ake up the special case of esthetic creation, and of forms
approaching thereto. Here again we find the original emotional element
as at first motor, then attached to various aspects of creation, as an
accompaniment. But, _in addition, affective states become material for
the creative activity_. It is a well-known fact, almost a rule, that the
poet, the novelist, the dramatist, and the musician--often, indeed, even
the sculptor and the painter--experience the thoughts and feeling of
their characters, become identified with them. There are, then, in this
second instance, two currents of feeling--the one, constituting emotion
as material for art, the other, drawing out creative activity and
developing along with it.

The difference between the two cases that we have distinguished consists
in this and nothing more than this. The existence of an emotion-content
belonging to esthetic production changes in no way the psychologic
mechanism of invention generally. Its absence in other forms of
imagination does not at all prevent the necessary existence of affective
elements everywhere and always.

2. _All emotional dispositions whatever may influence the creative
imagination._

Here, again, I find opponents, notably Oelzelt-Newin, in his short and
substantial monograph on the imagination.[12] Adopting the twofold
division of emotions as sthenic and asthenic, or exciting and
depressing, he attributes to the first the exclusive privilege of
influencing creative activity; but though the author limits his study
exclusively to the esthetic imagination, his thesis, even understood
thus, is untenable. The facts contradict it completely, and it is easy
to demonstrate that all forms of emotion, without exception, act as
leaven for imagination.

No one will deny that fear is the type of asthenic manifestations. Yet
is it not the mother of phantoms, of numberless superstitions, of
altogether irrational and chimerical religious practices?

Anger, in its exalted, violent form, is rather an agent of destruction,
which seems to contradict my thesis; but let us pass over the storm,
which is always of short duration, and we find in its place milder
intellectualized forms, which are various modifications of primitive
fury, passing from the acute to the chronic state: envy, jealousy,
enmity, premeditated vengeance, and so forth. Are not these dispositions
of the mind fertile in artifices, stratagems, inventions of all kinds?
To keep even to