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.

281 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. 299 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. 313 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. 320 APPENDICES.
observations and documents. A. The various forms of inspiration. 335 B. On the nature of the unconscious factor. Two categories—static unconscious, dynamic unconscious.—Theories as to the nature of the unconscious.—Objections, criticisms. 338 C. Cosmic and human imagination. 346 D. Evidence in regard to musical imagination. 350 E. The imaginative type and association of ideas. 353

---

INTRODUCTION

---

INTRODUCTION

The Motor Nature of the Constructive Imagination

I

It has been often repeated that one of the principal conquests of contemporary psychology is the fact that it has firmly established the place and importance of movements; that it has especially through observation and experiment shown the representation of a movement to be a movement begun, a movement in the nascent state. Yet those who have most strenuously insisted on this proposition have hardly gone beyond the realm of the passive imagination; they have clung to facts of pure reproduction. My aim is to extend their formula, and to show that it explains, in large measure at least, the origin of the creative imagination.

Let us follow step by step the passage from reproduction pure and simple to the creative stage, showing therein the persistence and preponderance of the motor element in proportion as we rise from mere repetition to invention.

First of all, do all representations include motor elements? Yes, I say, because every perception presupposes movements to some extent, and representations are the remnants of past perceptions. Certain it is that, without our examining the question in detail, this statement holds good for the great majority of cases. So far as visual and tactile images are concerned there is no possible doubt as to the importance of the motor elements that enter into their composition. The eye is very poorly endowed with movements for its office as a higher sense-organ; but if we take into account its intimate connection with the vocal organs, so rich in capacity for motor combinations, we note a kind of compensation. Smell and taste, secondary in human psychology, rise to a very high rank indeed among many animals, and the olfactory apparatus thus obtains with them a complexity of movements proportionate to its importance, and one that at times approaches that of sight. There yet remains the group of internal sensations that might cause discussion. Setting aside the fact that the vague impressions bound up with chemical changes within the tissues are scarcely factors in representation, we find that the sensations resulting from changes in respiration, circulation, and digestion are not lacking in motor elements. The mere fact that, in some persons, vomiting, hiccoughs, micturition, etc., can be caused by perceptions of sight or of hearing proves that representations of this character have a tendency to become translated into acts.

Without emphasizing the matter we may, then, say that this thesis rests on a weighty mass of facts; that the motor element of the image tends to cause it to lose its purely "inner" character, to objectify it, to externalize it, to project it outside of ourselves.

It should, however, be noted that what has just been said does not take us beyond the reproductive imagination—beyond memory. All these revived images are repetitions; but the creative imagination requires something new—this is its peculiar and essential mark. In order to grasp the transition from reproduction to production, from repetition to creation, it is necessary to consider other, more rare, and more extraordinary facts, found only among some favored beings. These facts, known for a long time, surrounded with some mystery, and attributed in a vague manner "to the power of the imagination," have been studied in our own day with much more system and exactness. For our purpose we need to recall only a few of them.

Many instances have been reported of tingling or of pains that may appear in different parts of the body solely through the effect of the imagination. Certain people can increase or inhibit the beating of their hearts at will, i.e., by means of an intense and persistent representation. The renowned physiologist, E. F. Weber, possessed