The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, Second Edition - Index of

THE STORY SO FAR
elegance’). But it does not tell us what features make a combination seem
‘harmonious’, still less ‘useful’. Nor does it tell us what sorts of combination
(or transformation) are likely to be promising, or how their promise
can be intuited.
How, for example, did Kekulé immediately recognize the tail-biting
snake as potentially relevant to his problem in theoretical chemistry?
How was it possible for this novel icon to trigger expectation as well as
investigation? Indeed, why did this serpentine pattern arouse Kekulé’s
aesthetic appreciation where the others had not? Why didn’t this
nineteenth-century chemist see a snake in a sine-wave, or a figure-ofeight,
as no less interesting? Two dream-snakes gracefully twined in a
double helix might have excited Francis Crick or James Watson a century
later, but there is no reason to think that Kekulé would have given them a
second thought. Why not?
These questions about the origin and recognition of insightful
ideas can be answered only after we are clearer about the concept of
creativity, only after we can distinguish mere newness from genuine
originality. That is the topic of the next chapter.
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