Essay on the Creative Imagination

by Th. Ribot

The subject, M......, a man thirty-seven years old, had from childhood a decided taste for solitude. Seated in an out-of-the-way corner of the house or out of doors, "he commenced from that time on to build castles in Spain that little by little took on a considerable importance in his life. His constructions were at first ephemeral, replaced every day by new ones. They became progressively more consistent.... When he had well entered into his imaginary rôle, he often succeeded in continuing his musing in the presence of other people. At college, whole hours would be spent in this way; often he would see and hear nothing." Married, the head of a prosperous business house, he had some respite; then he returned to his former constructions. "They commenced by being, as before, not very durable or absorbing; but gradually they acquired more intensity and duration, and lastly became fixed in a definite form."

"To sum up, here is what this ideal life, lasting almost from his fourth year, meant: M...... had built at Chaville, on the outskirts of the forest, an imaginary summer residence surrounded by a garden. By successive additions the pavilion became a château; the garden, a park; servants, horses, water-fixtures came to ornament the domain. The furnishings of the inside had been modified at the same time. A wife had come to give life to the picture; two children had been born. Nothing was wanting to this household, only the being true.... One day he was in his imaginary salon at Chaville, occupied in watching an upholsterer who was changing the arrangement of the tapestry. He was so absorbed in the matter that he did not notice a man coming toward him, and at the question, 'M......, if you please—?' he answered, without thinking, 'He is at Chaville.' This reply, given in public, aroused in him a real terror. 'I believe that I was foolish,' he said. Coming to himself, he declared that he was ready to do anything to get rid of his ideas."

Here the imaginative type is at its maximum, at the brink of insanity without being over it. Associations and combinations of images form the entire content of consciousness, which remains impervious to impressions from without. Its world becomes the world. The parasitic life undermines and corrodes the other in order to become established in its place—it grows, its parts adhere more closely, it forms a compact mass—the imaginary systematization is complete.

(4) The fourth stage is an exaggeration of the foregoing. The completely systematized and permanent imaginative life excludes the other. This is the extreme form, the beginning of insanity, which is outside our subject, from which pathology has been excluded.

Imagination in the insane would deserve a special study, that would be lengthy, because there is no form of imagination that insanity has not adopted. In no period have insane creations been lacking in the practical, religious, or mystic life, in poetry, the fine arts, and in the sciences; in industrial, commercial, mechanical, military projects, and in plans for social and political reform. We should, then, be abundantly supplied with facts.[153]

It would be difficult, for, if in ordinary life we are often perplexed to decide whether a man is sane or not, how much more then, when it is a question of an inventor, of an act of the creative faculty, i.e., of a venture into the unknown! How many innovators have been regarded as insane, or as at least unbalanced, visionary! We cannot even invoke success as a criterion. Many non-viable or abortive inventions have been fathered by very sane minds, and people regarded as insane have vindicated their imaginative constructions through success.

Let us leave these difficulties of a subject that is not our own, in order to determine merely the psychological criterion belonging to the fourth stage.

How may we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic—there are two distinct forms of existence.

One, subjective, having no reality except in consciousness, for the one experiencing it, its reality being due only to belief, to that first affirmation of the mind so often described.

The other, objective, existing in consciousness and outside of it, being real not only for me but for all those whose constitution is similar or analogous to mine.