ever pa.s.sing through the test of application. It is the creative imagination in its unconscious form, restrained to its first phase.

Nothing is better known than their names and their works: The _Republic_ of Plato, Thomas More's _Utopia_, Campanella's _City of the Sun_, Harrington's _Oceana_, Fenelon's _Salente_, etc.[141] However idealistic they may be, one could easily show that all the materials of their ideal are taken from the surrounding reality, they bear the stamp of the _milieu_, be it Greek, English, Christian, etc., in which they lived, and it should not be forgotten that in the Utopians everything is not chimerical--some have been revealers, others have acted as stimuli or ferments. True to its mission, which is to make innovations, the constructive imagination is a spur that arouses; it hinders social routine and prevents stagnation.

Among the creators of ideal societies there is one, almost contemporary, who would deserve a study of individual psychology--Ch. Fourier. If it is a question merely of fertility in pure construction, I doubt whether we could find one superior to him--he is equal to the highest, with the special characteristic of being at the same time exuberant to delirium and exact in details to the least minutiae. He is such a fine type of the imaginative intellect that he deserves that we stop a moment.

His cosmogony seems the work of an omnipotent demiurge fashioning the universe at will. His conception of the future world with its "counter-cast" creations, where the present ugliness and troubles of animal reign become changed into their opposites, where there will be "anti-lions," "anti-crocodiles," "anti-whales," etc., is one example of hundreds showing his inexhaustible richness in fantastic visions: the work of an imagination that is hot and overflowing, with no rational preoccupation.

On the other hand, his psychogony, based on the idea of metempsychosis borrowed from the Orient, gives itself up to numerical vagaries.

a.s.suming for every soul a periodical rebirth, he a.s.signs it first a period of "ascending subversion," the first phase of which lasts five thousand years, the second thirty-six thousand; then comes a period of completion, 9,000 years; and then a period of "descending subversion,"

whose first stage is 27,000 years, and the second 4,000 years--a total of 81,000 years. This form of imagination is already known to us.[142]

The princ.i.p.al part of his psychology, the theory of the emotions, questionable in many respects, is relatively rational. But in the construction of human society, the duality of his imagination--powerful and minute--reappears. We know his methodical organization: the _group_, composed of seven to nine persons; the _series_, comprising twenty-four to thirty-two groups; a _phalanx_ that includes eighteen groups, const.i.tuting the phalanstery; the small city, a general center of phalanges; the provincial city, the imperial capital, the universal metropolis. He has a pa.s.sion for cla.s.sification and ordering; "his phalanstery works like a clock."

This rare imaginative type well deserved a few remarks, because of its mixture of apparent exactness and a natural, unconscious utopianism and extravagance. For, beneath all these pulsating inventions of precise, petty details, the foundation is none the less a purely speculative construction of the mind. Let us add an incredible abuse of a.n.a.logy, that chief intellectual instrument of invention, of which only the reading of his books can give an idea.[143] Heinrich Heine said of Michelet, "He has a Hindoo imagination." The term would apply still better to Fourier, in whom coexist unchecked profusion of images and the taste for numerical acc.u.mulations. People have tried to explain this abundance of figures and calculation as a professional habit--he was for a long time a bookkeeper or cashier, always an excellent accountant. But this is taking the effect for cause. This dualism existed in the very nature of his mind, and he took advantage of it in his calling. The study of the numerical imagination[144] has shown how it is frequently met with among orientals, whose imaginative development is unquestioned, and we have seen why the idealistic imagination agrees so well with the indefinite series of numbers and makes use of it as a vehicle.

II

With practical inventors and reformers the ideal falls--not that they sacrifice it for their personal interests, but because they have a comprehension of possibilities. The imaginative construction must be corrected, narrowed, mutilated, if it is to enter into the narrow frame of the conditions of existence, until it becomes adapted and determined.

This process has been described several times, and it is needless to repeat it here in other terms. Nevertheless, the ideal--understanding by this term the unifying principle that excites creative work and supports it in its development--undergoes metamorphosis and must be not only individual but collective; the creation does not realize itself save through a "communion of minds," by a co-operation of feelings and of wills; the work of one conscious individual must become the work of a social consciousness.

That form of imagination, creating and organizing social groups, manifests itself in various degrees according to the tendency and power of creators.

There are the founders of small societies, religious in form--the Essenes, the earliest Christian communities, the monastic orders of the Orient and Occident, the great Catholic or Mohammedan congregations, the semi-lay, semi-religious sects like the Moravian Brotherhood, the Shakers, Mormons, etc. Less complete because it does not cover the individual altogether in all the acts of life is the creation of secret a.s.sociations, professional unions, learned societies, etc. The founder conceives an ideal of complete living or one limited to a given end, and puts it into practice, having for material men grouped of their free choice, or by cooptation.

There is invention operating on great ma.s.ses--social or political invention strictly so called--ordinarily not proposed but imposed, which, however, despite its coercive power, is subject to requirements even more numerous than mechanical, industrial, or commercial invention.

It has to struggle against natural forces, but most of all against human forces--inherited habits, customs, traditions. It must make terms with dominant pa.s.sions and ideas, finding its justification, like all other creation, only in success.

Without entering into the details of this inevitable determination, which would require useless repet.i.tion, we may sum up the role of the constructive imagination in social matters by saying that it has undergone a regression--i.e., that its area of development has been little by little narrowed; not that inventive genius, reduced to pure construction in images, has suffered an eclipse, but on its part it has had to make increasingly greater room for experiment, rational elements, calculation, inductions and deductions that permit foresight--for practical necessities.

If we omit the spontaneous, instinctive, semi-conscious invention of the earliest ages, that was sufficient for primitive societies, and keep to creations that were the result of reflection and of great pretension, we can roughly distinguish three successive periods:

(1) A very long idealistic phase (Antiquity, Renaissance) when triumphed the pure imagination, and the play of the free fancy that spends itself in social novels. Between the creation of the mind and the life of contemporary society there was no relation; they were worlds apart, strangers to one another. The true Utopians scarcely troubled themselves to make applications. Plato and More--would they have wished to realize their dreams?

(2) An intermediate phase, when an attempt is made to pa.s.s from the ideal to the practical, from pure speculation to social facts. Already, in the eighteenth century, some philosophers (Locke, Rousseau) drew up const.i.tutions, at the request of interested persons. During this period, when the work of the imagination, instead of merely becoming fixed in books, tends to become objectified in acts, we find many failures and some successes. Let us recall the fruitless attempts of the "phalansteries" in France, in Algeria, Brazil, and in the United States.

Robert Owen was more fortunate;[145] in four years he reformed New Larnak, after his ideal, and with varying fortune founded short-lived colonies. Saint-Simonism has not entirely died out; the primitive civilization after his ideal rapidly disappeared, but some of his theories have filtered into or have become incorporated with other doctrines.

(3) A phase in which imaginative creation becomes subordinated to practical life: The conception of society ceases to be purely idealistic or constructed _a priori_ by deduction from a single principle; it recognizes the conditions of its environment, adapts itself to the necessities of its development. It is the pa.s.sage from the absolutely autonomous state of the imagination to a period when it submits to the laws of a rational imperative. In other words, the transition from the esthetic to the scientific, and especially the practical, form.

Socialism is a well-known and excellent example of this. Compare its former utopias, down to about the middle of the last century, with its contemporary forms, and without difficulty we can appreciate the amount of imaginative elements lost in favor of an at least equivalent quant.i.ty of rational elements and positive calculations.

FOOTNOTES:

[139] This t.i.tle, as will be seen later, corresponds only in part to the contents of this chapter.

[140] For facts in support, see the _Psychology of the Emotions_, Second Part, chapter VIII.

[141] Our author does not mention Bacon's _New Atlantis_, one of the best specimens of its kind. "Wisest Verulam," active and distinguished in so many fields, is not amenable to rules, and is here found among "idealists," as elsewhere among the foremost empiricists and iconoclasts. (Tr.)

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

[143] We recommend to the reader the "Epilogue sur l'a.n.a.logie," in _Le Monde Industriel_, pp. 244 ff., where he will learn that the "goldfinch depicts the child born of poor parents; the pheasant represents the jealous husband; the c.o.c.k is the symbol of the man of the world; the cabbage is the emblem of mysterious love," etc. There are several pages in this tone, with alleged reasons in support of the statements.

[144] See above, chapter II.

[145] For an excellent account of the principles of these movements, see Rae, _Contemporary Socialism_; for Owen's ideals, his _Autobiography_; and for an account of some of the trials, Bushee's "Communistic Societies in the United States," _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. XX, pp. 625 ff. (Tr.)

CONCLUSION.

CONCLUSION

I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION

Why is the human mind able to create? In a certain sense this question may seem idle, childish, and even worse. We might just as well ask why does man have eyes and not an electric apparatus like the torpedo? Why does he perceive directly sounds but not the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays? Why does he perceive changes of odors but not magnetic changes?

And so on _ad infinitum_. We will put the question in a very different manner: Being given the physical and mental const.i.tution of man such as it is at present, how is the creative imagination a natural product of this const.i.tution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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