If the reader please to represent to himself well the immense number of facts that we have just indicated in a few lines; if he please to note that every invention, great or small, before becoming a fixed and realized thing, was at first an imagination, a mere contrivance of the brain, an assembly of new combinations or new relations, he will be forced to admit that nowhere—not excepting even esthetic production—has man imagined to such a great extent.
One of the reasons—though not the only one—that supports the contrary opinion is, that by the very law of their growing complexity, inventions are grafted one on another. In all the useful arts improvements have been so slow, and so gradually wrought, that each one of them passed unperceived, without leaving its author the credit for its discovery. The immense majority of inventions are anonymous—some great names alone survive. But, whether individual or collective, imagination remains imagination. In order that the plow, at first a simple piece of wood hardened by the fire and pushed along with the human hand, should become what it is to-day, through a long series of modifications described in the special works, who knows how many imaginations have labored! In the same way, the uncertain flame of a resinous branch guiding vaguely in the night leads us, through a long series of inventions, to gas and electric lighting. All objects, even the most ordinary and most common that now serve us in our everyday-life, are condensed imagination.
(III) More than any other form, mechanical imagination depends strictly on physical conditions. It cannot rest content with combining images, it postulates material factors that impose themselves unyieldingly. Compared to it, the scientific imagination has much more freedom in the building of its hypotheses. In general, every great invention has been preceded by a period of abortive attempts. History shows that the so-called "initial moment" of a mechanical discovery, followed by its improvements, is the moment ending a series of unsuccessful trials: we thus skip a phase of pure imagination, of imaginative construction that has not been able to enter into the mold of an appropriate determinism. There must have existed innumerable inventions that we might term mechanical romances, which, however, we cannot refer to because they have left us no trace, not being born viable. Others are known as curiosities because they have blazed the path. We know that Otto de Guericke made four fruitless attempts before discovering his air-pump. The brothers Montgolfier were possessed with the desire to make "imitation clouds," like those they saw moving over the Alps. "In order to imitate nature," they at first enclosed water-vapor in a light, stout case, which fell on cooling. Then they tried hydrogen; then the production of a gas with electrical properties; and so on. Thus, after a succession of hypotheses and failures, they finally succeeded. From the end of the sixteenth century there was offered the possibility of communicating at a distance by means of electricity. "In a work published in 1624 the Jesuit, Father Leurechon, described an imaginary apparatus (by means of which, he said, people could converse at a distance) for the aid of lovers who, by the connection of their movements, would cause a needle to move about a dial on which would be written the letters of the alphabet; and the drawing accompanying the text is almost a picture of Breguet's telegraph." But the author considered it impossible "in the absence of lovers having such ability."[128]
Mechanical inventions that fail correspond to erroneous or unverified scientific hypotheses. They do not emerge from the stage of pure imagination, but they are instructive to the psychologist because they give in bare form the initial work of the constructive imagination in the technical field.
There still remain the requirements of reasoning, of calculation, of adaptation to the properties of matter. But, we repeat, this determinism has several possible forms—one can reach the same goal through different means. Besides, these determining conditions are not lacking in any type of imagination; there is only a difference as between lesser and greater. Every imaginative construction from the moment that it is little more than a group of fancies, a spectral image haunting a dreamer's brain, must take on a body, submit to external conditions on which it depends, and which materialize it somewhat. In this respect, architecture is an excellent example. It is classed among the fine arts; but it is subject to so many limitations that its process of invention strongly resembles technical and mechanical creations. Thus it has been possible to say that "Architecture is the least personal of all the arts." "Before being an art it is an industry in the sense that it has nearly always a useful end that is imposed on it and rules its manifestations. Whatever it builds—a temple, a theater, a palace—it must before all else subordinate its work to the end assigned to it in advance. This is not all:—it must take account of materials, climate, soil, location, habits—of all things that may require much skill, tact, calculation, which, however, do not interest art as such, and do not permit architecture to manifest its purely esthetic qualities."[129]
Thus, at bottom, there is an identity of nature between the constructive imagination of the mechanic and that of the artist: the difference is only in the end, the means, and the conditions. The formula, Ars homo additus naturae, has been too often restricted to esthetics—it should comprehend everything artificial. Esthetes, doubtless, hold that their imagination has for them a loftier quality—a disputed question that psychology need not discuss; for it, the essential mechanism is the same in the two cases: a great mechanic is a poet in his own way, because he makes instruments imitating life. "Those constructions that at other times are the marvel of the ignorant crowd deserve the admiration of the reflecting:—Something of the power that has organized matter seems to have passed into combinations in which nature is imitated or surpassed. Our machines, so varied in form and in function, are the representatives of a new kingdom intermediate between senseless and animate forms, having the passivity of the former and the activity of the latter, and exploiting everything for our sake. They are counterfeits of animate beings, capable of giving inert substances a regular functioning. Their skeleton of iron, organs of steel, muscles of leather, soul of fire, panting or smoking breath, rhythm of movement—sometimes even the shrill or plaintive cries expressing effort or simulating pain:—all that contributes to give them a fantastic likeness to life—a specter and dream of inorganic life."[130]
FOOTNOTES:
[119] See above, Part One, [chapter II].
[120] For a complete and recent study of the question, see A. Lehmann, Aberglaube und Zauberei von den ältesten Zeiten bis in die Gegenwart, 1898.
[121] Lang, op. cit., I, 96. There will be found many other facts of this kind.