ts, a
physiological equivalent?

One metaphysician, Froschammer, who has elevated the creative
imagination to the rank of primary world-principle, asserts this
positively. For him there is an objective or cosmic imagination working
in nature, producing the innumerable varieties of vegetable and animal
forms; transformed into subjective imagination it becomes in the human
brain the source of a new form of creation. "The very same principle
causes the living forms to appear--a sort of objective image--and the
subjective images, a kind of living form."[27] However ingenious and
attractive this philosophical theory may be, it is evidently of no
positive value for psychology.

Let us stick to experience. Physiology teaches that generation is a
"prolonged nutrition," a surplus, as we see so plainly in the lower
forms of agamous generation (budding, division). The creative
imagination likewise presupposes a superabundance of psychic life that
might otherwise spend itself in another way. Generation in the physical
order is a spontaneous, natural tendency, although it may be stimulated,
successfully or otherwise, by artificial means. We can say as much of
the other. This list of resemblances it would be easy to prolong. But
all this is insufficient for the establishment of a thorough identity
between the two cases and the solution of the question.

It is possible to limit it, to put it into more precise language. Is
there a connection between the development of the generative function
and that of the imagination? Even in this form the question scarcely
permits any but vague answers. In favor of a connection we may allege:

(1) The well-known influence of puberty on the imagination of both
sexes, expressing itself in day-dreams, in aspirations toward an
unattainable ideal,[28] in the genius for invention that love bestows
upon the least favored. Let us recall also the mental troubles, the
psychoses designated by the name hebephrenia. With adolescence coincides
the first flowering of the fancy which, having emerged from its
swaddling-clothes of childhood, is not yet sophisticated and
rationalized.

It is not a matter of indifference for the general thesis of the present
work to note that this development of the imagination depends wholly on
the first effervescence of the emotional life. That "influence of the
feelings on the imagination" and of "the imagination on the feelings" of
which the moralists and the older psychologi