[29] Cabanis, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, édition Peisse, pp. 248-249, an anecdote that he relates after Buffon. Analogous, but less clear, facts may also be found in Moreau de Tours' Psychologie morbide.
CHAPTER V
THE PRINCIPLE OF UNITY
The psychological nature of the imagination would be very imperfectly known were we limited to the foregoing analytical study. Indeed, all creation whatever, great or small, shows an organic character; it implies a unifying, synthetic principle. Every one of the three factors—intellectual, emotional, unconscious—works not as an isolated fact on its own account; they have no worth save through their union, and no signification save through their common bearing. This principle of unity, which all invention demands and requires, is at one time intellectual in nature, i.e., as a fixed idea; at another time emotional, i.e., as a fixed emotion or passion. These terms—fixed idea, fixed emotion—are somewhat absolute and require restrictions and reservations, which will be made in what follows.
The distinction between the two is not at all absolute. Every fixed idea is supported and maintained by a need, a tendency, a desire; i.e., by an affective element. For it is idle fancy to believe in the persistence of an idea which, by hypothesis, would be a purely intellectual state, cold and dry. The principle of unity in this form naturally predominates in certain kinds of creation: in the practical imagination wherein the end is clear, where images are direct substitutes for things, where invention is subjected to strict conditions under penalty of visible and palpable check; in the scientific and metaphysical imagination, which works with concepts and is subject to the laws of rational logic.
Every fixed emotion should realize itself in an idea or image that gives it body and systematizes it, without which it remains diffuse; and all affective states can take on this permanent form which makes a unified principle of them. The simple emotions (fear, love, joy, sorrow, etc.), the complex or derived emotions (religious, esthetic, intellectual ideas) may equally monopolize consciousness in their own interests.
We thus see that these two terms—fixed idea, fixed emotion—are almost equivalent, for they both imply inseparable elements, and serve only to indicate the preponderance of one or the other element.
This principle of unity, center of attraction and support of all the working of the creative imagination—that is, a subjective principle tending to become objectified—is the ideal. In the complete sense of the word—not restrained merely to esthetic creation or made synonymous with perfection as in ethics—the ideal is a construction in images that should become a reality. If we liken imaginative creation to physiological generation, the ideal is the ovum awaiting fertilization in order to begin its development.