The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a
wide range of types, but they agree in possessing imaginations that
range beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to
bring the discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and
recognition. The scope and direction of the imaginative excursion
may vary very greatly. It may be the invention of something new or
the discovery of something hitherto unperceived. When the invention
or discovery is primarily beauty then we have the artistic type of
Poietic mind; when it is not so, we have the true scientific man.
The range of discovery may be narrowed as it is in the art of
Whistler or the science of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wide
extent of relevance, until at last both artist or scientific
inquirer merge in the universal reference of the true philosopher.
To the accumulated activities of the Poietic type, reacted upon by
circumstances, are due almost all the forms assumed by human thought
and feeling. All religious ideas, all ideas of what is good or
beautiful, entered life through the poietic inspirations of man.
Except for processes of decay, the forms of the human future must
come also through men of this same type, and it is a primary
essential to our modern idea of an abundant secular progress that
these activities should be unhampered and stimulated.
The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, and merging
insensibly along the boundary into the less representative
constituents of the Poietic group, but distinguished by a more
restricted range of imagination. Their imaginations do not range
beyond the known, experienced, and accepted, though within these
limits they may imagine as vividly or more vividly than members of
the former group. They are often very clever and capable people, but
they do not do, and they do not desire to do, new things. The more
vigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable people in
the world, and they are generally more moral and more trustworthy
than the Poietic types. They live,--while the Poietics are always
something of experimentalists with life. The characteristics of
either of these two classes may be associated with a good or bad
physique, with excessive or defective energy, with exceptional
keenness of the senses in some determinate direction or such-like
"bent," and the Kinetic type, just as the Poietic type, may display
an imagination of restricted or of the most universal range. But a
fairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that ideal
our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the
"Normal" human being. The very definition of the Poietic class
involves a certain abnormality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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