esthetic creation, is it necessary to recall the saying
_facit indignatio versum_?

It is not necessary to demonstrate the fecundity of joy. As for love,
everyone knows that its work consists of creating an imaginary being,
which is substituted for the beloved object; then, when the passion has
vanished, the disenchanted lover finds himself face to face with the
bare reality.

Sorrow rightly belongs in the category of depressing emotions, and yet,
it has as great influence on invention as any other emotion. Do we not
know that melancholy and even profound sorrow has furnished poets,
musicians, painters, and sculptors with their most beautiful
inspirations? Is there not an art frankly and deliberately pessimistic?
And this influence is not at all limited to esthetic creation. Dare we
hold that hypochondria and insanity following upon the delirium of
persecution are devoid of imagination? Their morbid character is, on the
contrary, the well whence strange inventions incessantly bubble.

Lastly, that complex emotion termed "self-feeling," which reduces itself
finally to the pleasure of asserting our power and of feeling its
expansion, or to the pitiable feeling of our shackled, enfeebled power,
leads us directly to the motor elements that are the fundamental
conditions of invention. Above all, in this personal feeling, there is
the satisfaction of being a causal factor, i.e., a creator, and every
creator has a consciousness of his superiority over non-creators.
However petty his invention, it confers upon him a superiority over
those who have invented nothing. Although we have been surfeited with
the repeated statement that the characteristic mark of esthetic creation
is "being disinterested," it must be recognized, as Groos has so truly
remarked,[13] that the artist does not create out of the simple pleasure
of creating, but in order that he may behold a mastery over other
minds.[14] Production is the natural extension of "self-feeling," and
the accompanying pleasure is the pleasure of conquest.

Thus, on condition that we extend "imagination" to its full sense,
without limiting it unduly to esthetics, there is, among the many forms
of the emotional life, not one that may not stimulate invention. It
remains to see this emotional factor at work,--to note how it can give
rise to new combinations; and this brings us to the association of
ideas.

II

We have said above that the ideal and theoretic law of the recurren