The wants, tendencies, desires—it matters not which term we adopt—the whole of which constitutes the instinct of individual preservation, have been the generators of all inventions dealing with food-getting, housing, making of weapons, instruments, and machines.
The need for individual and social expansion or extension has given rise to military, commercial, and industrial invention, and in its disinterested form, esthetic creation.
As for the sexual instinct, its psychic fertility is in no way less than the physical—it is an inexhaustible source of imagination in everyday life as well as in art.
The wants of man in contact with his fellows have engendered, through instinctive or reflective action, the numerous social and practical creations regulating human groups, and they are rough or complex, stable or unstable, just or unjust, kindly or harsh.
The need of knowing and of explaining, well or ill, has created myths, religions, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses.
Every want, tendency or desire may, then, become creative, by itself or associated with others, and into these final elements it is that analysis must resolve "creative spontaneity." This vague expression corresponds to a sum, not to a special property.[147] Every invention, then, has a motor origin; the ultimate basis of the constructive imagination is motor.
2. But needs and desires by themselves cannot create—they are only a stimulus and a spring. Whence arises the need of a second condition—the spontaneous revival of images.
In many animals that are endowed only with memory the return of images is always provoked. Sensation from without or from within bring them into consciousness under the form, pure and simple, of former experience; whence we have reproduction, repetition without new associations. People of slight imagination and used to routine approach this mental condition. But, as a matter of fact, man from his second year on, and some higher animals, go beyond this stage—they are capable of spontaneous revival. By this term I mean that revival that comes about abruptly, without apparent antecedents. We know that these act in a latent form, and consist of thinking by analogy, affective dispositions, unconscious elaboration. This sudden appearance excites other states which, grouped into new associations, contain the first elements of the creative act.
Taken altogether, and however numerous its manifestations, the constructive imagination seems to me reducible to three forms, which I shall call sketched, fixed, objectified, according as it remains an internal fancy, or takes on a material but contingent and unstable form, or is subjected to the conditions of a rigorous internal or external determinism.
(a) The sketched form is primordial, original, the simplest of all; it is a nascent moment or first attempt. It appears first of all in dreaming—an embryonic, unstable and uncoördinated manifestation of the creative imagination—a transition-stage between passive reproduction and organized construction. A step higher is revery, whose flitting images, associated by chance, without personal intervention, are nevertheless vivid enough to exclude from consciousness every impression of the external world—so much so that the day-dreamer re-enters it only with a shock of surprise. More coherent are the imaginary constructions known as "castles in Spain"—the works of a wish considered unrealizable, fancies of love, ambition, power and wealth, the goal of which seems to be forever beyond our reach. Lastly, still higher, come all the plans for the future conceived vaguely and as barely possible—foreseeing the end of a sickness, of a business enterprise, of a political event, etc.