ich, for the time being, should represent the world
rather than enclose it. The reinforcement of the state of the mind comes
from the fact that its several powers, instead of spreading themselves
over the whole world, are contained within the bounds of a single
object, touch one another, reciprocally help and reinforce each
other."[33] What the poet here maintains as regards esthetics only is
applicable to all the _organic_ forms of creation--that is to those
ruled by an immanent logic, and, like them, resembling works of Nature.

In order to leave no doubt as to the identity of attention and
imaginative synthesis, and in order to show that it is normally the true
unifying principle, we offer the following remarks:

Attention is at times spontaneous, natural, without effort, simply
dependent on the interest that a thing excites in us--lasting as long as
it holds us in subjection, then ceasing entirely. Again, it is
voluntary, artificial, an imitation of the other, precarious and
intermittent, maintained with effort--in a word, laborious. The same is
true of the imagination. The moment of inspiration is ruled by a perfect
and spontaneous unity; its impersonality approaches that of the forces
of Nature. Then appears the personal moment, the detailed working and
long, painful, intermittent resumptions, the miserable turns of which so
many inventors have described. The analogy between the two cases seems
to me incontestable.

Next let us note that psychologists always adduce the same examples when
they wish to illustrate on the one hand, the processes of the
persistent, tenacious attention, and, on the other hand, the
developmental labor without which creative work does not come to pass:
"Genius is only long patience," the saying of Newton; "always thinking
of it," and like expressions of d'Alembert, Helmholtz and others,
because in the one case as in the other the fundamental condition is the
existence of a fixed, ever-active idea, notwithstanding its relaxations
and its incessant disappearances into the unconscious with return to
consciousness.

(3) The extreme form, which from its nature is semi-morbid, becomes in
its highest degree plainly pathological; the unifying principle changes
to a condition of obsession.

The normal state of our mind is a plurality of states of consciousness
(polyideism). Through association there is a radiation in every
direction. In this totality of coexisting images no one long occupies