act of the creative imagination. Then he passes to the unconscious factor,
the involuntary "coming" of the idea, that "moment of genius," as Buffon
called it, which often marks the end of an unconscious elaboration of the
idea or the beginning of conscious elaboration.
[Footnote: See the quotation from Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the
mathematician, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.]
Ribot points out that certain organic changes, as in blood circulation--
the familiar rush of blood to the head--accompany imaginative activity.
Then he discusses the inventor's and artist's "fixed idea," their "will
that it shall be so," "the motor tendency of images engendering the
ideal." Ribot's distinction between the animal's revival of images and the
true creative combination of images in the mental life of children and of
primitive man bears directly upon poetry, but even more suggestive to us
is his diagram of the successive stages by which inventions come into
being. There are two types of this process, and three stages of each: (A)
the "idea," the "discovery" or invention, and then the verification or
application; or else (B) the unconscious preparation, followed
by the "idea" or "inspiration," and then by the "development" or
construction. Whether a man is inventing a safety-pin or a sonnet, the
series of imaginative processes seems to be much the same. There is of
course a typical difference between the "plastic" imagination, dealing
with clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the arts
of form like sculpture and architecture, and that "diffluent" imagination
which prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective and
emotional, and of which modern music like Debussy's is a good example. But
whatever may be the specific type of imagination involved, we find alike
in inventor, scientist and artist the same general sequence of "germ,
incubation, flowering and completion," and the same fundamental motor
impulse as the driving power.