Essay on the Creative Imagination Part 5

Summing up: The organic bases of the creative imagination, if there are any specially its own, remain to be determined. For in all that has been said we have been concerned only with some conditions of the general working of the mind--a.s.similation as well as invention. The eccentricities of inventors studied carefully and in a detailed manner would finally, perhaps, be most instructive material, because it would allow us to penetrate into their inmost individuality. Thus, the physiology of the imagination quickly becomes pathology. I shall not dwell on this, having purposely eliminated the morbid side of our subject. It will, however, be necessary to return thereto, touching upon it in another part of this essay.

III

There remains a problem, so obscure and enigmatic that I scarcely venture to approach it, in the a.n.a.logy that most languages--the spontaneous expression of a common thought--establish between physiologic and psychic creation. Is it only a superficial likeness, a hasty judgment, a metaphor, or does it rest on some positive basis?

Generally, the various manifestations of mental activity have as their precursor an unconscious form from which they arise. The sensitiveness belonging to living substance, known by the names heliotropism, chemotropism, etc., is like a sketch of sensation and of the reactions following it; organic memory is the basis and the obliterated form of conscious memory. Reflexes introduce voluntary activity; appet.i.tions and hidden tendencies are the forerunners of effective psychology. Instinct, on several sides, is like an unconscious and specific trial of reason.

Has the creative power of the human mind also a.n.a.logous antecedents, a physiological equivalent?

One metaphysician, Froschammer, who has elevated the creative imagination to the rank of primary world-principle, a.s.serts this positively. For him there is an objective or cosmic imagination working in nature, producing the innumerable varieties of vegetable and animal forms; transformed into subjective imagination it becomes in the human brain the source of a new form of creation. "The very same principle causes the living forms to appear--a sort of objective image--and the subjective images, a kind of living form."[27] However ingenious and attractive this philosophical theory may be, it is evidently of no positive value for psychology.

Let us stick to experience. Physiology teaches that generation is a "prolonged nutrition," a surplus, as we see so plainly in the lower forms of agamous generation (budding, division). The creative imagination likewise presupposes a superabundance of psychic life that might otherwise spend itself in another way. Generation in the physical order is a spontaneous, natural tendency, although it may be stimulated, successfully or otherwise, by artificial means. We can say as much of the other. This list of resemblances it would be easy to prolong. But all this is insufficient for the establishment of a thorough ident.i.ty between the two cases and the solution of the question.

It is possible to limit it, to put it into more precise language. Is there a connection between the development of the generative function and that of the imagination? Even in this form the question scarcely permits any but vague answers. In favor of a connection we may allege:

(1) The well-known influence of p.u.b.erty on the imagination of both s.e.xes, expressing itself in day-dreams, in aspirations toward an unattainable ideal,[28] in the genius for invention that love bestows upon the least favored. Let us recall also the mental troubles, the psychoses designated by the name hebephrenia. With adolescence coincides the first flowering of the fancy which, having emerged from its swaddling-clothes of childhood, is not yet sophisticated and rationalized.

It is not a matter of indifference for the general thesis of the present work to note that this development of the imagination depends wholly on the first effervescence of the emotional life. That "influence of the feelings on the imagination" and of "the imagination on the feelings" of which the moralists and the older psychologists speak so often is a vague formula for expressing this fact--that the motor element included in the images is reinforced.

(2) _Per contra_, the weakening of the generative power and of the constructive imagination coincide in old age, which is, in a word, a decay of nutrition, a progressive atrophy. It is proper not to omit the influence of castration. According to the theory of Brown-Sequard, it produces an abatement of the nutritive functions through the suppression of an internal stimulus; and, although its relations to the imagination have not been especially studied, it is not rash to admit that it is an arresting cause.

However, the foregoing merely establishes, between the functions compared, a concomitance in the general course of their evolution and in their critical periods; it is insufficient for a conclusion. There would be needed clear, authentic and sufficiently numerous observations proving that individuals bereft of imagination of the creative type have acquired it suddenly through the sole fact of their s.e.xual influences, and, inversely, that brilliant imaginations have faded under the contrary conditions. We find some of these evidences in Cabanis,[29]

Moreau de Tours and various alienists; they would seem to be in favor of the affirmative, but some seem to me not sure enough, others not explicit enough. Despite my investigations on this point, and inquiry of competent persons, I do not venture to draw a definite conclusion. I leave the question open; it will perhaps tempt another more fortunate investigator.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Flechsig, _Gehirn und Seele_, 1896.

[26] Is it possible that this would explain the fact of Aristotle lecturing to his pupils while walking about, thus giving the name "peripatetic" to his school and system? (Tr.)

[27] _Die Phantasie als Grundprincip der Weltprocesses_, Munchen, 1877. For other details on the subject, see Appendix C.

[28] A pa.s.sage from Chateaubriand (cited by Paulhan, _Rev. Philos._, March, 1898, p. 237) is a typical description of the situation: "The warmth of my (adolescent) imagination, my shyness, and solitude, caused me, instead of casting myself on something without, to fall back upon myself. Wanting a real object, I evoked through the power of my desires, a phantom, which thenceforth never left me; I made a woman, composed of all the women that I had already seen. That charming idea followed me everywhere, though invisible; I conversed with her as with a real being; she would change according to my frenzy. Pygmalion was less enamored of his statue."

[29] Cabanis, _Rapports du Physique et du Moral_, edition Peisse, pp. 248-249, an anecdote that he relates after Buffon. a.n.a.logous, but less clear, facts may also be found in Moreau de Tours'

_Psychologie morbide_.

CHAPTER V

THE PRINCIPLE OF UNITY

The psychological nature of the imagination would be very imperfectly known were we limited to the foregoing a.n.a.lytical study. Indeed, all creation whatever, great or small, shows an organic character; it implies a unifying, synthetic principle. Every one of the three factors--intellectual, emotional, unconscious--works not as an isolated fact on its own account; they have no worth save through their union, and no signification save through their common bearing. This principle of unity, which all invention demands and requires, is at one time intellectual in nature, i.e., as a fixed idea; at another time emotional, i.e., as a fixed emotion or pa.s.sion. These terms--fixed idea, fixed emotion--are somewhat absolute and require restrictions and reservations, which will be made in what follows.

The distinction between the two is not at all absolute. Every fixed idea is supported and maintained by a need, a tendency, a desire; i.e., by an affective element. For it is idle fancy to believe in the _persistence_ of an idea which, by hypothesis, would be a purely intellectual state, cold and dry. The principle of unity in this form naturally predominates in certain kinds of creation: in the practical imagination wherein the end is clear, where images are direct subst.i.tutes for things, where invention is subjected to strict conditions under penalty of visible and palpable check; in the scientific and metaphysical imagination, which works with concepts and is subject to the laws of rational logic.

Every fixed emotion should realize itself in an idea or image that gives it body and systematizes it, without which it remains diffuse; and all affective states can take on this permanent form which makes a unified principle of them. The simple emotions (fear, love, joy, sorrow, etc.), the complex or derived emotions (religious, esthetic, intellectual ideas) may equally monopolize consciousness in their own interests.

We thus see that these two terms--fixed idea, fixed emotion--are almost equivalent, for they both imply inseparable elements, and serve only to indicate the preponderance of one or the other element.

This principle of unity, center of attraction and support of all the working of the creative imagination--that is, a subjective principle tending to become objectified--is the ideal. In the complete sense of the word--not restrained merely to esthetic creation or made synonymous with perfection as in ethics--the ideal is a construction in images that should become a reality. If we liken imaginative creation to physiological generation, the ideal is the ovum awaiting fertilization in order to begin its development.

We could, to be more exact, make a distinction between the synthetic principle and the ideal conception which is a higher form of it. The fixation of an end and the discovery of appropriate means are the necessary and sufficient conditions for all invention. A creation, whatever it be, that looks only to present success, can satisfy itself with a unifying principle that renders it viable and organized, but we can look higher than the merely necessary and sufficient.

The ideal is the principle of unity in motion in its historic evolution; like all development, it advances or recedes according to the times.

Nothing is less justified than the conception of a fixed archetype (an undisguised survival of the Platonic Ideas), illuminating the inventor, who reproduces it as best he can. The ideal is a nonent.i.ty; it arises in the inventor and through him; its life is a _becoming_.

Psychologically, it is a construction in images belonging to the merely sketched or outlined type.[30] It results from a double activity, negative and positive, or dissociation and a.s.sociation, the first cause and origin of which is found in a _will that it shall be so_; it is the motor tendency of images in the nascent state engendering the ideal.

The inventor cuts out, suppresses, sifts, according to his temperament, character, taste, prejudices, sympathies and antipathies--in short, his _interest_. In this separation, already studied, let us note one important particular. "We know nothing of the complex psychic production that may simply be the sum of component elements and in which they would remain with their own characters, with no modification. The nature of the components disappears in order to give birth to a novel phenomenon that has its own and particular features. The construction of the ideal is not a mere grouping of past experiences; in its totality it has its own individual characteristics, among which we no more see the composing lines than we see the components, oxygen and hydrogen, in water. In no scientific or artistic production, says Wundt, does the whole appear as made up of its parts, like a mosaic."[31] In other words, it is a case of mental chemistry. The exactness of this expression, which is due, I believe, to J. Stuart Mill, has been questioned. Still it answers to positive facts; for example, in perception, to the phenomena of contrast and their a.n.a.logues; juxtaposition or rapid succession of two different colors, two different sounds, of tactile, olfactory, gustatory impressions different in quality, produces a particular state of consciousness, similar to a combination. Harmony or discord does not, indeed, exist in each separate sound, but only in the relations and sequence of sounds--it is a _tertium quid_. We have heretofore, in the discussion of a.s.sociation of ideas, very frequently represented the states of consciousness as fixed elements that approach one another, cohere, separate, come together anew, but always unalterable, like atoms. It is not so at all. Consciousness, says t.i.tchener, resembles a fresco in which the transition between colors is made through all kinds of intermediate stages of light and shade.... The idea of a pen or of an inkwell is not a stable thing clearly pictured like the pen or inkwell itself. More than any one else, William James has insisted on this point in his theory of "fringes" of states of consciousness. Outside of the given instances we could find many others among the various manifestations of the mental life. It is not, then, at all chimerical to a.s.sume in psychology an equivalent of chemical combination. In a complex state there is, in addition to the component elements, the result of their reciprocal influences, of their varying relations. Too often we forget this resultant.

At bottom the ideal is an individual concept. If objection is offered that an ideal common to a large ma.s.s of men is a fact of common experience (e.g., idealists and realists in the fine arts, and even more so religious, moral, social and political concepts, etc.), the answer is easy: There are families of minds. They have a common ideal because, in certain matters, they have the same way of feeling and thinking. It is not a transcendental idea that unites them; but this result occurs because from their common aspirations the collective ideal becomes disengaged; it is, in scholastic terminology, a _universale post rem_.

The ideal conception is the first moment of the creative act, which is not yet battling with the conditions of the actual. It is only the internal vision of an individual mind that has not yet been projected externally with a form and body. We know how the pa.s.sage from the internal to the external life has given rise among inventors to deceptions and complaints. Such was the imaginative construction that could not, unchanged, enter into its mould and become a reality.

Let us now examine the various forms of this coagulating[32] principle in advancing from the lowest to the highest, from the unity vaguely antic.i.p.ated to the absolute and tyrannical masterful unity. Following a method that seems to me best adapted for these ill-explained questions I shall single out only the princ.i.p.al forms, which I have reduced to three--the unstable, the organic or middle, and the extreme or semi-morbid unity.

(1) The unstable form has its starting point directly and immediately in the reproductive imagination without creation. It a.s.sembles its elements somewhat by chance and st.i.tches together the bits of our life; it ends only in beginnings, in attempts. The unity-principle is a momentary disposition, vacillating and changing without cessation according to the external impressions or modifications of our vital conditions and of our humor. By way of example let us recall the state of the day-dreamer building castles in the air; the delirious constructions of the insane, the inventions of the child following all the fluctuations of chance, of its caprice; the half-coherent dreams that seem to the dreamer to contain a creative germ. In consequence of the extreme frailty of the synthetic principle the creative imagination does not succeed in accomplishing its task and remains in a condition intermediate between simple a.s.sociation of ideas and creation proper.

(2) The organic or middle form may be given as the type of the unifying power. Ultimately it reduces itself to attention and presupposes nothing more, because, thanks to the process of "localization," which is the essential mark of attention, it makes itself a center of attraction, grouping about the leading idea the images, a.s.sociations, judgments, tendencies and voluntary efforts. "Inspiration," the poet Grillparzer used to say, "is a concentration of all the forces and capacities upon a single point which, for the time being, should represent the world rather than enclose it. The reinforcement of the state of the mind comes from the fact that its several powers, instead of spreading themselves over the whole world, are contained within the bounds of a single object, touch one another, reciprocally help and reinforce each other."[33] What the poet here maintains as regards esthetics only is applicable to all the _organic_ forms of creation--that is to those ruled by an immanent logic, and, like them, resembling works of Nature.

In order to leave no doubt as to the ident.i.ty of attention and imaginative synthesis, and in order to show that it is normally the true unifying principle, we offer the following remarks:

Attention is at times spontaneous, natural, without effort, simply dependent on the interest that a thing excites in us--lasting as long as it holds us in subjection, then ceasing entirely. Again, it is voluntary, artificial, an imitation of the other, precarious and intermittent, maintained with effort--in a word, laborious. The same is true of the imagination. The moment of inspiration is ruled by a perfect and spontaneous unity; its impersonality approaches that of the forces of Nature. Then appears the personal moment, the detailed working and long, painful, intermittent resumptions, the miserable turns of which so many inventors have described. The a.n.a.logy between the two cases seems to me incontestable.

Next let us note that psychologists always adduce the same examples when they wish to ill.u.s.trate on the one hand, the processes of the persistent, tenacious attention, and, on the other hand, the developmental labor without which creative work does not come to pa.s.s: "Genius is only long patience," the saying of Newton; "always thinking of it," and like expressions of d'Alembert, Helmholtz and others, because in the one case as in the other the fundamental condition is the existence of a fixed, ever-active idea, notwithstanding its relaxations and its incessant disappearances into the unconscious with return to consciousness.

(3) The extreme form, which from its nature is semi-morbid, becomes in its highest degree plainly pathological; the unifying principle changes to a condition of obsession.

The normal state of our mind is a plurality of states of consciousness (polyideism). Through a.s.sociation there is a radiation in every direction. In this totality of coexisting images no one long occupies first place; it is driven away by others, which are displaced in turn by still others emerging from the penumbra. On the contrary, in attention (relative monoideism) a single image retains first place for a long time and tends to have the same importance again. Finally, in a condition of obsession (absolute monoideism) the fixed idea defies all rivalry and rules despotically. Many inventors have suffered painfully this tyranny and have vainly struggled to break it. The fixed idea, once settled, does not permit anything to dislodge it save for the moment and with much pain. Even then it is displaced only apparently, for it persists in the unconscious life where it has thrust its deep roots.

At this stage the unifying principle, although it can act as a stimulus for creation, is no longer normal. Consequently, a natural question arises: Wherein is there a difference between the obsession of the inventor and the obsession of the insane, who most generally destroys in place of creating?

The nature of fixed ideas has greatly occupied contemporary alienists.

For other reasons and in their own way they, too, have been led to divide obsession into two cla.s.ses, the intellectual and emotional, according as the idea or the affective state predominates. Then they have been led to ask: Which of these two elements is the primitive one?

For some it is the idea. For others, and it seems that these are the more numerous, the affective state is in general the primary fact; the obsession always rests on a basis of morbid emotion and in a retention of impressions.[34]

But whatever opinion we may hold on this point, the difficulty of establishing a dividing line between the two forms of obsession above mentioned remains the same. Are there characters peculiar to each one?

It has been said: "The physiologically fixed idea is normally longed for, often sought, in all cases accepted, and it does not break the unity of the self." It does not impose itself fatally on consciousness; the individual knows the value thereof, knows where it leads him, and adapts his conduct to its requirements. For example, Christopher Columbus.

The pathological fixed idea is "parasitic," automatic, discordant, irresistible. Obsession is only a special case of psychic disintegration, a kind of doubling of consciousness. The individual becomes a person "possessed," whose self has been confiscated for the sake of the fixed idea, and whose submission to his situation is wrought with pain.

In spite of this parallel the distinguishing criterion between the two is very vague, because from the sane to the delirious idea the transitions are very numerous. We are obliged to recognize "that with certain workers--who are rather taken up with the elaboration of their work, and not masters directing it, quitting it, and resuming it at their pleasure--an artistic, scientific, or mechanical conception succeeds in haunting the mind, imposing itself upon it even to the extent of causing suffering." In reality, pure psychology is unable to discover a positive difference between obsession leading to creative work and the other forms, because in both cases the mental mechanism is, at bottom, the same. The criterion must be sought elsewhere. For that we must go out of the internal world and proceed objectively. We must judge the fixed idea not in itself but by its effects. What does it produce in the practical, esthetic, scientific, moral, social, religious field? It is of value according to its fruits. If objection be made to this change of front we may, in order to stick to a strictly psychological point of view, state that it is certain that as soon as it pa.s.ses beyond a middle point, which it is difficult to determine, the fixed idea profoundly troubles the mechanism of the mind. In imaginative persons this is not rare, which partly explains why the pathological theory of genius (of which we shall speak later) has been able to rally so many to its support and to allege so many facts in its favor.

FOOTNOTES: