Essay on the Creative Imagination

by Th. Ribot

a. The explicative myths, arising from utility, from the necessity of knowing. These undergo a radical transformation.

b. The non-explicative myths, resulting from a need of luxury, from a pure desire to create: these undergo only a partial transformation.

Let us follow them in the accomplishment of their destinies.

a. The myths of the first class, answering the various needs of knowing in order afterwards to act, are much the more numerous.... Is primitive man by nature curious? The question has been variously answered; thus, Tylor says yes; Spencer, no.[61] The affirmative and negative answers are not, perhaps, irreconcilable, if we take account of the differences in races. Taking it generally, it is hard to believe that he is not curious—he holds his life at that price. He is in the presence of the universe just as we are when confronted with an unknown animal or fruit. Is it useful or hurtful? He has all the more need for a conception of the world since he feels himself dependent on everything. While our subordination as regards nature is limited by the knowledge of her laws, he is on account of his animism in a position similar to ours before an assembly of persons whom we have to approach or avoid, conciliate or yield to. It is necessary that he be practically curious—that is indispensable for his preservation. There has been alleged the indifference of primitive man to the complicated engines of civilization (a steamboat, a watch, etc.). This shows, not lack of curiosity, but absence of intelligence or interest for what he does not consider immediately useful for his needs.

His conception of the world is a product of the imagination, because no other is possible for him. The problem is imperatively set, he solves it as best he can; the myth is a response to a host of theoretical and practical needs. For him, the imaginative explanation takes the place of the rational explanation which is yet unborn, and which for great reasons can not arise—first, because the poverty of his experience, limited to a small circle, engenders a multitude of erroneous associations, which remain unbroken in the absence of other experiences to contradict and shatter them; secondly, because of the extreme weakness of his logic and especially of his conception of causality, which most often reduces itself to a post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Whence we have the thorough subjectivity of his interpretation of the world.[62] In short, primitive man makes without exception or reserve, and in terms of images, what science makes provisionally, with reserves, and by means of concepts—namely, hypotheses.

Thus, the explicative myths are as we see, an epitome of a practical philosophy, proportioned to the requirements of the man of the earliest, or slightly-cultured ages. Then comes the period of critical transformation: a slow, progressive substitution of a rational conception of the world for the imaginative conception. It results from a work of depersonification of the myth, which little by little loses its subjective, anthropomorphic character in order to become all the more objective, without ever succeeding therein completely.

This transformation occurs thanks to two principal supports: methodical and prolonged observation of phenomena, which suggests the objective notion of stability and law, opposed to the caprices of animism (example: the work of the ancient astronomers of the Orient); the growing power of reflection and of logical rigor, at least in well-endowed races.

It does not concern the subject in hand to trace here the fortunes of the old battle whereby the imagination, assailed by a rival power, loses little by little its position and preponderance in the interpretation of the world. A few remarks will suffice.

To begin with, the myth is transformed into philosophic speculation, but without total disappearance, as is seen in the mystic speculations of the Pythagoreans, in the cosmology of Empedocles, ruled by two human-like antitheses, Love and Hate. Even to Thales, an observing, positive spirit that calculates eclipses, the world is full of daemons, remains of primitive animism.[63] In Plato, even leaving out his theory of Ideas, the employment of myth is not merely a playful mannerism, but a real survival.

This work of elimination, begun by the philosophers, is more firmly established in the first attempts of pure science (the Alexandrian mathematicians; naturalists like Aristotle; certain Greek physicians). Nevertheless, we know how imaginary concepts remained alive in physics, chemistry, biology, down to the sixteenth century; we know the bitter struggle that the two following centuries witnessed against occult qualities and loose methods. Even in our day, Stallo has been able to propose to write a treatise "On Myth in Science." Without speaking at this time of the hypotheses admitted as such and on account of their usefulness, there yet remain in the sciences many latent signs of primitive anthropomorphism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people believed in several "properties of matter" that we now regard as merely modes of energy. But this latter notion, an expression of permanence underneath the various manifestations of nature, is for science only an abstract, symbolical formula: if we attempt to embody it, to make it concrete and representable, then, whether we will or no, it resolves itself into the feeling of muscular effort, that is, takes on a human character. To produce no other examples, we see that so far as concerns the last term of this slow regression, the imagination is not yet completely annulled, although it may have had to recede incessantly before a more solid and better armed rival.