ying it have been found has
led the unreflecting to imagine that in art the need produces the
discovery and the idea the work. Causes at best are lightly assigned by
mortals, and this particular superstition is no worse than any other.
The data--the plan and its execution--as conjoined empirically in the
few interesting cases which show successful achievement, are made into a
law, in oblivion of the fact that in more numerous cases such
conjunction fails wholly or in part, and that even in the successful
cases other natural conditions are present, and must be present, to
secure the result. In a matter where custom is so ingrained and
supported by a constant apperceptive illusion, there is little hope of
making thought suddenly exact, or exact language not paradoxical. We
must observe, however, that only by virtue of a false perspective do
ideas seems to govern action, or is a felt necessity the mother of
invention. In truth invention is the child of abundance, and the genius
or vital premonition and groping which achieve art, simultaneously
achieve the ideas which that art embodies; or, rather, ideas are
themselves products of an inner movement which has an automatic
extension outwards; and this extension manifests the ideas. Mere craving
has no lights of its own to prophesy by, no prescience of what the world
may contain that would satisfy, no power of imagining what would allay
its unrest. Images and satisfactions have to come of themselves; then
the blind craving, as it turns into an incipient pleasure, first
recognises its object. The pure will's impotence is absolute, and it
would writhe for ever and consume itself in darkness if perception gave
it no light and experience no premonition.

[Sidenote: So are the ideas it expresses.]

Now, a man cannot draw bodily from external perception the ideas he is
supposed to create or invent; and as his will or uneasiness, before he
creates the satisfying ideas, is by hypothesis without them, it follows
that creation or invention is automatic. The ideas come of themselves,
being new and unthought-of figments, similar, no doubt, to old
perceptions and compacted of familiar materials, but reproduced in a
novel fashion and dropping in their sudden form from the blue. However
instantly they may be welcomed, they were not already known and never
could have been summoned. In the stock example, for instance, of groping
for a forgotten name, we know the context in which that name sho