350 CREATWE SCIENCE 



produced the Reformation: the stimulus received by the other gave 

 the Renaissance its most pregnant symbol. Truly, we see what our 

 eyes are fitted to perceive. 



One thing, forever insufficient in itself, is forever necessary as pre- 

 liminary to creative thinking: hard work. The scientist who would be 

 an innovator of ideas must be sufficiently motivated for the sustained 

 effort of "y^a^s of seeking in the dark for a truth that one feels, but 

 cannot express; . . ." (Einstein). He must be motivated, too, for the 

 concentrated effort suggested by Polanyi's anecdote of Pavlov. 



Asked by his pupils in jest what they should do to become "a Pavlov," 

 the master answered in all seriousness: "Get up in the morning with 

 your problem before you. Breakfast with it. Go to the laboratory with 

 it. Eat your lunch with it. Keep it before you after dinner. Go to bed 

 with it in your mind. Dream about it." 



Few are they with even the intellectual stamina required of potential 

 Einsteins and Pavlovs; far fewer they who actually become Einsteins 

 and Pavlovs. The variables elude us: we do not even know in what 

 degree Pavlovs and Einsteins are born, in what degree made. Per- 

 haps, however, we may ultimately learn to gauge the end effect of 

 many of the human variables, from the development of studies sug- 

 gested by those from which Barron concludes that: 



. . . creative individuals have a positive liking for phenomenal fields 

 which cannot be assimilated to simple principles of geometric order 

 and which require the development, or, better, the creation, of new 

 perceptual schemata which will re-establish in the observer a feeling 

 that the phenomena are intelligible, which is to say ordered, har- 

 monious, and capable of arousing the esthetic sentiment. 



. . . there appears a positive preference for what we are accus- 

 tomed to call disorder, but which to them [creative individuals] is 

 simply the possibility of a future order whose principle of organiza- 

 tion cannot be told now. 



THE BIRTH OF INSIGHT 



Manifold are the ways a new idea is born. Consider the two extremes 

 of a continuous spectrum of possibilities. At one extreme we have 

 the innovator who, after long preliminary study, acquires some dim 

 feeling he cannot yet formulate explicitly. Under the impulse of this 

 feeling, certain shadings of emphasis and neglect appear in the men- 



