856 Dynamic Theory. 



Precisely the same observations apply to the so-called invention of 

 the Novelist. He copies with greater or less accuracy a certain class of 

 facts seen in connection with human action and character. He is in 

 the same position as the inventor of machinery, except as to the class 

 of external objects to which his attention is subjected. His invention 

 consists in new arrangements of detailed facts, forming a new group 

 representing something possible or impossible as a whole, but not in 

 actual existence. 



The Artist, again, is another imitator of external objects, reproducing 

 his imitation in his own peculiar way. If he is an inventor as well, his 

 productions consist of copies of actual details, placed in new and fac- 

 titious relations to each other. Such relations may result from the ac- 

 cidental revival simultaneously of the memory of unrelated ideas, as it 

 happens in dreams and unpurposive waking fancies, or they may be 

 formed in accordance with a definite stimulus from the environment and 

 result in a coherent purposive original creation, so-called. 



Imagination is a process of reasoning which consists in taking parts 

 of different ideas and from them constructing new ideas, which, while 

 they are not true in fact, may be true in potentiality. They are facti- 

 tious. Writings of fiction, studies in painting, sculpture and other art, 

 belong to this class. They differ from dreams, in being under the dom- 

 ination of some persistent external stimulus which selects and preserves a 

 consistency and congruity between the parts, not usually found in dreams. 

 Works of fiction are preceded by more or less complete conceptions of 

 what is to be done. Conception is the name of the sensation of the sub- 

 jective process and the result of the analysis and synthesis going on in 

 the brain, which may end in the motor activities required for the produc- 

 tion of a work of art. But many a conception ends subjectively and is 

 never realized in any objective form. It remains as a new combination 

 of ideas of external things. It may relate to any subject, as art, morals, 

 science. It is to conceptions formed often in the most haphazard way 

 that we are indebted for discoveries in science and machanics. Such 

 accidental conceptions are very much like those accidental combinations 

 in mechanics which prove to be useful, like the post-hole digger de- 

 scribed above, and which thereupon . become valuable "inventions." 

 When one part of a compound idea becomes stimulated, the stimulus 

 naturally overflows to the associated parts, and these present themselves 

 likewise. 



Association includes the parts related in memory, such as relative size 

 of one to the other, similarity or difference of form, texture, composi- 

 tion, color, relative position of parts. 



Comparison is that kind of association, which, ignoring contiguity, 

 brings into a single idea two things, which, by possessing some common 



