Essay on the Creative Imagination

by Th. Ribot

II

With practical inventors and reformers the ideal falls—not that they sacrifice it for their personal interests, but because they have a comprehension of possibilities. The imaginative construction must be corrected, narrowed, mutilated, if it is to enter into the narrow frame of the conditions of existence, until it becomes adapted and determined. This process has been described several times, and it is needless to repeat it here in other terms. Nevertheless, the ideal—understanding by this term the unifying principle that excites creative work and supports it in its development—undergoes metamorphosis and must be not only individual but collective; the creation does not realize itself save through a "communion of minds," by a co-operation of feelings and of wills; the work of one conscious individual must become the work of a social consciousness.

That form of imagination, creating and organizing social groups, manifests itself in various degrees according to the tendency and power of creators.

There are the founders of small societies, religious in form—the Essenes, the earliest Christian communities, the monastic orders of the Orient and Occident, the great Catholic or Mohammedan congregations, the semi-lay, semi-religious sects like the Moravian Brotherhood, the Shakers, Mormons, etc. Less complete because it does not cover the individual altogether in all the acts of life is the creation of secret associations, professional unions, learned societies, etc. The founder conceives an ideal of complete living or one limited to a given end, and puts it into practice, having for material men grouped of their free choice, or by coöptation.

There is invention operating on great masses—social or political invention strictly so called—ordinarily not proposed but imposed, which, however, despite its coercive power, is subject to requirements even more numerous than mechanical, industrial, or commercial invention. It has to struggle against natural forces, but most of all against human forces—inherited habits, customs, traditions. It must make terms with dominant passions and ideas, finding its justification, like all other creation, only in success.

Without entering into the details of this inevitable determination, which would require useless repetition, we may sum up the rôle of the constructive imagination in social matters by saying that it has undergone a regression—i.e., that its area of development has been little by little narrowed; not that inventive genius, reduced to pure construction in images, has suffered an eclipse, but on its part it has had to make increasingly greater room for experiment, rational elements, calculation, inductions and deductions that permit foresight—for practical necessities.

If we omit the spontaneous, instinctive, semi-conscious invention of the earliest ages, that was sufficient for primitive societies, and keep to creations that were the result of reflection and of great pretension, we can roughly distinguish three successive periods:

(1) A very long idealistic phase (Antiquity, Renaissance) when triumphed the pure imagination, and the play of the free fancy that spends itself in social novels. Between the creation of the mind and the life of contemporary society there was no relation; they were worlds apart, strangers to one another. The true Utopians scarcely troubled themselves to make applications. Plato and More—would they have wished to realize their dreams?

(2) An intermediate phase, when an attempt is made to pass from the ideal to the practical, from pure speculation to social facts. Already, in the eighteenth century, some philosophers (Locke, Rousseau) drew up constitutions, at the request of interested persons. During this period, when the work of the imagination, instead of merely becoming fixed in books, tends to become objectified in acts, we find many failures and some successes. Let us recall the fruitless attempts of the "phalansteries" in France, in Algeria, Brazil, and in the United States. Robert Owen was more fortunate;[145] in four years he reformed New Larnak, after his ideal, and with varying fortune founded short-lived colonies. Saint-Simonism has not entirely died out; the primitive civilization after his ideal rapidly disappeared, but some of his theories have filtered into or have become incorporated with other doctrines.

(3) A phase in which imaginative creation becomes subordinated to practical life: The conception of society ceases to be purely idealistic or constructed a priori by deduction from a single principle; it recognizes the conditions of its environment, adapts itself to the necessities of its development. It is the passage from the absolutely autonomous state of the imagination to a period when it submits to the laws of a rational imperative. In other words, the transition from the esthetic to the scientific, and especially the practical, form. Socialism is a well-known and excellent example of this. Compare its former utopias, down to about the middle of the last century, with its contemporary forms, and without difficulty we can appreciate the amount of imaginative elements lost in favor of an at least equivalent quantity of rational elements and positive calculations.