Creative Evolution

“ Creative Evolution is destined, I believe, to mark an epoch in the history of modern thought. The work has its root in modern physical science, but it blooms and bears fruit in the spirit to a degree quite unprecedented.... ”

“ If, on the contrary, evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it. ”

“ We must now show that if mechanism is insufficient to account for evolution, the way of proving this insufficiency is not to stop at the classic conception of finality, still less to contract or attenuate it, but, on the contrary, to go further.
Let us indicate at once the principle of our demonstration. We said of life that, from its origin, it is the continuation of one and the same impetus, divided into divergent lines of evolution. Something has grown, something has developed by a series of additions which have been so many creations. ”

“ When once we have grasped them in their essence by adopting their movement, we understand how the rest of reality is derived from them. Evolution appears and, within this evolution, the progressive determination of materiality and intellectuality by the gradual consolidation of the one and of the other. But, then, it is within the evolutionary movement that we place ourselves, in order to follow it to its present results, instead of recomposing these results artificially with fragments of themselves. Such seems to us to be the true function of philosophy. ”

“ To sum up, if the accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible variations, some good genius must be appealed to—the genius of the future species—in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for selection will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the accidental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have happened together must be complementary. ”

“ For the spectator who regards the general sweep of the current, evolution is growth. On the other hand, he who thinks this growth now ended is under a simple delusion: "The gates of the future stand wide open." ("Creative Evolution", page 114.) In the stage at present attained man is leading; he marks the culminating point at which creation continues; in him, life has already succeeded, at least up to a certain point; from him onwards it advances with consciousness capable of reflection ”

“ How much, again, in all this last and highest evolution of creative might, is the conclusion confirmed, and arrived at from so many converging lines, that the sacred record was intended to embody an actual account of the creation of our globe, in its various primordial arrangements as well as in all its consecutive events, until its majestic close in the human epoch? ”

“ The first organized beings must have been very simple; but little by little the objective imagination increases its energy by exercising it; it invents and realizes increasingly more complex images that attest the progress of its artistic genius. So Darwin was right in asserting that a slow evolution raises up organized beings towards fulness of life and beauty of form. ”

“ This, then, is the direction in which such souls would use their powers of initiative and selection as being the true line of evolution--in a word they would realize that the principle of Creative Progression, when it reaches the level of fully developed mental man, necessarily implies the Resurrection of the Body, and that anything short of this would be retrogression and not progress. ”

“ Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself? As well contend that the part is equal to the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its cause, or that the pebble left on the beach displays the form of the wave that brought it there. ”

“ In like manner, evolution raises immensely the value of the biological processes that are everywhere operative about us, by showing us that these processes are the channels through which the creative energy has worked, and is still working. Not in the far-off or in the exceptional does it seek the key to man's origin, but in the sleepless activity of the creative force, which has been pushing onward and upward, from the remotest time, till it has come to full fruition in man. ”

“ The evolution of mechanisms implies and indicates the concealed presence and dominance of creative mind. The ability of the mortal intellect to conceive, design, and create automatic mechanisms demonstrates the superior, creative, and purposive qualities of man's mind as the dominant influence on the planet. ”

“ It is seen everywhere in the healthy activity of the human mind, in its delight in romance and imagination, in the play of children, the stage, literature, art, scientific invention—the sheer joy of creation, going on everywhere and always. Lay the conscious and controlling and selective power of the upper mind at rest, in the trance-condition, and you have in the deeps of the subliminal self this primal creative power exposed. ”

“ But, deficient as one's knowledge of evolution, scientifically and in detail, may be, he may have attained to a not unintelligent perception of the all-embracing creative process called by that name as that in which, in the whole range of the advancing universal movement of life, what is ascends from what was, and fulfils it. ”

“ So, when a philosopher arose who announced a doctrine of evolution, in which the progress of matter toward perceptibility would be traced together with the advance of the mind toward rationality, in which the complication of correspondences between the external and the internal would be followed step by step, in which change would become the very substance of things—to him all eyes were turned. ”

“ Finally, that phase of highest culture which recognizes the law of universal evolution, formulates the [212] view of one continuous creative act, in which every object is still a creation but not a separate creation,—only a separate manifestation of one eternal act of creative energy. The history of creation, which means the same thing as the history of evolution, shows innumerable adaptations which may surely be considered as the work of a cosmos designer. Evolution has profoundly modified our conceptions of design in nature as it has those of creation. ”

“ But, on the other hand, just because it goes beyond intellect—the faculty of connecting the same with the same, of perceiving and also of producing repetitions—this reality is undoubtedly creative, i.e. productive of effects in which it expands and transcends its own being. ”

“ And just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed—in any case, is modified—under the very influence of the works he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form that we are just assuming. ”

“ He could by a direct exercise of his power of creation form the eye of man, or he could leave it to be evolved out of the only type of a visual organ on which he saw fit to exercise his creative power. He could create in the land-animals a true air-breathing lung as a special production of his will, or could permit it to be formed by transitional gradations out of the swim-bladder of an aquatic creature. ”

“ Unless there be some other gradual process besides transmutation, to bridge the interval between the creative fiat and the eventual appearance of modern types, there seems to be no escape from the dilemma. ”

“ The truth was that the creative forces had flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer act as efficient channels for the light. ”

“ One of the principal objects of that essay was, in fact, to show that the psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation. ”

“ In Essay IV, we discover the essentially creative character of Art, the field par excellence of the triumphs of non-divine intelligences, and thus come, as if by a new and unexpected path, once more upon the intrinsic autonomy of the rational individual. ”

“ Do they not clearly point to the exercise of the creative power in a special manner, and for special purposes? That power being once exercised, the new chemical composition and mechanical appliances being devised, the same "ideal plan" could be carried through a new class of animals by a repetition which is in accordance with the economy of Nature, and which an infinite power could adapt to the formation of animals, each of which was designed to perpetuate its own species and no other. ”

“ But is it not plain that science itself invites philosophy to consider things in another way? If our biology was still that of Aristotle, if it regarded the series of living beings as unilinear, if it showed us the whole of life evolving towards intelligence and passing, to that end, through sensibility and instinct, we should be right, we, the intelligent beings, in turning back towards the earlier and consequently inferior manifestations of life and in claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into the molds of our understanding. ”

“ We are speaking out today to advocate for a future of richer and more accessible creative innovation for generations of artists to come. Artists breathe life into AI, directing its innovation towards positive cultural evolution while expanding the essential human dimensions it inherently lacks. ”

“ To decide whether social changes are due mostly to the accumulated influences of some individuals and their initiative, or to the environment, to circumstances, to hereditary transmission, is not a problem for psychology to solve. We can not, however, totally avoid this discussion, for it touches the very springs of creation.
Is the inventive genius the highest degree of personality or a synthesis of masses?—the result of himself or of others?—the expression of an individual activity or of a collective activity? ”

“ Three kinds of forces virtually determine the general trend of all artistic development as, indeed, of all other forms of evolution—forces which constitute the sum total of those that we comprehend under the joint name of tradition, a sum total of progressive tendencies which we will designate as esthetic ideals, and, mediating between the two, the typical development of the individuals themselves—above all, naturally, individuals of genius who really create literature. ”

“ By way of summary, and whatever be the causes, we may say that there is a universal tendency in all living matter toward variation, whether we consider vegetables, animals, or the physical and mental man. The need of innovating is only a special case, rare in the lower races, frequent in the higher. This tendency toward variation is fundamental or superficial: As fundamental, it corresponds to genius, and survives through processes analogous to natural selection, i.e., by its own power. ”

“ In proportion as we recede from distant origins the light grows, and invention in the social and moral order becomes manifest as the work of two principal categories of minds—the fantastic, the positive. ”

“ As superficial, it corresponds to talent, survives and prospers chiefly through the help of circumstances and environment. Here, the orientation comes from without, not from within. According as the spirit of the time inclines rather to poetry or painting, or music, or scientific research, or industry, or military art, minds of the second order are dragged into the current—showing that a goodly part of their power is in the aptness, not for invention, but for imitation. ”

“ With the introduction of man into the scene of existence, creation, I repeat, seems to have ceased. What is it that now takes its place, and performs its work? During the previous dynasties, all elevation in the scale was an effect simply of creation. Nature lay dead in a waste theatre of rock, vapor, and sea, in which the insensate laws, chemical; mechanical, and electric, carried on their blind, unintelligent processes: the creative fiat went forth; and, amid waters that straightway teemed with life in its lower forms, vegetable and animal, the dynasty of the fish was introduced. ”

“ We come now to a unique period in the history of the development of the imagination—its golden age. In primitive man, still confined in savagery or just starting toward civilization, it reaches its full bloom in the creation of myths; and we are rightly astonished that psychologists, obstinately attached to esthetics, have neglected such an important form of activity, one so rich in information concerning the creative imagination. ”

“ This initial state puts into action a mechanism determined by the nature of each species, and ends in creations of special kinds. However, variations of instinct, its adaptation to various conditions, show that the conditions of the determinism are less simple, that the creative activity is endowed with a certain plasticity. ”

“ For I cannot but maintain that, at present, the psychology of the imagination is concerned almost wholly with its part in esthetic creation and in the sciences. We scarcely get beyond that; its other manifestations have been occasionally mentioned—never investigated. Yet invention in the fine arts and in the sciences is only a special case, and possibly not the principal one. ”

“ In considering any form of art of a period which shows active traditions, real life and movement, natural growth and development, we are fascinated by its organic quality, and though we may detect the absorption or adaptation of new elements and new influences from time to time leading to changes of style and structure of design, as well as changed temper and feeling, as long as this natural evolution continues, each variety has its own charm and its own compensations ”