and Ribot that we are chiefly concerned with "imaginations," that is, a
series of visual, auditory, motor or tactile images flooding in upon the
mind, and that it is safer to talk about these "imaginations" than about
"the Imagination." Literary critics will continue to use this last
expression--as we are doing in the present chapter--because it is too
convenient to be given up. But they mean by it something fairly definite:
namely, the images swarming in the stream of consciousness, and their
integration into wholes that satisfy the human desire for beauty. It is
in its ultimate aim rather than in its immediate processes that the
"artistic" imagination differs from the inventor's or scientist's or
philosopher's imagination. We no longer assert, as did Stopford Brooke
some forty years ago, that "the highest scientific intellect is a joke
compared with the power displayed by a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante." We
are inclined rather to believe that in its highest exercise of power the
scientific mind is attempting much the same feat as the highest type of
poetic mind, and that in both cases it is a feat of imaginative energy.


_2. Creative and Artistic Imagination_

The reader who has hitherto allowed himself to think of a poet as a sort
of freak of nature, abnormal in the very constitution of his mind, and
achieving his results by methods so obscure that "inspiration" is our
helpless name for indicating them, cannot do better than master such a
book as Ribot's _Essay on the Creative Imagination_.
[Footnote: Th. Ribot, _Essai sur l'Imagination creatrice_. Paris, 1900.
English translation by Open Court Co., Chicago, 1906.]
This famous psychologist, starting with the conception that the raw
material for the creative imagination is images, and that its basis lies
in a motor impulse, examines first the emotional factor involved in every