indicate the preponderance of one or the other element.

This principle of unity, center of attraction and support of all the
working of the creative imagination--that is, a subjective principle
tending to become objectified--is the ideal. In the complete sense of
the word--not restrained merely to esthetic creation or made synonymous
with perfection as in ethics--the ideal is a construction in images that
should become a reality. If we liken imaginative creation to
physiological generation, the ideal is the ovum awaiting fertilization
in order to begin its development.

We could, to be more exact, make a distinction between the synthetic
principle and the ideal conception which is a higher form of it. The
fixation of an end and the discovery of appropriate means are the
necessary and sufficient conditions for all invention. A creation,
whatever it be, that looks only to present success, can satisfy itself
with a unifying principle that renders it viable and organized, but we
can look higher than the merely necessary and sufficient.

The ideal is the principle of unity in motion in its historic evolution;
like all development, it advances or recedes according to the times.
Nothing is less justified than the conception of a fixed archetype (an
undisguised survival of the Platonic Ideas), illuminating the inventor,
who reproduces it as best he can. The ideal is a nonentity; it arises in
the inventor and through him; its life is a _becoming_.

Psychologically, it is a construction in images belonging to the merely
sketched or outlined type.[30] It results from a double activity,
negative and positive, or dissociation and association, the first cause
and origin of which is found in a _will that it shall be so_; it is the
motor tendency of images in the nascent state engendering the ideal.
The inventor cuts out, suppresses, sifts, according to his temperament,
character, taste, prejudices, sympathies and antipathies--in short, his
_interest_. In this separation, already studied, let us note one
important particular. "We know nothing of the complex psychic production
that may simply be the sum of component elements and in which they would
remain with their own characters, with no modification. The nature of
the components disappears in order to give birth to a novel phenomenon
that has its own and particular features. The construction of the ideal
is not a mere grouping of past experiences; in its totality it has its
own