In unseen and unacknowledged specter, an “X,” attends at every economic feast, and stands at the elbow of every modern wiseacre. It confounds the forecaster with seeming malice showing itself only in the event and even then with impish and uncertain effect. It laughs at pretensions to knowledge; it tantalizes all figurers, haunts all generalizers and keeps itself to itself, a shadow, an unknown. But phantom as it is, it is still a force, a potent, active, generative substance, mysterious in genesis, related to a dream, but able to accomplish miracles of reality. For the purpose here it will be called the creative experience.
1 An address read at the Bowdoin Institute of Philosophy, April 14, 1937.
2 There is a discussion of the meaning of method in Mr. Stuart A. Rice's introduction to “Methods in Social Science,” in which he refers to the difficulty of discovering how hypotheses originate in the minds of their discoverers, and to the desire of methodical theorists to exclude this from consideration.