III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already
acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings,
suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. Careful
observation and recollection determine what is given, what is
already there, and hence assured. They cannot furnish what is
lacking. They define, clarify, and locate the question; they
cannot supply its answer. Projection, invention, ingenuity,
devising come in for that purpose. The data arouse suggestions,
and only by reference to the specific data can we pass upon the
appropriateness of the suggestions. But the suggestions run
beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. They
forecast possible results, things to do, not facts (things
already done). Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a
leap from the known.
In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it
is presented) is creative, -- an incursion into the novel. It
involves some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be
familiar in some context; the novelty, the inventive devising,
clings to the new light in which it is seen, the different use to
which it is put. When Newton thought of his theory of
gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in
its materials. They were familiar; many of them commonplaces --
sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers.
These were not original ideas; they were established facts.
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