ESSAY
ON THE
CREATIVE IMAGINATION
BY
TH. RIBOT
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY
ALBERT H. N. BARON
FELLOW IN CLARK UNIVERSITY
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., Ltd.
1906
COPYRIGHT BY
The Open Court Publishing Co.
CHICAGO, U. S. A.
1906
All rights reserved.
To the Memory of My Teacher
and Friend,
Arthur Allin, Ph. D.,
professor of psychology and education,
university of colorado,
who first interested me in the problems of psychology,
this book is dedicated, with reverence
and gratitude, by
The Translator.
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Translator's Preface Author's Preface
INTRODUCTION.
The motor nature of the constructive imagination.
Transition from the reproductive to the creative imagination.—Do all representations contain motor elements?—Unusual effects produced by images: vesication, stigmata; their conditions; their meaning for our subject.—The imagination is, on the intellectual side, equivalent to will. Proof: Identity of development; subjective, personal character of both; teleologic character; analogy between the abortive forms of the imagination and abulias.
FIRST PART.
Analysis of the imagination.
CHAPTER I.
The intellectual factor.
Dissociation, preparatory work.—Dissociation in complete, incomplete and schematic images.—Dissociation in series. Its principal causes:
Internal or subjective, external or objective.—Association: its rôle reduced to a single question, the formation of new combinations.—The principal intellectual factor is thinking by analogy. Why it is an almost inexhaustible source of creation. Its mechanism. Its processes reducible to two, viz.: personification, transformation.
CHAPTER II.
The emotional factor.
The great importance of this element.—All forms of the creative imagination imply affective elements. Proofs: All affective conditions may influence the imagination. Proofs: Association of ideas on an emotional basis; new combinations under ordinary and extraordinary forms.—Association by contrast.—The motor element in tendencies.— There is no creative instinct; invention has not a source, but sources, and always arises from a need.—The work of the imagination reduced to two great classes, themselves reducible to special needs.—Reasons for the prejudice in favor of a creative instinct.
CHAPTER III.
The unconscious factor.
Various views of the "inspired state." Its essential characteristics; suddenness, impersonality.—Its relations to unconscious activity.—Resemblances to hypermnesia, the initial state of alcoholic intoxication and somnambulism on waking.—Disagreements concerning the ultimate nature of unconsciousness: two hypotheses.—The "inspired state" is not a cause, but an index.—Associations in unconscious form.—Mediate or latent association: recent experiments and discussions on this subject.—"Constellation" the result of a summation of predominant tendencies. Its mechanism.
CHAPTER IV.
The organic conditions of the imagination.
Anatomical conditions: various hypotheses. Obscurity of the question. Flechsig's theory.—Physiological conditions: are they cause, effect, or accompaniment? Chief factor: change in cerebral and local circulation.—Attempts at experimentation.—The oddities of inventors brought under two heads: the explicable and inexplicable. They are helpers of inspiration.—Is there any analogy between physical and psychic creation? A philosophical hypothesis on the subject.—Limitation of the question. Impossibility of an exact answer.
CHAPTER V.
The principle of unity.
Importance of the unifying principle. It is a fixed idea or a fixed emotion.—Their equivalence.—Distinction between the synthetic principle and the ideal, which is the principle of unity in motion: the ideal is a construction in images, merely outlined.—The principal forms of the unifying principles: unstable, organic or middle, extreme or semi-morbid.—Obsession of the inventor and the sick: insufficiency of a purely psychological criterion.
SECOND PART.
The development of the imagination.
CHAPTER I.
Imagination in animals.
Difficulties of the subject.—The degree of imagination in animals.—Does creative synthesis exist in them? Affirmation and denials.—The special form of animal imagination is motor, and shows itself through play: its numerous varieties.—Why the animal imagination must be above all motor: lack of intellectual development.—Comparison with young children, in whom the motor system predominates: the rôles of movements in infantile insanity.
CHAPTER II.
Imagination in the child.
Division of its development into four principal periods.—Transition from passive to creative imagination: perception and illusion.—Animating everything: analysis of the elements constituting this moment: the rôle of belief.—Creation in play: period of imitation, attempts at invention.—Fanciful invention.
CHAPTER III.
Primitive man and the creation of myths.
The golden age of the creative imagination.—Myths: hypotheses as to the origin: the myth is the psycho-physical objectification of man in the phenomena that he perceives. The rôle of imagination.—How myths are formed. The moment of creation: two operations—animating everything, qualifying everything. Romantic invention lacking in peoples without imagination. The rôle of analogy and of association through "constellation."—The evolution of myths: ascension, acme, decline.—The explanatory myths undergo a radical transformation: the work of depersonification of the myth. Survivals.—The non-explanatory myths suffer a partial transformation: Literature is a fallen and rationalized mythology.—Popular imagination and legends: the legend is to the myth what illusion is to hallucination.—Unconscious processes that the imagination employs in order to create legends: fusion, idealization.
CHAPTER IV.
The higher forms of invention.
Is a psychology of great inventors possible? Pathological and physiological theories of genius.—General characters of great inventors. Precocity: chronological order of the development of the creative power. Psychological reasons for this order. Why the creator commences by imitating.—Necessity or fatalism of vocation.—The representative character of great creators. Discussion as to the origin of this character—is it in the individual or in the environment?— Mechanism of creation. Two principal processes—complete, abridged. Their three phases; their resemblances and differences.—The rôle of chance in invention: it supposes the meeting of two factors—one internal, the other external.—Chance is an occasion for, not an agent of, creation.
CHAPTER V.
Law of the development of the imagination.
Is the creative imagination, in its evolution, subject to any law?—It passes through two stages separated by a critical phase.—Period of autonomy; critical period; period of definite constitution. Two cases: decay or transformation through logical form, through deviation.—Subsidiary law of increasing complexity.—Historical verification.
THIRD PART.
The principal types of imagination.
preliminary.
The need of a concrete study.—The varieties of the creative imagination, analogous to the varieties of character.
CHAPTER I.
The plastic imagination.
It makes use of clear images, well determined in space, and of associations of objective relations.—Its external character.—Inferiority of the affective element.—Its principal manifestations: in the arts dealing with form; in poetry (transformation of sonorous into visual images); in myths with clear outline; in mechanical invention.—The dry and rational imagination its elements.
CHAPTER II.
The diffluent imagination.
It makes use of vague images linked according to the least rigorous modes of association. Emotional abstractions; their nature.—Its characteristic of inwardness.—Its principal manifestations: revery, the romantic spirit, the chimerical spirit; myths and religious conceptions, literature and the fine arts (the symbolists), the class of the marvelous and fantastic.—Varieties of the diffluent imagination: first, numerical imagination; its nature; two principal forms, cosmogonic and scientific conceptions; second, musical imagination, the type of the affective imagination. Its characteristics; it does not develop save after an interval of time.—Natural transposition of events in musicians.— Antagonism between true musical imagination and plastic imagination. Inquiry and facts on the subject.—Two great types of imagination.
CHAPTER III.
Mystic imagination.
Its elements; its special characteristics.—Thinking symbolically.—Nature of this symbolism.—The mystic changes concrete images into symbolic images.—Their obscurity; whence it arises.—Extraordinary abuse of analogy.—Mystic labor on letters, numbers, etc.—Nature and extent of the belief accompanying this form of imagination: it is unconditional and permanent.—The mystic conception of the world a general symbolism.—Mystic imagination in religion and in metaphysics.
CHAPTER IV.
The scientific imagination.
It is distinguishable into genera and species.—The need for monographs that have not yet appeared.—The imagination in growing sciences—belief is at its maximum; in the organized sciences—the negative rôle of method.—The conjectural phase; proof of its importance.—Abortive and dethroned hypotheses.—The imagination in the processes of verification.—The metaphysician's imagination arises from the same need as the scientist's.—Metaphysics is a rationalized myth.—Three mqoments.—Imaginative and rationalist.
CHAPTER V
The practical and mechanical imagination.
Indetermination of this imaginative form.—Inferior forms: the industrious, the unstable, the eccentric. Why people of lively imagination are changeable.—Superstitious beliefs. Origin of this form of imagination—its mental mechanism and its elements.—The higher form—mechanical imagination.—Man has expended at least as much imagination there as in esthetic creation.—Why the contrary view prevails.—Resemblances between these two forms of imagination.—Identity of development. Detail observation—four phases.—General characters. This form, at its best, supposes inspiration; periods of preparation, of maturity, and of decline.—Special characters: invention occurs in layers. Principal steps of its development.—It depends strictly on physical conditions.—A phase of pure imagination—mechanical romances. Examples.—Identical nature of the imagination of the mechanic and that of the artist.
CHAPTER VI.
The commercial imagination.
Its internal and external conditions.—Two classes of creators—the cautious, the daring.—The initial moment of invention.—The importance of the intuitive mind.—Hypotheses in regard to its psychologic nature.—Its development: the creation of increasingly more simple processes of substitution.—Characters in common with the forms of creation already studied.—Characters peculiar to it—the combining imagination of the tactician; it is a form of war.—Creative intoxication.—Exclusive use of schematic representations.—Remarks on the various types of images.—The creators of great financial systems.—Brief remarks on the military imagination.
CHAPTER VII.
The utopian imagination.
Successive appearances of ideal conceptions.—Creators in ethics and in the social realm.—Chimerical forms. Social novelists.—Ch. Fourrier, type of the great imaginer.—Practical invention—the collective ideal.—Imaginative regression.
CONCLUSION.
I. The foundations of the creative imagination. Why man is able to create: two principal conditions.—"Creative spontaneity," which resolves itself into needs, tendencies, desires.— Every imaginative creation has a motor origin.—The spontaneous revival of images.—The creative imagination reduced to three forms: outlined, fixed, objectified. Their peculiar characteristics. II. The imaginative type.
A view of the imaginative life in all its stages.—Reduction to a psychologic law.—Four stages characterized: 1, by the quantity of images; 2, by their quantity and intensity; 3, by quantity, intensity and duration; 4, by the complete and permanent systematization of the imaginary life.— Summary.
APPENDICES.
Observations and documents.
A. The various forms of inspiration.
B. On the nature of the unconscious factor. Two categories—static unconscious, dynamic unconscious.—Theories as to the nature of the unconscious.—Objections, criticisms.
C. Cosmic and human imagination.
D. Evidence in regard to musical imagination.
E. The imaginative type and association of ideas.
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