Essay on the Creative Imagination

Ribot treats imagination as an active, constructive power rather than a decorative extra to reason. Writing as one of the founders of scientific psychology in France, he breaks the creative process into three parts: an intellectual factor (thinking by analogy and the association of images), an emotional factor (feeling as the real motor of invention), and the unconscious or organic conditions that underlie both. He also traces how the faculty develops in childhood, matures, and eventually declines with age. From there he follows creative imagination across its many fields, including mechanical invention, science, myth and religion, the fine arts, commerce, and even the abstractions of mathematics and utopian thought. First published in French in 1900, this is an early and systematic attempt to explain creativity in psychological terms rather than mystical ones.