es disengaged; it is, in scholastic terminology, a _universale post
rem_.

The ideal conception is the first moment of the creative act, which is
not yet battling with the conditions of the actual. It is only the
internal vision of an individual mind that has not yet been projected
externally with a form and body. We know how the passage from the
internal to the external life has given rise among inventors to
deceptions and complaints. Such was the imaginative construction that
could not, unchanged, enter into its mould and become a reality.

Let us now examine the various forms of this coagulating[32] principle
in advancing from the lowest to the highest, from the unity vaguely
anticipated to the absolute and tyrannical masterful unity. Following a
method that seems to me best adapted for these ill-explained questions I
shall single out only the principal forms, which I have reduced to
three--the unstable, the organic or middle, and the extreme or
semi-morbid unity.

(1) The unstable form has its starting point directly and immediately in
the reproductive imagination without creation. It assembles its
elements somewhat by chance and stitches together the bits of our life;
it ends only in beginnings, in attempts. The unity-principle is a
momentary disposition, vacillating and changing without cessation
according to the external impressions or modifications of our vital
conditions and of our humor. By way of example let us recall the state
of the day-dreamer building castles in the air; the delirious
constructions of the insane, the inventions of the child following all
the fluctuations of chance, of its caprice; the half-coherent dreams
that seem to the dreamer to contain a creative germ. In consequence of
the extreme frailty of the synthetic principle the creative imagination
does not succeed in accomplishing its task and remains in a condition
intermediate between simple association of ideas and creation proper.

(2) The organic or middle form may be given as the type of the unifying
power. Ultimately it reduces itself to attention and presupposes nothing
more, because, thanks to the process of "localization," which is the
essential mark of attention, it makes itself a center of attraction,
grouping about the leading idea the images, associations, judgments,
tendencies and voluntary efforts. "Inspiration," the poet Grillparzer
used to say, "is a concentration of all the forces and capacities upon a
single point wh