onscious elements.

Whether this explanation be right or not, let us remark that association
by contrast could not be left out, because its mechanism, full of
unforeseen possibilities, lends itself easily to novel relations.
Otherwise, I do not at all claim that it is entirely dependent upon the
emotional factor. But, as Hoeffding observes,[16] the special property of
the emotional life is moving among contraries; it is altogether
determined by the great opposition between pleasure and pain. Thus, the
effects of contrasts are much stronger than in the realm of sensation.
This form of association predominates in esthetic and mythic creation,
that is to say, in creation of the free fancy; it becomes dimmed in the
precise forms of practical, mechanical, and scientific invention.

III

Hitherto we have considered the emotional factor under a single aspect
only--the purely emotional--that which is manifested in consciousness
under an agreeable or disagreeable or mixed form. But thoughts,
feelings, and emotions include elements that are deeper--motor, i.e.,
impulsive or inhibitory--which we may neglect the less since it is in
movements that we seek the origin of the creative imagination. This
motor element is what current speech and often even psychological
treatises designate under the terms "creative instinct," "inventive
instinct;" what we express in another form when we say that creators are
guided by instinct and "are pushed like animals toward the
accomplishment of certain acts."

If I mistake not, this indicates that the "creative instinct" exists in
all men to some extent--feeble in some, perceptible in others, brilliant
in the great inventors.

For I do not hesitate to maintain that the creative instinct, taken in
this strict meaning, compared to animal instinct, is a mere figure of
speech, an "entity" regarded as a reality, an abstraction. There are
needs, appetites, tendencies, desires, common to all men, which, in a
given individual at a given moment can result in a creative act; but
there is no special psychic manifestation that may be the "creative
instinct." What, indeed, could it be? Every instinct has its own
particular end:--hunger, thirst, sex, the specific instincts of the bee,
ant, beaver, consist of a group of movements adapted for a determinate
end that is always the same. Now, what would be a creative instinct _in
general_ which, by hypothesis, could produce in turn an opera, a
machine, a metap