Essay on the Creative Imagination. Th. Ribot
operations. His curiosity is not at all theoretic; he does not aim to know for the sake of knowing, but in order to act upon the outside world and to draw profit therefrom. To the numerous questions that necessity puts to him his imagination alone responds, because his reason is shifting and his scientific knowledge nil. Here, then, invention again results from urgent needs.
Indeed, in the course of the nineteenth century and on account of growing civilization all these creations reach a second moment when their origin is hidden. Most of our mechanical, industrial and commercial inventions are not stimulated by the immediate necessity of living, by an urgent need; it is not a question of existence but of better existence. The same holds true of social and political inventions which arise from the increasing complexity and the new requirements of the aggregates forming great states. Lastly, it is certain that primitive curiosity has partially lost its utilitarian character in order to become, in some men at least, the taste for pure research—theoretical, speculative, disinterested. But all this in no way affects our thesis, for it is a well-known elementary psychological law that upon primitive wants are grafted acquired wants fully as imperative. The primitive need is modified, metamorphosed, adapted; there remains of it, nonetheless, the fundamental activity toward creation.
Let us now consider the class of esthetic creations. According to the generally accepted theory which is too well known for me to stop to explain it, art has its beginning in a superfluous, bounding activity, useless as regards the preservation of the individual, which is shown first in the form of play. Then, through transformation and complication, play becomes primitive art, dancing, music, and poetry at the same time, closely united in an apparently indissoluble unity. Although the theory of the absolute inutility of art has met some strong criticism, let us accept it for the present. Aside from the true or false character of inutility, the psychological mechanism remains the same here as in the preceding cases; we shall only say that in place of a vital need it is a need of luxury acting, but it acts only because it is in man.
Nevertheless, the inutility of play is far from proven biologically. Groos, in his two excellent works on the subject,[17] has maintained with much power the opposite view. According to him the theory of Schiller and Spencer, based on the expenditure of superfluous activity and the opposite theory of Lazarus, who reduces play to a relaxation—that is, a recuperation of strength—are but partial explanations. Play has a positive use. In man there exist a great number of instincts that are not yet developed at birth. An incomplete being, he must have education of his capacities, and this is obtained through play, which is the exercise of the natural tendencies of human activities. In man and in the higher animals plays are a preparation, a prelude to the active functions of life. There is no instinct of play in general, but there are special instincts that are manifested under the forms of play. If we admit this explanation, which does not lack potency, the work of the esthetic imagination itself would be reduced to a biological necessity, and there would be no reason for making a separate category of it. Whichever view we may adopt, it still remains established that any invention is reducible, directly or indirectly, to a particular, determinate need, and that to allow man a special instinct, the definite specific character of which should be stimulation to creative activity, is a fantastic notion.
Whence, then, comes this persistent and in some respects seductive idea that creation is an instinctive result? Because a happy invention has characteristics that evidently relate it to instinctive activity in the strict sense of the word. First, precocity, of which we shall later give numerous examples, and which resembles the innateness of instinct. Again, orientation in a single direction: the inventor is, so to speak, polarized; he is the slave of music, of mechanics, of mathematics; often inapt at everything outside his own particular sphere. We know the witticism of Madame du Deffant on Vaucanson, who was so awkward, so insignificant when he ventured outside of mechanics. "One should say that this man had manufactured himself." Finally, the ease with which invention often (not always) manifests itself makes it resemble the work of a pre-established mechanism.
But these and similar characteristics may be lacking. They are necessary for instinct, not for invention. There are great creators who have been neither precocious nor confined in a narrow field, and who have given birth to their inventions painfully, laboriously. Between the mechanism of instinct and that of imaginative creation there are frequently great analogies but not identity of nature. Every tendency of our organization, useful or hurtful, may become the beginning of a creative act. Every invention arises from a particular need of human nature, acting within its own sphere and for its own special end.
If now it should be asked why the creative imagination directs itself preferably in one line rather than in another—toward poetry or physics, trade or mechanics, geometry or painting, strategy or music, etc.—we have nothing in answer. It is a result of the individual organization, the secret of which we do not possess. In ordinary life we meet people visibly borne along toward love or good cheer, toward ambition, riches or good works; we say that they are "so built," that such is their character. At bottom the two questions are identical, and current psychology is not in a position to solve them.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Ueber Phantasievorstellungen, Graz, 1889, p. 48.
[13] Die Spiele der Thiere, Jena, 1896. The subject has been very well treated by this author, pp. 294–301.
[14] The "disinterested" view is found widely advocated or hinted at in literature. Cf. Goethe's "Der Sänger" (Tr.).
[15] Psychology, I, 571 ff.
[16] Höffding, Psychologie, p. 219; Eng. trans., p. 161.
[17] Groos, Die Spiele der Thiere, 1896, and Die Spiele der Menschen, 1899 (Eng. trans., Appletons, New York, 1898, 1901).
CHAPTER III
THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR
I
By this term I designate principally, not exclusively, what ordinary speech calls "inspiration." In spite of its mysterious and semi-mythological appearance, the term indicates a positive fact, one that is ill-understood in a deep sense, like all that is near the roots of creation. This concept has its history, and if it is permissible to apply a very general formula to a particular case we may say that it has developed according to the law of the three states assumed by the positivists.
In the beginning, inspiration is literally ascribed to the gods—among the Greeks to Apollo and the Muses, and in like manner under various polytheistic religions. Later, the gods become supernatural spirits, angels, saints, etc. In one way or another it is always regarded as external and superior to man. In the beginnings of all inventions—agriculture, navigation, medicine, commerce, legislation, fine arts—there is a belief in revelation; the human mind considers itself incapable of having discovered