hetic imagination itself would be reduced
to a biological necessity, and there would be no reason for making a
separate category of it. Whichever view we may adopt, it still remains
established that any invention is reducible, directly or indirectly, to
a particular, determinate need, and that to allow man a special
instinct, the definite specific character of which should be stimulation
to creative activity, is a fantastic notion.

Whence, then, comes this persistent and in some respects seductive idea
that creation is an instinctive result? Because a happy invention has
characteristics that evidently relate it to instinctive activity in the
strict sense of the word. First, precocity, of which we shall later give
numerous examples, and which resembles the innateness of instinct.
Again, orientation in a single direction: the inventor is, so to speak,
polarized; he is the slave of music, of mechanics, of mathematics; often
inapt at everything outside his own particular sphere. We know the
witticism of Madame du Deffant on Vaucanson, who was so awkward, so
insignificant when he ventured outside of mechanics. "One should say
that this man had manufactured himself." Finally, the ease with which
invention often (not always) manifests itself makes it resemble the work
of a pre-established mechanism.

But these and similar characteristics may be lacking. They are necessary
for instinct, not for invention. There are great creators who have been
neither precocious nor confined in a narrow field, and who have given
birth to their inventions painfully, laboriously. Between the mechanism
of instinct and that of imaginative creation there are frequently great
analogies but not identity of nature. Every tendency of our
organization, useful or hurtful, may become the beginning of a creative
act. Every invention arises from a particular need of human nature,
acting within its own sphere and for its own special end.

If now it should be asked why the creative imagination directs itself
preferably in one line rather than in another--toward poetry or physics,
trade or mechanics, geometry or painting, strategy or music, etc.--we
have nothing in answer. It is a result of the individual organization,
the secret of which we do not possess. In ordinary life we meet people
visibly borne along toward love or good cheer, toward ambition, riches
or good works; we say that they are "so built," that such is their
character. At bottom the two quest