(2) The organic or middle form may be given as the type of the unifying power. Ultimately it reduces itself to attention and presupposes nothing more, because, thanks to the process of "localization," which is the essential mark of attention, it makes itself a center of attraction, grouping about the leading idea the images, associations, judgments, tendencies and voluntary efforts. "Inspiration," the poet Grillparzer used to say, "is a concentration of all the forces and capacities upon a single point which, for the time being, should represent the world rather than enclose it. The reinforcement of the state of the mind comes from the fact that its several powers, instead of spreading themselves 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.
In order to leave no doubt as to the identity of attention and imaginative synthesis, and in order to show that it is normally the true unifying principle, we offer the following remarks:
Attention is at times spontaneous, natural, without effort, simply dependent on the interest that a thing excites in us--lasting as long as it holds us in subjection, then ceasing entirely. Again, it is voluntary, artificial, an imitation of the other, precarious and intermittent, maintained with effort--in a word, laborious. The same is true of the imagination. The moment of inspiration is ruled by a perfect and spontaneous unity; its impersonality approaches that of the forces of Nature. Then appears the personal moment, the detailed working and long, painful, intermittent resumptions, the miserable turns of which so many inventors have described. The analogy between the two cases seems to me incontestable.
Next let us note that psychologists always adduce the same examples when they wish to illustrate on the one hand, the processes of the persistent, tenacious attention, and, on the other hand, the developmental labor without which creative work does not come to pass: "Genius is only long patience," the saying of Newton; "always thinking of it," and like expressions of d'Alembert, Helmholtz and others, because in the one case as in the other the fundamental condition is the existence of a fixed, ever-active idea, notwithstanding its relaxations and its incessant disappearances into the unconscious with return to consciousness.
