Chapter 36

THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION[139]

When the human mind creates, it can use only two classes of ideas as materials to embody its idea, viz.:

(1) Natural phenomena, the forces of the organic and inorganic worlds. In its scientific form, seeking to explain, to know, it ends in the hypothesis, a disinterested creation. In its industrial aspect, aiming towards application and utilization, it ends in practical, interested inventions.

(2) Human, i.e., psychic elements--instincts, passions, feelings, ideas, and actions. Esthetic creation is the disinterested form, social invention is the utilitarian form.

Consequently, we may say that invention in science resembles invention in the fine arts, both being speculative; and that mechanical and industrial invention approaches social invention through a common tendency toward the practical. I shall not insist on this distinction, which, to be definite, rests only on partial characters; I merely wish to mention that invention, whose role in social, political and moral evolution is large, must, in order to be a success, adopt certain processes while neglecting others. This the Utopians do not do.

The development of human societies depends on a multitude of factors, such as race, geographic and economic conditions, war, etc., which we need neither enumerate nor study. One only belongs to our topic--the successive appearance of idealistic conceptions that, like all other creations of mind, tend to realize themselves, the moral ideal consisting of new combinations arising from the predominance of one feeling, or from an unconscious elaboration (inspiration), or from analogy.

At the beginning of civilizations we meet semi-historic, semi-legendary persons--Manu, Zoroaster, Moses, Confucius, etc., who were inventors or reformers in the social and moral spheres. That a part of the inventions attributed to them must be credited to predecessors or successors is probable; but the invention, no matter who is its author, remains none the less invention. We have said elsewhere, and may repeat, that the expression _inventor_ in morals may seem strange to some, because we are imbued with the notion of a knowledge of good and evil that is innate, universal, bestowed on all men and in all times. If we admit, on the other hand, as observation compels us to do, not a ready-made morality, but a morality in the making, it must be, indeed, the _creation_ of an individual or of a group. Everybody recognizes inventors in geometry, in music, in the plastic and mechanic arts; but there have also been men who, in their moral dispositions, were very superior to their contemporaries, and were promoters, initiators.[140] For reasons of which we are ignorant, analogous to those that produce a great poet or a great painter, there arise moral geniuses who feel strongly what others do not feel at all, just as does a great poet, in comparison with the crowd. But it is not enough that they feel: they must create, they must realize their ideal in a belief and in rules of conduct accepted by other men. All the founders of great religions were inventors of this kind. Whether the invention comes from themselves alone, or from a collectivity of which they are the sum and incarnation, matters little. In them moral invention has found its complete form; like all invention, it is organic. The legend relates that Buddha, possessed with the desire of finding the perfect road of salvation for himself and all other men, gives himself up, at first, to an extravagant asceticism. He perceives the uselessness of this and renounces it. For seven years he meditates, then he beholds the light. He comes into possession of knowledge of the means that give freedom from _Karma_ (the chain of causes and effects), and from the necessity of being born again. Soon he renounces the life of contemplation, and during fifty years of ceaseless wanderings preaches, makes converts, organizes his followers. Whether true or false historically, this tale is psychologically exact. A fixed and besetting idea, trial followed by failure, the decisive moment of _Eureka!_ then the inner revelation manifests itself outwardly, and through the labors of the master and his disciples becomes complete, imposes itself on millions of men. In what respect does this mode of creation differ from others, at least in the practical order?

Thus, from the viewpoint of our present study, we may divide ethics into living and dead. Living ethics arise from needs and desires, stimulate an imaginative construction that becomes fixed in actions, habits and laws; they offer to men a concrete, positive ideal which, under various and often contrary aspects, is always happiness. The lifeless ethics, from which invention has withdrawn, arise from reflection upon, and the rational codification of, living ethics. Stored away in the writings of philosophers, they remain theoretical, speculative, without appreciable influence on the masses, mere material for dissertation and commentary.

In proportion as we recede from distant origins the light grows, and invention in the social and moral order becomes manifest as the work of two principal categories of minds--the fantastic, the positive. The former, purely imaginative beings, visionaries, utopians, are closely related to poets and artists. The latter, practical creators or reformers, capable of organizing, belong to the family of inventors in the industrial-commercial-mechanical order.

I

The chimerical form of imagination, applied to the social sciences, is the one that, taking account neither of the external determinism nor of practical requirements, spreads out freely. Such are the creators of ideal republics, seeking for a lost or to-be-discovered-in-the-future golden age, constructing, as their fancy pleases, human societies in their large outlines and in their details. They are social novelists, who bear the same relation to sociologists that poets do to critics. Their dreams, subjected merely to the conditions of an inner logic, have lived only within themselves, an ideal life, without ever passing through the test of application. It is the creative imagination in its unconscious form, restrained to its first phase.

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

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

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

On the other hand, his psychogony, based on the idea of metempsychosis borrowed from the Orient, gives itself up to numerical vagaries. Assuming for every soul a periodical rebirth, he assigns it first a period of "ascending subversion," the first phase of which lasts five thousand years, the second thirty-six thousand; then comes a period of completion, 9,000 years; and then a period of "descending subversion," whose first stage is 27,000 years, and the second 4,000 years--a total of 81,000 years. This form of imagination is already known to us.[142]

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

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

II

With practical inventors and reformers the ideal falls--not that they sacrifice it for their personal interests, but because they have a comprehension of possibilities. The imaginative construction must be corrected, narrowed, mutilated, if it is to enter into the narrow frame of the conditions of existence, until it becomes adapted and determined. This process has been described several times, and it is needless to repeat it here in other terms. Nevertheless, the ideal--understanding by this term the unifying principle that excites creative work and supports it in its development--undergoes metamorphosis and must be not only individual but collective; the creation does not realize itself save through a "communion of minds," by a co-operation of feelings and of wills; the work of one conscious individual must become the work of a social consciousness.

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

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

There is invention operating on great masses--social or political invention strictly so called--ordinarily not proposed but imposed, which, however, despite its coercive power, is subject to requirements even more numerous than mechanical, industrial, or commercial invention. It has to struggle against natural forces, but most of all against human forces--inherited habits, customs, traditions. It must make terms with dominant passions and ideas, finding its justification, like all other creation, only in success.

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

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

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

(2) An intermediate phase, when an attempt is made to pass from the ideal to the practical, from pure speculation to social facts. Already, in the eighteenth century, some philosophers (Locke, Rousseau) drew up constitutions, at the request of interested persons. During this period, when the work of the imagination, instead of merely becoming fixed in books, tends to become objectified in acts, we find many failures and some successes. Let us recall the fruitless attempts of the "phalansteries" in France, in Algeria, Brazil, and in the United States. Robert Owen was more fortunate;[145] in four years he reformed New Larnak, after his ideal, and with varying fortune founded short-lived colonies. Saint-Simonism has not entirely died out; the primitive civilization after his ideal rapidly disappeared, but some of his theories have filtered into or have become incorporated with other doctrines.

(3) A phase in which imaginative creation becomes subordinated to practical life: The conception of society ceases to be purely idealistic or constructed _a priori_ by deduction from a single principle; it recognizes the conditions of its environment, adapts itself to the necessities of its development. It is the passage from the absolutely autonomous state of the imagination to a period when it submits to the laws of a rational imperative. In other words, the transition from the esthetic to the scientific, and especially the practical, form. Socialism is a well-known and excellent example of this. Compare its former utopias, down to about the middle of the last century, with its contemporary forms, and without difficulty we can appreciate the amount of imaginative elements lost in favor of an at least equivalent quantity of rational elements and positive calculations.

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

[144] See above, chapter II.

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

CONCLUSION.

CONCLUSION

I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION

Why is the human mind able to create? In a certain sense this question may seem idle, childish, and even worse. We might just as well ask why does man have eyes and not an electric apparatus like the torpedo? Why does he perceive directly sounds but not the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays? Why does he perceive changes of odors but not magnetic changes? And so on _ad infinitum_. We will put the question in a very different manner: Being given the physical and mental constitution of man such as it is at present, how is the creative imagination a natural product of this constitution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "sketched" form is or remains an elementary, primitive, automatic form. Conformably to the general law ruling the development of mind--passage from indefinite to definite, from the incoherent to the coherent, from spontaneity to reflection, from the reflex to the voluntary period--the imagination comes out of its swaddling-clothes, is changed--through the intervention of a teleological act that assigns it an end; through the union of rational elements that subdue it for an adaptation. Then appear the other two forms.

(b) The _fixed_ form comprises mythic and esthetic creations, philosophical and scientific hypotheses. While the "outline" imagination remains an internal phenomenon, existing only in and for a single individual, the fixed form is projected outwards, made something else. The former has no reality other than the momentary belief accompanying it; the latter exists by itself, for its creator and for others; the work is accepted, rejected, examined, criticised. Fiction rests on the same level as reality. Do not people discuss seriously the objective value of certain myths, and of metaphysical theories? the action of a novel or drama as though it were a matter of real events? the character of the _dramatis personae_ as though they were living flesh and blood?

The fixed imagination moves in an elastic frame. The material elements circumscribing it and composing it have a certain fluidity; they are language, writing, musical sounds, colors, forms, lines. Furthermore, we know that its creations, in spite of the spontaneous adherence of the mind accepting them, are the work of a free will; they could have been otherwise--they preserve an indelible imprint of contingency and subjectivity.

(c) This last mark is rubbed out without disappearing (for a thing imagined is always a personal thing) in the objectified form that comprises successful practical inventions--whether mechanical, industrial, commercial, military, social, or political. These have no longer an arbitrary, borrowed reality; they have their place in the totality of physical and social phenomena. They resemble creations of nature, subject like them to fixed conditions of existence and to a limited determinism. We shall not dwell longer on this last character, so often pointed out.

In order the better to comprehend the distinction between the three forms of imagination let us borrow for a moment the terminology of spiritualism or of the common dualism--merely as a means of explaining the matter clearly. The "outline" imagination is a soul without a body, a pure spirit, without determination in space. The "fixed" imagination is a soul or spirit surrounded by an almost immaterial sheath, like angels or demons, genii, shadows, the "double" of savages, the _peresprit_ of spiritualists, etc. The _objectified_ imagination is soul and body, a complete organization after the pattern of living people; the ideal is incarnated, but it must undergo transformation, reductions and adaptations, in order that it may become practical--just as the soul, according to spiritualism, must bend to the necessities of the body, to be at the same time the servant of, and served by, the bodily organs.

According to general opinion the great imaginers are found only in the first two classes, which is, in the strict sense of the word, true; in the full sense of the word false. As long as it remains "outline," or even "fixed," the constructive imagination can reign as supreme mistress. Objectified, it still rules, but shares its power with competitors; it avails nought without them, they can do nothing without it. What deceives us is the fact that we see it no longer in the open. Here the imaginative stroke resembles those powerful streams of water that must be imprisoned in a complicated network of canals and ramifications varying in shape and in diameter before bursting forth in multiple jets and in liquid architecture.[148]

II

THE IMAGINATIVE TYPE.

Let us try now, by way of conclusion, to present to the reader a picture of the whole of the imaginative life in all its degrees.

If we consider the human mind principally under its intellectual aspect--i.e., insofar as it knows and thinks, deducting its emotions and voluntary activity--the observation of individuals distinguishes some very clear varieties of mentality.

First, those of a "positive" or realistic turn of mind, living chiefly on the external world, on what is perceived and what is immediately deducible therefrom--alien or inimical to vain fancy; some of them flat, limited, of the earth earthy; others, men of action, energetic but limited by real things.

Second, abstract minds, "quintessence abstractors," with whom the internal life is dominant in the form of combinations of concepts. They have a schematic representation of the world, reduced to a hierarchy of general ideas, noted by symbols. Such are the pure mathematicians, the pure metaphysicians. If these two tendencies exist together, or, as happens, are grafted one on the other, without anything to counterbalance them, the abstract spirit attains its perfect form.

Midway between these two groups are the imaginers in whom the internal life predominates in the form of combinations of images, which fact distinguishes them clearly from the abstractors. The former alone interest us, and we shall try to trace this imaginative type in its development from the normal or average stage to the moment when ever-growing exuberance leads us into pathology.

The explanation of the various phases of this development is reducible to a well-known psychologic law--the natural antagonism between sensation and image, between phenomena of peripheral origin and phenomena of central origin; or, in a more general form, between the outer and inner life. I shall not dwell long on this point, which Taine has so admirably treated.[149] He has shown in detail how the image is a spontaneously arising sensation, one that is, however, aborted by the opposing shock of real sensation, which is its reducer, producing on it an arresting action and maintaining it in the condition of an internal, subjective fact. Thus, during the waking hours, the frequency and intensity of impressions from without press the images back to the second level; but during sleep, when the external world is as it were suppressed, their hallucinatory tendency is no longer kept in check, and the world of dreams is momentarily the reality.

The psychology of the imaginer reduces itself to a progressively increasing interchange of roles. Images become stronger and stronger states; perceptions, more and more feeble. In this movement opposite to nature I note four steps, each of which corresponds to particular conditions: (1) The quantity of images; (2) quantity and intensity; (3) quantity, intensity and duration; (4) complete systematization.

(1) In the first place the predominance of imagination is marked only by the quantity of representations invading consciousness; they teem, break apart, become associated, combine easily and in various ways. All the imaginative persons who have given us their experiences either orally or in writing agree in regard to the extreme ease of the formation of associations, not in repeating past expedience, but in sketching little romances.[150] From among many examples I choose one. One of my correspondents writes that if at church, theatre, on a street, or in a railway station, his attention is attracted to a person--man or woman--he immediately makes up, from the appearance, carriage and attractiveness his or her present or past, manner of life, occupation--representing to himself the part of the city he or she must dwell in, the apartments, furniture, etc.--a construction most often erroneous; I have many proofs of it. Surely this disposition is normal; it departs from the average only by an excess of imagination that is replaced in others by an excessive tendency to observe, to analyze, or to criticise, reason, find fault. In order to take the decisive step and become abnormal one condition more is necessary--intensity of the representations.

2. Next, the interchange of place, indicated above, occurs. Weak states (images) become strong; strong states (perceptions) become weak. The impressions from without are powerless to fulfill their regular function of inhibition. We find the simplest example of this state in the exceptional persistence of certain dreams. Ordinarily, our nocturnal imaginings vanish as empty phantasmagorias at the inrush of the perceptions and habits of daily life--they seem like faraway phantoms, without objective value. But, in the struggle occurring, on waking, between images and perceptions, the latter are not always victorious. There are dreams--i.e., imaginary creations--that remain firm in face of reality, and for some time go along parallel with it. Taine was perhaps the first to see the importance of this fact. He reports that his relative, Dr. Baillarger, having dreamt that one of his friends had been appointed editor of a journal, announced the news seriously to several persons, and doubt arose in his mind only toward the end of the afternoon. Since then contemporary psychologists have gathered various observations of this kind.[151] The emotional persistence of certain dreams is known. So-and-so, one of our neighbors, plays in a dream an odious role; we may have a feeling of repulsion or spite toward him persisting throughout the day. But this triumph of the image, accidental and ephemeral in normal man, is frequent and stable in the imaginers of the second class. Many among them have asserted that this internal world is the only reality. Gerard de Nerval "had very early the conviction that the majority is mistaken, that the material universe in which it believes, because its eyes see it and its hands touch it, is nothing but phantoms and appearances. For him the invisible world, on the contrary, was the only one not chimerical." Likewise, Edgar Allan Poe: "The real things of the world would affect me like visions, and only so; while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became in turn not only the feeding ground of my daily existence but positively the sole and entire existence itself." Others describe their life as "a permanent dream." We could multiply examples. Aside from the poets and artists, the mystics would furnish copious examples. Let us take an exaggerated instance: This permanent dream is, indeed, only a part of their existence; it is above all active through its intensity; but, while it lasts, it absorbs them so completely that they enter the external world only with a sudden, violent and painful shock.

(3) If the changing of images into strong states preponderating in consciousness is no longer an episode but a lasting disposition, then the imaginative life undergoes a partial systematization that approaches insanity. Everyone may be "absorbed" for a moment; the above-mentioned authors are so frequently. On a higher level this invading supremacy of the internal life becomes a habit. This third degree is but the second carried to excess.

Some cases of double personality (those of Azam, Reynolds) are known in which the second state is at first embryonic and of short duration; then its appearances are repeated, its sphere becomes extended. Little by little it engrosses the greater part of life; it may even entirely supplant the earlier self. The growing working of the imagination is similar to this. Thanks to two causes acting in unison, temperament and habit, the imaginative and internal life tends to become systematized and to encroach more and more on the real, external life. In an account by Fere[152] one may follow step by step this work of systematization which we abridge here to its chief characteristics.

The subject, M......, a man thirty-seven years old, had from childhood a decided taste for solitude. Seated in an out-of-the-way corner of the house or out of doors, "he commenced from that time on to build castles in Spain that little by little took on a considerable importance in his life. His constructions were at first ephemeral, replaced every day by new ones. They became progressively more consistent.... When he had well entered into his imaginary role, he often succeeded in continuing his musing in the presence of other people. At college, whole hours would be spent in this way; often he would see and hear nothing." Married, the head of a prosperous business house, he had some respite; then he returned to his former constructions. "They commenced by being, as before, not very durable or absorbing; but gradually they acquired more intensity and duration, and lastly became fixed in a definite form."

"To sum up, here is what this ideal life, lasting almost from his fourth year, meant: M...... had built at Chaville, on the outskirts of the forest, an imaginary summer residence surrounded by a garden. By successive additions the pavilion became a chateau; the garden, a park; servants, horses, water-fixtures came to ornament the domain. The furnishings of the inside had been modified at the same time. A wife had come to give life to the picture; two children had been born. Nothing was wanting to this household, only the being true.... One day he was in his imaginary salon at Chaville, occupied in watching an upholsterer who was changing the arrangement of the tapestry. He was so absorbed in the matter that he did not notice a man coming toward him, and at the question, 'M......, if you please--?' he answered, without thinking, 'He is at Chaville.' This reply, given in public, aroused in him a real terror. 'I believe that I was foolish,' he said. Coming to himself, he declared that he was ready to do anything to get rid of his ideas."

Here the imaginative type is at its maximum, at the brink of insanity without being over it. Associations and combinations of images form the entire content of consciousness, which remains impervious to impressions from without. Its world becomes _the_ world. The parasitic life undermines and corrodes the other in order to become established in its place--it grows, its parts adhere more closely, it forms a compact mass--the imaginary systematization is complete.

(4) The fourth stage is an exaggeration of the foregoing. The _completely_ systematized and permanent imaginative life excludes the other. This is the extreme form, the beginning of insanity, which is outside our subject, from which pathology has been excluded.

Imagination in the insane would deserve a special study, that would be lengthy, because there is no form of imagination that insanity has not adopted. In no period have insane creations been lacking in the practical, religious, or mystic life, in poetry, the fine arts, and in the sciences; in industrial, commercial, mechanical, military projects, and in plans for social and political reform. We should, then, be abundantly supplied with facts.[153]

It would be difficult, for, if in ordinary life we are often perplexed to decide whether a man is sane or not, how much more then, when it is a question of an inventor, of an act of the creative faculty, i.e., of a venture into the unknown! How many innovators have been regarded as insane, or as at least unbalanced, visionary! We cannot even invoke success as a criterion. Many non-viable or abortive inventions have been fathered by very sane minds, and people regarded as insane have vindicated their imaginative constructions through success.

Let us leave these difficulties of a subject that is not our own, in order to determine merely the psychological criterion belonging to the fourth stage.

How may we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone--whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief--that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism--and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic--there are two distinct forms of existence.

One, subjective, having no reality except in consciousness, for the one experiencing it, its reality being due only to belief, to that first affirmation of the mind so often described.

The other, objective, existing in consciousness and outside of it, being real not only for me but for all those whose constitution is similar or analogous to mine.

This much borne in mind, let us compare the last two degrees of the development of the imaginative life.

For the imaginer of the third stage, the two forms of existence are not confounded. He distinguishes _two_ worlds, preferring one and making the best of the other, but believing in both. He is conscious of passing from one to the other. There is an alternation. The observation of Fere, although extreme, is a proof of this.

At the fourth stage, in the insane, imaginative labor--the only kind with which we are concerned--is so systematized that the distinction between the two kinds of existence has disappeared. All the phantoms of his brain are invested with objective reality. Occurrences without, even the most extraordinary, do not reach one in this stage, or else are interpreted in accordance with the diseased fancy. There is no longer any alternation.[154]

By way of summary we may say: The creative imagination consists of the property that images have of gathering in new combinations, through the effect of a spontaneity whose nature we have attempted to describe. It always tends to realize itself in degrees that vary from mere momentary belief to complete objectivity. Throughout its multiple manifestations, it remains identical with itself in its basic nature, in its constitutive elements. The diversity of its deeds depends on the end desired, the conditions required for its attainment, materials employed which, as we have seen, under the collective name "representations" are very unlike one another, not only as regards their sensuous origin (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) but also as regards their psychologic nature (concrete, symbolic, affective, emotional-abstract images; generic and schematic images, concepts--each group itself having shades or degrees).

This constructive activity, applying itself to everything and radiating in all directions, is in its early, typical form a mythic creation. It is an invincible need of man to reflect and reproduce his own nature in the world surrounding him. The first application of his mind is thinking by analogy, which vivifies everything after the human model and attempts to know everything according to arbitrary resemblances. Myth-making activity, which we have studied in the child and in primitive man, is the embryonic form whence arise by a slow evolution religious creations--gross or refined; esthetic development, which is a fallen, impoverished mythology; the fantastic conceptions of the world that may little by little become scientific conceptions, with, however, an irreducible residuum of hypotheses. Alongside of these creations, all bordering upon what we have called the fixed form, there are practical, objective creations. As for the latter, we could not trace them to the same mythic source except by dialectic subtleties which we renounce. The former arise from an internal efflorescence; the latter from urgent life-needs; they appear later and are a bifurcation of the early trunk: but the same sap flows in both branches.

The constructive imagination penetrates every part of our life, whether individual or collective, speculative and practical, in all its forms--IT IS EVERYWHERE.

FOOTNOTES:

[146] See above, Part I, chapter II.

[147] It is a postulate of contemporary physiology that all the neurones taken together cannot spontaneously, that is, of themselves, give rise to any movement--they receive from without, and expend their energy outwards. Nevertheless, between the two moments that, in reflex and instinctive actions, seem continuous, a third interposes, which, for the higher psychic acts, may be of long duration. Thus, reasonings in logical form and reflection regarding a decision to be made have a feeble tendency to become changed into acts; their motor effects are indirect, and at a long range. But this intermediate moment is _par excellence_ the moment for psychology. It is also the moment of the personal equation: every man receives, transforms, and restores outwards according to his own organization, temperament, idiosyncrasies, character--in a word, according to his personality, of which needs, tendencies, desires, are the direct and immediate expression. So we come back, by another route, to the same definition of spontaneity.

[148] Besides these three principal forms, there are intermediate forms, transitions from one category to another, that are hard to classify: certain mythic creations are half-sketched, half-fixed; and we find religious and social and political conceptions, partly theoretic or fixed, partly practical or objective.

[149] Taine, _On Intelligence_, Part I, Book II, ch. I.

[150] See Appendix E.

[151] Sante de Santis, _I Sogni_, chapter X; Dr. Tissie, _Les Reves_, esp. p. 165, the case of a merchant who dreams of having paid a certain debt, and several weeks afterward meets his creditor, and maintains that they are even, giving way only to proof.

[152] For the complete account, see his _Pathologie des emotions_, pp. 345-49. (Paris, F. Alcan.)

[153] Dr. Max Simon, in an article on "Imagination in Insanity" (_Annales medico-psychologiques_, December, 1876), holds that every kind of mental disease has its own form of imagination that expresses itself in stories, compositions, sketches, decorations, dress, and symbolic attributes. The maniac invents complicated and improbable designs; the persecuted, symbolic designs, strange writings, bordering on the horrible; megalomaniacs look for the effect of everything they say and do; the general paralytic lives in grandeur and attributes capital importance to everything; lunatics love the naive and childishly wonderful.

There are also great imaginers who, having passed through a period of insanity, have strongly regretted it "as a state in which the soul, more exalted and more refined, perceives invisible relations and enjoys spectacles that escape the material eyes." Such was Gerard de Nerval. As for Charles Lamb, he would assert that he should be envied the days spent in an insane asylum. "Sometimes," he said in a letter to Coleridge, "I cast a longing glance backwards to the condition in which I found myself; for while it lasted I had many hours of pure happiness. Do not believe, Coleridge, that you have tasted the grandeur and all the transport of fancy if you have not been insane. Everything seems to me now insipid in comparison." Quoted by A. Barine, _Nevroses_, p. 326.

[154] There has often been cited the instance of certain maniacs at Charenton, who, during the Franco-Prussian War, despite the stories that were told them, the papers that they read, and the shells bursting under the walls of the asylum, maintained that the war was only imagined, and that all was only a contrivance of their persecutors.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

THE VARIOUS FORMS OF INSPIRATION[155]

Among the descriptions of the inspired state found in various authors, I select only three, which are brief and have each a special character.

I. Mystic inspiration, in a passive form, in Jacob Boehme (_Aurora_): "I declare before God that I do not myself know how the thing arises within me, without the participation of my will. I do not even know that which I must write. If I write, it is because the Spirit moves me and communicates to me a great, wonderful knowledge. Often I do not even know whether I dwell in spirit in this present world and whether it is I myself that have the fortune to possess a certain and solid knowledge."

II. Feverish and painful inspiration in Alfred de Musset: "Invention annoys me and makes me tremble. Execution, always too slow for my wish, makes my heart beat awfully, and weeping, and keeping myself from crying aloud, I am delivered of an idea that is intoxicating me, but of which I am mortally ashamed and disgusted next morning. If I change it, it is worse, it deserts me--it is much better to forget it and wait for another; but this other comes to me so confused and misshapen that my poor being cannot contain it. It presses and tortures me, until it has taken realizable proportions, when comes the other pain, of bringing forth, a truly physical suffering that I cannot define. And that is how my life is spent when I let myself be dominated by this artistic monster in me. It is much better, then, that I should live as I have imagined living, that I go to all kinds of excess, and that I kill this never-dying worm that people like me modestly term their inspiration, but which I call, plainly, my weakness."[156]

III. The poet Grillparzer[157] analyzes the condition, thus:

"Inspiration, properly so called, is the concentration of all the faculties and aptitudes on a single point which, for the moment, should include the rest of the world less than represent it. The strengthening of the state of the soul comes from the fact that its various faculties, instead of being disseminated over the whole world, find themselves contained within the limits of a single object, touch one another, reciprocally upholding, reenforcing, completing themselves. Thanks to this isolation, the object emerges out of the average level of its _milieu_, is illumined all around and put in relief--it takes body, moves, lives. But to attain this is necessary the concentration of all the faculties. It is only when the art-work has been a world for the artist that it is also a world for others."

FOOTNOTES:

[155] See Part One, chapter III.

[156] George Sand, _Elle et Lui_, I.

[157] In Oelzelt-Newin, _op. cit._, p. 49.

APPENDIX B

ON THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS FACTOR

We have seen that in the question of the unconscious there must be recognized a positive part--facts, and an hypothetical part--theories.[158]

Insofar as the facts are concerned, it would be well, I think, to establish two categories--(1) static unconscious, comprising habits, memory, and, in general, all that is organized knowledge. It is a state of preservation, of rest; very relatively, since representations suffer incessant corrosion and change. (2) Dynamic unconscious, which is a state of latent activity, of elaboration and incubation. We might give a multitude of proofs of this unconscious rumination. The well-known fact that an intellectual work gains by being interrupted; that in resuming it one often finds it cleared up, changed, even accomplished, was explained by some psychologists prior to Carpenter by "the resting of the mind." It would be just as valid to say that a traveler covers leagues by lying abed. The author just mentioned[159] has brought together many observations in which the solution of a mathematical, mechanical, commercial problem appeared suddenly after hours and days of vague, undefinable uneasiness, the cause of which is unknown, which, however, is only the result of an underlying cerebral working; for the trouble, sometimes rising to anguish, ceases as soon as the unawaited conclusion has entered consciousness. The men who think the most are not those who have the clearest and "most conscious" ideas, but those having at their disposal a rich fund of unconscious elaboration. On the other hand, shallow minds have a naturally poor unconscious fund, capable of but slight development; they give out immediately and rapidly all that they are able to give; they have no reserve. It is useless to allow them time for reflection or invention. They will not do better; they may do worse.

As to the nature of the unconscious working, we find disagreement and darkness. One may doubtless maintain, theoretically, that in the inventor everything goes on in subconsciousness and in unconsciousness, just as in consciousness itself, with the exception that a message does not arrive as far as the self; that the labor that may be followed, in clear consciousness, in its progress and retreats, remains the same when it continues unknown to us. This is possible. Yet it must at least be recognized that consciousness is rigorously subject to the condition of time, the unconscious is not. This difference, not to mention others, is not negligible, and could well arouse other problems.

The contemporary theories regarding the nature of the unconscious seem to me reducible to two principal positions--one psychological, the other physiological.

1. The physiological theory is simple and scarcely permits any variations. According to it, unconscious activity is simply cerebral; it is an "unconscious cerebration." The psychic factor, which ordinarily accompanies the activity of the nervous centers, is absent. Although I incline toward this hypothesis, I confess that it is full of difficulties.

It has been proven through numerous experiments (Fere, Binet, Mosso, Janet, Newbold, etc.) that "unconscious sensations"[160] act, since they produce the same reactions as conscious sensations, and Mosso has been able to maintain that "the testimony of consciousness is less certain than that of the sphygmograph." But the particular instance of invention is very different; for it does not merely suppose the adaptation to an end which the physiological factor would suffice to explain; it implies a series of adaptations, corrections, rational operations, of which nervous activity alone furnishes us no example.[161]

2. The psychological theory is based on an equivocal use of the word consciousness. Consciousness has one definite mark--it is an internal event existing, not by itself, but for me and insofar as it is known by me. But the psychological theory of the unconscious assumes that if we descend from clear consciousness progressively to obscure consciousness, to the subconscious, to the unconscious that manifests itself only through its motor reactions, the first state thus successively impoverished, still remains, down to its final term, identical in its basis with consciousness. It is an hypothesis that nothing justifies.

No difficulty arises when we bear in mind the legitimate distinction between consciousness of self and consciousness in general, the former entirely subjective, the latter in a way objective (the consciousness of a man captivated by an attractive scene; better yet, the fluid form of revery or of the awaking from syncope). We may admit that this evanescent consciousness, affective in nature, felt rather than perceived, is due to a lack of synthesis, of relations among the internal states, which remain isolated, unable to unite into a whole.

The difficulty commences when we descend into the region of the subconscious, which allows stages whose obscurity increases in proportion as we move away from clear consciousness, "like a lake in which the action of light is always nearing extinction" (in double coexisting personalities, automatic writing, mediums, etc.). Here some postulate two currents of consciousness existing at the same time in one person without reciprocal connection. Others suppose a "field of consciousness" with a brilliant center and extending indefinitely toward the dim distance. Still others liken the phenomenon to the movement of waves, whose summit alone is lighted up. Indeed, the authors declare that with these comparisons and metaphors they make no pretense of explaining; but certainly they all reduce unconsciousness to consciousness, as a special to a general case, and what is that if not explaining?

I do not intend to enumerate all the varieties of the psychological theory. The most systematic, that of Myers, accepted by Delboef and others, is full of a biological mysticism all its own. Here it is in substance: In every one of us there is a conscious self adapted to the needs of life, and potential selves constituting the subliminal consciousness. The latter, much broader in scope than personal consciousness, has dependent on it the entire vegetative life--circulation, trophic actions, etc. Ordinarily the conscious self is on the highest level, the subliminal consciousness on the second; but in certain extraordinary states (hypnosis, hysteria, divided consciousness, etc.) it is just the reverse. Here is the bold part of the hypothesis: Its authors suppose that the supremacy of the subliminal consciousness is a reversion, a return to the ancestral. In the higher animals and in primitive man, according to them, all trophic actions entered consciousness and were regulated by it. In the course of evolution this became organized; the higher consciousness has delegated to the subliminal consciousness the care of silently governing the vegetative life. But in case of mental disintegration there occurs a return to the primitive state. In this manner they explain burns through suggestion, stigmata, trophic changes of a miraculous appearance, etc. It is needless to dwell on this conception of the unconscious. It has been vehemently criticised, notably by Bramwell, who remarks that if certain faculties could little by little fall into the domain of subliminal consciousness because they were no longer necessary for the struggle for life, there are nevertheless faculties so essential to the well-being of the individual that we ask ourselves how they have been able to escape from the control of the will. If, for example, some lower type had the power of arresting pain, how could it lose it?

At the foundation of the psychological theory in all its forms is the unexpressed hypothesis that consciousness may be likened to a quantity that forever decreases without reaching zero. This is a postulate that nothing justifies. The experiments of psychophysicists, without solving the question, would support rather the opposite view. We know that the "threshold of consciousness" or minimum perceptible quantity, appears and disappears suddenly; the excitation is not felt under a determinate limit. Likewise in regard to the "summit of perception" or maximum perceptible, any increase of excitation is no longer felt if above a determinate limit. Moreover, in order that an increase or diminution be felt between these two extreme limits, it is necessary that both have a constant relation--differential threshold--as is expressed in Weber's law. All these facts, and others that I omit, are not favorable to the thesis of growing or diminishing continuity of consciousness. It has even been maintained that consciousness "has an aversion for continuity."

To sum up: The two rival theories are equally unable to penetrate into the inner nature of the unconscious factor. We have thus had to limit ourselves to taking it as a fact of experience and to assign it its place in the complex function that produces invention.

The observations of Flournoy (in his book, mentioned above, Part I,