Creative energy

“ On this basis the creative energy of the Universal Mind may be safely trusted to work through the specializing influence of our own thought [1] and we may adopt the maxim "trust your desires" because we know that they are the movement of the Universal in ourselves, and that being based upon our fundamental recognition of the Life, Love, and Beauty which the Spirit is, their unfoldments must carry these initial qualities with them all down the line, and thus, in however small a degree, becomes a portion of the working of the Spirit in its inherent creativeness. ”

“ But this plastic impulse is not powerful, or finds in the environment insufficient support. Great art and great creative achievements are rare in the world, and come for the most part only in those moments and in those places where an unusual concentration of mental energy and the friction of many kindred minds allow the scattered sparks of inspiration to merge and to leap into flame. ”

“ Its powers of creative energy are felt to be enormous. But still it seems to be conscious that it must receive some form of energy from either its "I" companion, or else from some other "I," ere it is able to bring into being its mental creations. This consciousness brings with it a realization of an enormous capacity for mental work and creative ability. ”

“ The creative impulse may remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct, as many philosophers have supposed; a portion of the divine energy which is somehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad, cultured and savage, have now and again possessed this vital creative power. ”

“ And if this acquiescence and enjoyment be supplemented by the recreation of a creative energy, in that special happiness which comes from the fashioning by human handiwork of things of delight, the possibilities of an inspiration can be discerned which even for a time, putting aside occupation in ultimate mysteries, may “bring satisfaction to the ways of men.” ”

“ This is not a long or wearisome task for in the cortex of every brain there are distinct idea centers whose business it is to take up ideas built from thoughts, and will must follow the idea, and by constantly selecting the thoughts which will produce harmonious vibrations within the psychic and physical selves, we join with the great creative energy of the universe and it flows through us, healing and harmonizing every atom of our body. ”

“ The former, rational architects, build by means of abstract ideas, logical relations and methods, by deduction and induction; the others, imaginative builders, care [232] little for this learned magnificence—they excel in vivid creations because the moving energy with them is in their feelings, "in their hearts;" because they speak a language made up of concrete images, and consequently their wholly symbolic speech is at the same time an original construction. The mystic imagination is a transformation of the mythic imagination, the myth changing into symbols. ”

“ It may be that our sense of their greatness and remoteness produces a certain "humility" in us, and a certain mood of "waiting on the Spirit," not altogether encouraging to what this age, in its fussy worship of energy, calls "our creative work." ”

“ But what can remain of matter when you take away everything that determines it, that is to say, just energy and movement themselves? The philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making a clean sweep of everything that is only an imaginative symbol, he will see the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he will thus be prepared to discover real duration there where it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life and of consciousness. ”

“ The Supreme is the divine channel through which flows the creative infinity of the triodities that crystallizes into the galactic panorama of space, against which takes place the magnificent personality drama of time: the spirit conquest of energy-matter through the mediation of mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such pleasures, at any rate, whatever their value as contributions to special lines of knowledge, enrich the æsthetic consciousness, prepare it for fresh and perhaps more definite impressions, enlarge its sense of the underlying relation between art and life, between all the manifold and contradictory expressions of human energy, and leave it thus more prepared to defend its own attitude, to see how, in one sense—a sense not excluding, but in a way enveloping and fertilising all the specialised forms of technical competence—Gefühl ist alles. ”

“ And even so far as you were creative, so shall your work be informed by you, and not mere dead pigment and dried oil and dull canvas be your autograph, but the vivid and inspiring blazon of an inspired idea shall glow life-like on some friendly wall, and in its turn inspire some other soul, whose light within needs but the breath from without to burst upward in clear flame. ”

“ Now the higher the idea of art is understood, the more art feels its task to be the task of bringing the life of the universe into harmony, so much the more must the feeling of responsibility be intensified in a creative mind. ”

“ And the total effect, increased by all these methods of wilful blunting and blurring, is an art without stamina, tired, impotent, short-lived, while produced by an excessive expense of talent and effort of invention.
For here we have the mischief: all the artistic force is spent by the art in merely keeping alive; and there is no reserve energy for living with serenity and depth of feeling. ”

“ The combining imagination joined to the inductive spirit constitutes "the talent for invention strictly so-called," in industry, in the technique of science; it gives the artist and the poet the power of composing their works.
The combining imagination plus the deductive spirit gives the speculative talent of the mathematician and philosopher; deduction predominates in the former, imagination in the latter. ”

“ It is not merely the special endowment of eye, ear, hand, not merely what we call artistic talent, which is exceptional and vested in individuals only. It takes a surplus of sensitiveness and energy to be determined in one's moods by natural surroundings instead of solely by one's own wants or circumstances or business. Now art is born of just this surplus sensitiveness and energy; it is the response not to the impressions made by our private ways and means, but to the impressions made by the ways and means of the visible, sensible universe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you will permit me, so early in my argument, to speak of the Maker of them all, I will say that the creative power is inexhaustible in invention, both of useful and beautiful parts. And in the ceaseless activity of these creatures, great and small, we recognise the physical happiness which accompanies so much life. ”

“ The invaluable suggestions of real practical purpose, the organic dignity of integrated habit and necessity, the safety of tradition, the spiritual weightiness of genuine message, all these elements of creative power are lacking. And in default of them we see a great amount of artistic talent, artificially fed and excited by the teaching and the example of every possible past or present art, exhausting itself in attempts to invent, to express, to be something, anything, so long as it is new. ”

“ II. IRON IN ART.—Passing, then, from the offices of the metal in the operations of nature to its uses in the hands of man, you must remember, in the outset, that the type which has been thus given you, by the lifeless metal, of the action of body and soul together, has noble antitype in the operation of all human power. All art worthy the name is the energy—neither of the human body alone, nor of the human soul alone, but of both united, one guiding the other: good craftsmanship and work of the fingers, joined with good emotion and work of the heart. ”

“ If our studies and our work bring us to the point of visual discrimination, to æsthetic appreciation and enjoyment, and no farther, we are distinguished among men. The rarest thing in the world is creative genius, the faculty which creates great works. ”

“ In the same way, the uncertain flame of a resinous branch guiding vaguely in the night leads us, through a long series of inventions, to gas and electric lighting. All objects, even the most ordinary and most common that now serve us in our everyday-life, are condensed imagination. ”

“ Nothing, however, is subordinate for the creative spirit; things and beings penetrate by their invisible radiations into the hidden places where our work is being born. Our thoughts are colored by the softness of white clouds, by all the flowers of the meadows, by the blood of the roses, and like the grain they are sifted on the glowing sieves of the rays of the sun. ”

“ It is a well-known fact, almost a rule, that the poet, the novelist, the dramatist, and the musician—often, indeed, even the sculptor and the painter—experience the thoughts and feeling of their characters, become identified with them. There are, then, in this second instance, two currents of feeling—the one, constituting emotion as material for art, the other, drawing out creative activity and developing along with it. ”

“ If we admit this explanation, which does not lack potency, the work of the esthetic [48] imagination itself would be reduced to a biological necessity, and there would be no reason for making a separate category of it. Whichever view we may adopt, it still remains established that any invention is reducible, directly or indirectly, to a particular, determinate need, and that to allow man a special instinct, the definite specific character of which should be stimulation to creative activity, is a fantastic notion. ”

“ The creative power enables us to refashion that world and to put it forth again out of ourselves, as it was originally put forth out of the life of the divine artist. The creative process is, therefore, a double process, and culture and genius stand in indissoluble union.
The development of the imagination, upon the power of which both absorption of knowledge and creative capacity depend, is, therefore, a matter of supreme importance. ”

“ An artist must maintain the creative impulse alert throughout. He must himself, in the strength of his own imagination, already impregnated with the knowledge of appropriate form and made vital with profound experience and emotion, give such an embodiment to the significance, which is the inspiring motive of the work, as will make it appear throughout as metal cast at one time and is one state of fusion. ”

“ The crucial point of transition, where fine art wakes from its sleep, must consequently be sought there, where at last the artist is creative by virtue of his own free conception, where the flash of genius strikes into the material presented, and communicates freshness and vitality to the presentment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Between the mechanism of instinct and that of imaginative creation there are frequently great analogies but not identity of nature. Every tendency of our organization, useful or hurtful, may become the beginning of a creative act. Every invention arises from a particular need of human nature, acting within its own sphere and for its own special end.
If now it should be asked why the creative imagination directs itself preferably in one line rather than in another—toward poetry or physics, trade or mechanics, geometry or painting, strategy or music, etc.—we have nothing in answer. ”

“ The fixed imagination moves in an elastic frame. The material elements circumscribing it and composing it have a certain fluidity; they are language, writing, musical sounds, colors, forms, lines. Furthermore, we know that its creations, in spite of the spontaneous adherence of the mind accepting them, are the work of a free will; they could have been otherwise—they preserve an indelible imprint of contingency and subjectivity. ”

“ The reinforcement of the state of the mind comes from the fact that its several powers, instead of spreading themselves [86] 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. ”

“ Avoiding the question of creative genius, what impresses us in a work of art is the intensity or the pressure with which the theme, emotion, sentiment, even “idea” is rendered. Assuming that a blow from the butt of a revolver is not exactly artistic presentation, that “effectiveness” is not the only criterion, we have the beginning of a criticism of æsthetics. ”

“ May we not apply the same principle to the Greater Creative Mind with which we are seeking to deal? There is something in the work of the artist which is akin to that of original creation. His work, literary, musical, or graphic is original creation on a miniature scale, and in this it differs from that of the engineer, which is constructive, or that of the scientist which is analytical; for the artist in a sense creates something out of nothing, and therefore starts from the stand-point of simple feeling, and not from that of a pre-existing necessity. ”