For Froschammer, Fancy is the original principle of things. In his philosophical theory it plays the same part as Hegel's Idea, Schopenhauer's Will, Hartmann's Unconscious, etc. It is, at first, objective—in the beginning the universal creative power is immanent in things, just as there is contained in the kernel the principle that shall give the plant its form and construct its organism; it spreads out into the myriads of vegetable and animal existences that have been succeeded or that still live on the surface of the Cosmos. The first organized beings must have been very simple; but little by little the objective imagination increases its energy by exercising it; it invents and realizes increasingly more complex images that attest the progress of its artistic genius. So Darwin was right in asserting that a slow evolution raises up organized beings towards fulness of life and beauty of form.

Step by step, it succeeds in becoming conscious of itself in the mind of man—it becomes subjective. Generative power, at first diffused throughout the organism, becomes localized in the generative organs, and becomes established in sex. "The brain, in living beings, may form a pole opposed to the reproductive organs, especially when these beings are very high in the organic scale." Thus changed, the generative power has become capable of perceiving new relations, of bringing forth internal worlds. In nature and in man it is the same principle that causes living forms to appear—objective images in a way, and subjective images, a kind of living forms that arise and die in the mind.[163]

This metaphysical theory, one of the many varieties of mens agitat molem, being, like every other, a personal conception, it is superfluous to discuss or criticise its evident anthropomorphism. But, since we are dealing with hypotheses, I venture to risk a comparison between embryological development in physiology, instinct in psychophysiology, and the creative imagination in psychology. These three phenomena are creations, i.e., a disposition of certain materials following a determinate type.

In the first case, the ovum after fertilization is subject to a rigorously determined evolution whence arises such and such an individual with its specific and personal characters, its hereditary influences, etc. Every disturbing factor in this evolution produces deviations, monstrosities, and the creation does not attain the normal. Embryology can follow these changes step by step. There remains one obscure point in any event, and that is, the nature of what the ancients called the nisus formativus.

In the case of instinct, the initial moment is an external or internal sensation, or rather, a representation—the image of a nest to be built, in the case of the bird; of a tunnel to be dug, for the ant; of a comb to be made, for the bee and the wasp; of a web to be spun, for the spider, etc. This initial state puts into action a mechanism determined by the nature of each species, and ends in creations of special kinds. However, variations of instinct, its adaptation to various conditions, show that the conditions of the determinism are less simple, that the creative activity is endowed with a certain plasticity.

In the third case, creative imagination, the ideal, a sketched construction, is the equivalent of the ovum; but it is evident that the plasticity of the creative imagination is much greater than that of instinct. The imagination may radiate in several very different ways, and the plan of the invention, as we have seen,[164] may arise as a whole and develop regularly in an embryological manner, or else present itself in a fragmentary, partial form that becomes complete after a series of attractions.

Perhaps an identical process, forming three stages—a lower, middle, and higher—is at the root of all three cases. But this is only a speculative hypothesis, foreign to psychology proper.