is faulty; so that for these the second creative process is shortened in
appearance only.

Such seem to me the two principal forms of the mechanism of creation.
These are genera; they include species and varieties that a patient and
minute study of the processes peculiar to various inventors would reveal
to us. We must bear in mind that this work makes no claim of being a
monograph on invention, but merely a sketch.[75]

The two processes above described seem to correspond on the whole to
the oft-made distinction between the intuitive or spontaneous, and the
combining or reflective imagination.

The intuitive, essentially synthetic form, is found principally in the
purely imaginative types, children and savages. The mind proceeds from
the whole to details. The generative idea resembles those concepts
which, in the sciences, are of wide range because they condense a
generalization rich in consequences. The subject is at first
comprehended as a whole; development is organic, and we may compare it
to the embryological process that causes a living being to arise from
the fertilized ovum, analogous to an immanent logic. As a type of this
creative form there has often been given a letter wherein Mozart
explains his mode of conception. Recently (and that is why I do not
reprint it here) it has been suspected of being apocryphal. I regret
this--it was worthy of being authentic. According to Goethe,
Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ could have been created only through an intuitive
process, etc.

The combining, discursive imagination proceeds from details to the
vaguely-perceived unity. It starts from a fragment that serves as a
matrix, and becomes completed little by little. An adventure, an
anecdote, a scene, a rapid glance, a detail, suggests a literary or
artistic creation; but the organic form does not appear in a trice. In
science, Kepler furnishes a good example of this combining imagination.
It is known that he devoted a part of his life trying strange
hypotheses, until the day when, having discovered the elliptical orbit
of Mars, all his former work took shape and became an organized system.
Did we want to make use once more of an embryological comparison, it
would be necessary to look for it in the strange conceptions of ancient
cosmogonies: they believed that from an earthly slime arose parts of
bodies and separate organs which through a mysterious attraction and
happy chance ended by sticking together, and forming living