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]
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Cf. the well-known aphorism, "Apperception ist alles." (Tr.)
[4] See especially J. Philippe, "La déformation et les transformations des images" in Revue Philosophique, May and November, 1897. Although these investigations had in view only visual representations, it is not at all doubtful that the results hold good for others, especially those of hearing (voice, song, harmony).
[5] On Intelligence, Vol. I, Bk. ii, Chap. 2.
[6] In his recent history of the theories of the imagination, La psicologia dell' immaginazione, nella storia filosofia (Rome, 1898) Ambrosi shows that this law is found already formulated in the Psychologia Empirica of Christian Wolff [d. 1754]: "Perceptio præterita integra recurrit cujus præsens continet partem."