We are asking a really fundamental question whether thought can ever be creative. If thought is not the ground of creation then what is creation? Is love the only factor that is creative?
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.
Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.
As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.
It's hard to invent a new thing, and it's just as hard to invent another new thing.
Could I interrupt here, because there is an alternative explanation, which you are particularly well placed to examine. You know the argument that it is the alchemists in the laboratories who invent the sweet new kits.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
It is true I had been successful on a small scale in overcoming one of the main difficulties in the new process, but there was still much to invent, and much that at that period I necessarily knew nothing about.
To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover.
