3658925934

shown by World Fairs, where the industrial inventions of nations are compared instead of their
industrial prosperity, that is, the imitative propagation of inventions. The classification of nations in
these international competitions is therefore quite different from that which would be established by
glancing through industrial and commercial statistics.
The influence of the social environment has often been improperly understood and exaggerated to
mean that the man of genius is a simple product of the masses, a being simply representative of his
surroundings. Ribot remarks that if this were true, such a man would first of all not arouse so much
antagonism in his environment. But his environment furnishes all the elements of which his invention
constitutes but an original hybrid. Any machine is merely a composite of previous, simpler ones,
springs and forces which were known about individually. The new conception arises from these prior
inventions, which are propogated through example and meet in one particular mind. Every invention,
be it theoretical or practical, is only a combination of imitations, but the nature of this combination
remains to be explained. First, this synthesis presupposes a preliminary analysis or abstraction which
has dissociated the elements of former inventions and perceived therein the possibility of new
associations. This dissociation, like the association, occurs through an intense need for either finality
or logic (depending on whether it is a practical or a theoretical invention). In a new type of
architecture—Gothic architecture for example—we only find forms which were already popular; but
bringing them together for the first time was not just a simple meeting of ideas in someone’s mind, for
the meeting raised the further idea of their common adaptation to a goal which, in this manner, was
realized for the first time: such a goal, which generally preexists (and often has done so for a long
time), is in the case of Gothic style the forceful expression of certain exaltations or impulses of the
Christian soul, certain characteristic hopes and fears. Everything in Gothic architecture concurs in
this goal and at the same time constitutes a response to the need of bringing greater crowds around the
pulpit or the alter. Likewise, the invention of the windmill contained only those elements in use for
centuries: grindstones, the motor force of the wind, a tower, a mobile roof. The ingenuity consisted in
bringing these things together in order to realize an ancient wish: grinding wheat with the least
possible effort. Seen from this point of view, brought together in this manner, these things, which once
appeared foreign to one another, appear as collaborators. Similarly, when Huyghens conceived the
theory of light waves, he perceived the phenomena of luminous radiation and propagation of sound
waves or waves formed by the wind on the surface of a lake as consequences of the same principle,
applications of the same formula, whereas until then they had not seemed to have any relation to one
another.
Thus we see that the inventive idea can be utilitarian or disinterested, that is, its subject may be a
relation of means to end or of consequence to principle (of species to genus). But this does not
prevent the inventive idea from being in both cases a purely intellectual fact, a deductive analysis,
provoked to be sure by a ferment of passion, a special desire, which this conception satisfies but
which has nothing in common with those completely different desires that the conception is destined
to satisfy when it is utilitarian in nature. The conception of industrial invention is one thing, the wish
to see it materialize quite another. On this point I note the comparison, made by both Mr. Ribot and
Mr. Paulhan, between invention and volition. “Imagination,” according to Mr. Ribot, “is to the
intellectual order what will is to the order of movements.” Creative imagination has its miscarriages
comparable to the weaknesses of will. Reveries are equivalent to loss of will power. The unexpected
is a characteristic common to invention and voluntary decision, as is unpredictability. Perhaps these
striking analogies will acquire a different significance if we note that in every act of will there is an
invention, be it large or small, a plan, more or less new (for without this there would be only habit