Without presuming to solve this vexed question, I lean toward the view of individualism pure and simple. It seems to me very difficult to admit that the great creator is only the result of his environment. Since this influence acts on many others, it is very necessary that, in great men, there should be in addition a personal factor. Besides, in opposition to the exclusively environmental theory we may bring the well-known fact that most innovators and inventors at first arouse opposition. We know the invariable sentence on everything novel--it is "false" or "bad;" then it is adopted with the statement that it had been known for a long time. In the hypothesis of collective invention, it seems that the mass of people should applaud inventors, recognizing itself in them, seeing its confused thought take form and body: but most often the contrary happens. The misoneism of crowds seems to me one of the strongest arguments in favor of the individual character of invention.
We can doubtless distinguish two cases--in the first, the creator sums up and clearly translates the aspirations of his _milieu_; in the second, he is in opposition to it because he goes beyond it. How many innovators have been disappointed because they came before their time! But this distinction does not reach to the bottom of the question, and is not at all sufficient as an answer.
Let us leave this problem, which, on account of its complexity, we can hardly solve through peremptory reasoning, and let us try to examine _objectively_ the relation between creation and environment in order that we may see to what extent the creative imagination, without losing its individual character--which is impossible--depends on the intellectual and social surrounding.
If, with the American psychologists,[69] we term the disposition for innovating a "spontaneous variation"--a Darwinian term explaining nothing, but convenient--we may enunciate the following law:
_The tendency toward spontaneous variation (invention) is always in inverse ratio to the simplicity of the environment._
The savage environment is in its nature very simple, consequently homogeneous. The lower races show a much smaller degree of differentiation than the higher; in them, as Jastrow says, physical and psychic maturity is more precocious, and as the period just before the adult age is the plastic period _per se_, this diminishes the chances of a departure from the common type. Thus comparison between whites and blacks, between primitive and civilized peoples, shows that, for equal populations, there is an enormous disproportion as to the number of innovators.