Considered under its intellectual aspect, that is, in so far as it borrows its elements from the understanding, the imagination presupposes two fundamental operations—the one, negative and preparatory, dissociation; the other, positive and constitutive, association.

Dissociation is the "abstraction" of the older psychologists, who well understood its importance for the subject with which we are now concerned. Nevertheless, the term "dissociation" seems to me preferable, because it is more comprehensive. It designates a genus of which the other is a species. It is a spontaneous operation and of a more radical nature than the other. Abstraction, strictly so-called, acts only on isolated states of consciousness; dissociation acts, further, on series of states of consciousness, which it sorts out, breaks up, dissolves, and through this preparatory work makes suitable for entering into new combinations.

Perception is a synthetic process, but dissociation (or abstraction) is already present in embryo in perception, just because the latter is a complex state. Everyone perceives after an individual fashion, according to his constitution and the impression of the moment. A painter, a sportsman, a dealer, and an uninterested spectator do not see a given horse in the same manner: the qualities that interest one are unnoticed by another.[3]

The image being a simplification of sensory data, and its nature dependent on that of previous perceptions, it is inevitable that the work of dissociation should go on in it. But this is far too mild a statement. Observation and experiment show us that in the majority of cases the process grows wonderfully. In order to follow the progressive development of this dissolution, we may roughly differentiate images into three categories—complete, incomplete, and schematic—and study them in order.

The group of images here termed complete comprises first, objects repeatedly presented in daily experience—my wife's face, my inkstand, the sound of a church bell or of a neighboring clock, etc. In this class are also included the images of things that we have perceived but a few times, but which, for additional reasons, have remained clean-cut in our memory. Are these images complete, in the strict sense of the word? They cannot be; and the contrary belief is a delusion of consciousness that, however, disappears when one confronts it with the reality. The mental image can contain all the qualities of an object in even less degree than the perception; the image is the result of selection, varying with every case. The painter Fromentin, who was proud that he found after two or three years "an exact recollection" of things he had barely noticed on a journey, makes elsewhere, however, the following confession: "My memory of things, although very faithful, has never the certainty admissible as documentary evidence. The weaker it grows, the more is it changed in becoming the property of my memory and the more valuable is it for the work that I intend for it. In proportion as the exact form becomes altered, another form, partly real, partly imaginary, which I believe preferable, takes its place." Note that the person speaking thus is a painter endowed with an unusual visual memory; but recent investigations have shown that among men generally the so-called complete and exact images undergo change and warping. One sees the truth of this statement when, after a lapse of some time, one is placed in the presence of the original object, so that comparison between the real object and its image becomes possible.[4] Let us note that in this group the image always corresponds to certain individual objects; it is not the same with the other two groups.

The group of incomplete images, according to the testimony of consciousness itself, comes from two distinct sources—first, from perceptions insufficiently or ill-fixed; and again, from impressions of like objects which, when too often repeated, end by becoming confused. The latter case has been well described by Taine. A man, says he, who, having gone through an avenue of poplars wants to picture a poplar; or, having looked into a poultry-yard, wishes to call up a picture of a hen, experiences a difficulty—his different memories rise up. The experiment becomes a cause of effacement; the images canceling one another decline to a state of imperceptible tendencies which their likeness and unlikeness prevent from predominating. Images become blunted by their collision just as do bodies by friction.[5]

This group leads us to that of schematic images, or those entirely without mark—the indefinite image of a rosebush, of a pin, of a cigarette, etc. This is the greatest degree of impoverishment; the image, deprived little by little of its own characteristics, is nothing more than a shadow. It has become that transitional form between image and pure concept that we now term "generic image," or one that at least resembles the latter.

The image, then, is subject to an unending process of change, of suppression and addition, of dissociation and corrosion. This means that it is not a dead thing; it is not at all like a photographic plate with which one may reproduce copies indefinitely. Being dependent on the state of the brain, the image undergoes change like all living substance,—it is subject to gains and losses, especially losses. But each of the foregoing three classes has its use for the inventor. They serve as material for different kinds of imagination—in their concrete form, for the mechanic and the artist; in their schematic form, for the scientist and for others.

Thus far we have seen only a part of the work of dissociation and, taking it all in all, the smallest part. We have, seemingly, considered images as isolated facts, as psychic atoms; but that is a purely theoretic position. Images are not solitary in actual life; they form part of a chain, or rather of a woof or net, since, by reason of their manifold relations they may radiate in all directions, through all the senses. Dissociation, then, works also upon series, cuts them up, mangles them, breaks them, and reduces them to ruins.

The ideal law of the recurrence of images is that known since Hamilton's time under the name of "law of redintegration,"[6] which consists in the passing from a part to the whole, each element tending to reproduce the complete state, each member of a series the whole of that series. If this law existed alone, invention would be forever forbidden to us; we could not emerge from repetition; we should be condemned to monotony. But there is an opposite power that frees us—it is dissociation.

It is very strange that, while psychologists have for so long a time studied the laws of association, no one has investigated whether the inverse process, dissociation, also has not laws of its own. We can not here attempt such a task, which would be outside of our province; it will suffice to indicate in passing two general conditions determining the association of series.

First, there are the internal or subjective causes. The revived image of a face, a monument, a landscape, an occurrence, is, most often, only partial. It depends on various conditions that revive the essential part and drop the minor details, and this "essential" which survives dissociation depends on subjective causes, the principal ones of which are at first practical, utilitarian reasons. It is the tendency already mentioned to ignore what is of no value, to exclude that from consciousness. Helmholtz has shown that in the act of seeing, various details remain unnoticed because they are immaterial in the concerns of life; and there are many other like instances. Then, too, emotional reasons governing the attention orientate it exclusively in one direction—these will be studied in the course of this work. Lastly, there are logical or intellectual reasons, if we understand by this term the law of mental inertia or the law of least resistance by means of which the mind tends toward the simplification and lightening of its labor.

Secondly, there are external or objective causes which are variations in experience. When two or more qualities or events are given as constantly associated in experience we do not dissociate them. The uniformity of nature's laws is the great opponent of dissociation. Many truths (for example, the existence of the antipodes) are established with difficulty, because it is necessary to break up closely knit associations. The oriental king whom Sully mentions, who had never seen ice, refused to credit the existence of solid water. A total impression, the elements of which had never been given us separately in experience, would be unanalyzable. If all cold objects were moist, and all moist objects cold; if all liquids were transparent and all non-liquids opaque, we should find it difficult to distinguish cold from moisture and liquidity from transparency. On his part, James adds further that what has been associated sometimes with one thing and sometimes with another tends to become dissociated from both. This might be called a law of association by concomitant variations.[7]

In order to thoroughly comprehend the absolute necessity for dissociation, let us note that total redintegration is per se a hindrance to creation. Examples are given of people who can easily remember twenty or thirty pages of a book, but if they want a particular passage they are unable to pick it out—they must begin at the beginning and continue down to the required place. Excessive ease of retention thus becomes a serious inconvenience. Besides these rare cases, we know that ignorant people, those intellectually limited, give the same invariable story of every occurrence, in which all the parts—the important and the accessory, the useful and the useless—are on a dead level. They omit no detail, they cannot select. Minds of this kind are inapt at invention. In short, we may say that there are two kinds of memory: one is completely systematized, e.g., habits, routine, poetry or prose learned by heart, faultless musical rendering, etc. The acquisition forms a compact whole and cannot enter into new combinations. The other is not systematized; it is composed of small, more or less coherent groups. This kind of memory is plastic and capable of becoming combined in new ways.

We have enumerated the spontaneous, natural causes of association, omitting the voluntary and artificial causes, which are but their imitations. As a result of these various causes, images are taken to pieces, shattered, broken up, but made all the readier as materials for the inventor. This is a process analogous to that which, in geologic time, produces new strata through the wearing away of old rocks.

II

Association is one of the big questions of psychology; but as it does not especially concern our subject, it will be discussed in strict proportion to its use here. Nothing is easier than limiting ourselves. Our task is reducible to a very clear and very brief question: What are the forms of association that give rise to new combinations and under what influences do they arise? All other forms of association, those that are only repetitions, should be eliminated. Consequently, this subject can not be treated in one single effort; it must be studied, in turn, in its relations to our three factors—intellectual, emotional, unconscious.

It is generally admitted that the expression "association of ideas" is faulty.[8] It is not comprehensive enough, association being active also in psychic states other than ideas. It seems indicative rather of mere juxtaposition, whereas associated states modify one another by the very fact of their being connected. But, as it has been confirmed by long usage, it would be difficult to eliminate the phrase.

On the other hand, psychologists are not at all agreed as regards the determination of the principal laws or forms of association. Without taking sides in the debate, I adopt the most generally accepted classification, the one most suitable for our subject—the one that reduces everything to the two fundamental laws of contiguity and resemblance. In recent years various attempts have been made to reduce these two laws to one, some reducing resemblance to contiguity; others, contiguity to resemblance. Putting aside the ground of this discussion, which seems to me very useless, and which perhaps is due to excessive zeal for unity, we must nevertheless recognize that this discussion is not without interest for the study of the creative imagination, because it has well shown that each of the two fundamental laws has a characteristic mechanism.

Association by contiguity (or continuity), which Wundt calls external, is simple and homogeneous. It reproduces the order and connection of things; it reduces itself to habits contracted by our nervous system.

Is association by resemblance, which Wundt calls internal, strictly speaking, an elementary law? Many doubt it. Without entering into the long and frequently confused discussions to which this subject has given rise, we may sum up their results as follows: In so-called association by resemblance it is necessary to distinguish three moments—(a) That of the presentation; a state A is given in perception or association-by-contiguity, and forms the starting point. (b) That of the work of assimilation; A is recognized as more or less like a state a previously experienced. (c) As a consequence of the coËxistence of A and a in consciousness, they can later be recalled reciprocally, although the two original occurrences A and a have previously never existed together, and sometimes, indeed, may not possibly have existed together. It is evident that the crucial moment is the second, and that it consists of an act of active assimilation. Thus James maintains that "it is a relation that the mind perceives after the fact, just as it may perceive the relations of superiority, of distance, of causality, of container and content, of substance and accident, or of contrast between an object, and some second object which the associative machinery calls up."[9]

Association by resemblance presupposes a joint labor of association and dissociation—it is an active form. Consequently it is the principal source of the material of the creative imagination, as the sequel of this work will sufficiently show.

After this rather long but necessary preface, we come to the intellectual factor rightly so termed, which we have been little by little approaching. The essential, fundamental element of the creative imagination in the intellectual sphere is the capacity of thinking by analogy; that is, by partial and often accidental resemblance. By analogy we mean an imperfect kind of resemblance: like is a genus of which analogue is a species.

Let us examine in some detail the mechanism of this mode of thought in order that we may understand how analogy is, by its very nature, an almost inexhaustible instrument of creation.

1. Analogy may be based solely on the number of attributes compared. Let a b c d e f and r s t u d v be two beings or objects, each letter representing symbolically one of the constitutive attributes. It is evident that the analogy between the two is very weak, since there is only one common element, d. If the number of the elements common to both increases, the analogy will grow in the same proportion. But the agreement represented above is not infrequent among minds unused to a somewhat severe discipline. A child sees in the moon and stars a mother surrounded by her daughters. The aborigines of Australia called a book "mussel," merely because it opens and shuts like the valves of a shellfish.[10]

2. Analogy may have for its basis the quality or value of the compound attributes. It rests on a variable element, which oscillates from the essential to the accidental, from the reality to the appearance. To the layman, the likeness between cetacians and fishes are great; to the scientist, slight. Here, again, numerous agreements are possible, provided one take no account either of their solidity or their frailty.

3. Lastly, in minds without power, there occurs a semi-unconscious operation that we may call a transfer through the omission of the middle term. There is analogy between a b c d e and g h a i f through the common letter a; between g h a i f and x y f z q through the common letter f; and finally an analogy becomes established between a b c d e and x y f z q for no other reason than that of their common analogy with g h a i f. In the realm of the affective states, transfers of this sort are not at all rare.

Analogy, an unstable process, undulating and multiform, gives rise to the most unforeseen and novel groupings. Through its pliability, which is almost unlimited, it produces in equal measure absurd comparisons and very original inventions.

After these remarks on the mechanism of thinking by analogy, let us glance at the processes it employs in its creative work. The problem is, apparently, inextricable. Analogies are so numerous, so various, so arbitrary, that we may despair of finding any regularity whatever in creative work. Despite this it seems, however, reducible to two principal types or processes, which are personification, and transformation or metamorphosis.

Personification is the earlier process. It is radical, always identical with itself, but transitory. It goes out from ourselves toward other things. It consists in attributing life to everything, in supposing in everything that shows signs of life—and even in inanimate objects—desires, passions, and acts of will analogous to ours, acting like ourselves in view of definite ends. This state of mind is incomprehensible to an adult civilized man; but it must be admitted, since there are facts without number that show its existence. We do not need to cite them—they are too well known. They fill the works of ethnologists, of travelers in savage lands, of books of mythology. Besides, all of us, at the commencement of our lives, during our earliest childhood, have passed through this inevitable stage of universal animism. Works on child-psychology abound in observations that leave no possible room for doubt on this point. The child endows everything with life, and he does so the more in proportion as he is more imaginative. But this stage, which among civilized people lasts only a brief period, remains in the primitive man a permanent disposition and one that is always active. This process of personification is the perennial fount whence have gushed the greater number of myths, an enormous mass of superstitions, and a large number of esthetic productions. To sum up in a word, all things that have been invented ex analogia hominis.

Transformation or metamorphosis is a general, permanent process under many forms, proceeding not from the thinking subject towards objects, but from one object to another, from one thing to another. It consists of a transfer through partial resemblance. This operation rests on two fundamental bases—depending at one time on vague resemblances (a cloud becomes a mountain, or a mountain a fantastic animal; the sound of the wind a plaintive cry, etc.), or again, on a resemblance with a predominating emotional element: A perception provokes a feeling, and becomes the mark, sign, or plastic form thereof (the lion represents courage; the cat, artifice; the cypress, sorrow; and so on). All this, doubtless, is erroneous or arbitrary; but the function of the imagination is to invent, not to perceive. All know that this process creates metaphors, allegories, symbols; it should not, however, be believed on that account that it remains restricted to the realm of art or of the development of language. We meet it every moment in practical life, in mechanical, industrial, commercial, and scientific invention, and we shall, later, give a large number of examples in support of this statement.

Let us note, briefly, that analogy, as an imperfect form of resemblance—as was said above, if we assume among the objects compared a totality of likenesses and differences in varying proportions—necessarily allows all degrees. At one end of the scale, the comparison is made between valueless or exaggerated likenesses. At the other end, analogy is restricted to exact resemblance; it approaches cognition, strictly so called; for example, in mechanical and scientific invention. Hence it is not at all surprising that the imagination is often a substitute for, and as Goethe expressed it, "a forerunner of," reason. Between the creative imagination and rational investigation there is a community of nature—both presuppose the ability of seizing upon likenesses. On the other hand, the predominance of the exact process establishes from the outset a difference between "thinkers" and imaginative dreamers ("visionaries").[11]

[3] Cf. the well-known aphorism, "Apperception ist alles." (Tr.)