CREATIVE SCIENCE 343 



tuitive anticipation of successful research. The idea once set forth, 

 we can only explain how to submit it to the definite precepts and pre- 

 cise rules of logic from which no experimenter may depart; but its 

 appearance is wholly spontaneous, and its nature is wholly individual. 

 A particular feeling, a quid proprium constitutes the originality, the 

 inventiveness, or the genius of each man. 



The Creative Imagination 



I cannot say what imagination is, nor can I assign the causes of imagi- 

 nation. As regards science, I suppose it possible to say what imagina- 

 tion does, and to indicate some of the factors influencing its function. 

 We exercise imagination when we form our experience in new pat- 

 terns we have not been taught, nor taught to expect. This capacity 

 we find in children. Their fantasies sometimes amuse, sometimes 

 horrify, but they do represent novel groupings of experience. While 

 awake we ourselves can rarely conceive the world in such "fantastic" 

 ways. Yet, when freed from the controls of consciousness, even adult 

 imagination will again reconstruct the world. Our dreams, like the 

 fantasies of childhood, present novel groupings of facts and ideas. 

 They involve new combinations and separations, and new attribu- 

 tions of importance and unimportance, of naturalness and unnatural- 

 ness— and so do the great breakthroughs of scientific imagination. 



Education. We cannot be taught imagination, but education can- 

 not fail both to enlarge and to contract the potential imaginative 

 capacity of which each has his own native endowment. Education 

 enlarges imagination by conveying knowledge of multiple facts and 

 relations, and of the many conceptual patterns in which various 

 groups of these can be arranged. The educated man is then better 

 equipped for the creation of novel patterns: he knows what there is 

 to be fitted into them, and he is able to frame them by analogy with 

 patterns he has been taught. On the other hand, education contracts 

 imaginative capacity to the extent that it suggests that only certain 

 patterns are permissible or "right." In this respect some educations 

 will be worse than others but, by the very nature of the situation, 

 some such contraction seems unavoidable. Even as we learn our 

 language we are constrained toward certain conceptual patterns, and 

 our capacity to conceive patterns not conformable with the linguistic 

 categories may be seriously impaired. 



