Essay on the Creative Imagination Part 22

The "sketched" form is or remains an elementary, primitive, automatic form. Conformably to the general law ruling the development of mind--pa.s.sage 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 a.s.signs 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 circ.u.mscribing 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 cla.s.ses, 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 compet.i.tors; 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 quant.i.ty of images; (2) quant.i.ty and intensity; (3) quant.i.ty, intensity and duration; (4) complete systematization.

(1) In the first place the predominance of imagination is marked only by the quant.i.ty of representations invading consciousness; they teem, break apart, become a.s.sociated, 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 a.s.sociations, 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 a.n.a.lyze, 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 cla.s.s. Many among them have a.s.serted 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs 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. a.s.sociations 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 ma.s.s--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 a.s.sert 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 const.i.tution is similar or a.n.a.logous 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 pa.s.sing 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 const.i.tutive 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 a.n.a.logy, 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 princ.i.p.al forms, there are intermediate forms, transitions from one category to another, that are hard to cla.s.sify: 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 nave and childishly wonderful.

There are also great imaginers who, having pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sert 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 sh.e.l.ls bursting under the walls of the asylum, maintained that the war was only imagined, and that all was only a contrivance of their persecutors.