It is a well-known law of the emotional life that what is at first sought as a means may become an end and be desired for itself. A very sensual passion may at length undergo a sort of idealization; people study a science at first because it is useful, and later because of its fascination; and we may desire money in order to spend it, and later in order to hoard it. Here it is the same: the financial inventor is often possessed with a kind of intoxication--he no longer labors for lucre, but for art; he becomes, in his own way, an author of romance. His imagination, set at the beginning toward gain, now seeks only its complete expansion, the assertion and eruption of its creative power, the pleasure of inventing for invention's sake,[133] daring the extraordinary, the unheard-of--it is the victory of pure construction. The natural equilibrium between the three necessary elements of creation--mobility, combination of images, calculation--is destroyed. The rational element gives way, is obliterated, and the speculator is launched into adventure with the possibility of a dazzling success or astounding catastrophe. But let us note well that the primary and sole cause of this change is in the affective and motor element, in an hypertrophy of the lust for power, in an unmeasured and morbid want of expansion of self. Here, as everywhere, the source of invention is the emotional nature of the inventor. (2) A second special character of commercial imagination is the exclusive employment of schematic representations. Although this process is also met with in the sciences and especially in social inventions, the imaginative type that we are now considering has the privilege of using them without exception. This, then, is the proper moment for a description.