| Chapter 2: | Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology |
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In 1746, in The Fine Arts Reduced to One Single Principle (Les Beaux-Arts Réduits à Une Même Principe), Abbé Charles Batteux terminated the mystical line of thinking with a claim that genius is not a property of an individual but rather should be seen as the degree and speed with which a person can process the relationships observed in nature. Since everyone participates in the universal reason, there are no differences in kind between one individual and another (Jaffe 1980, 585). In the same year, Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780) published a book entitled An Essay on the Origin of Human Consciousnesses (Essai sur l'Origine des Connaissances Humaines). In it, he postulated that genius, although granted to only a few people, involves simply an ability to see new relationships in nature. The identification of previously untried combinations is invention. Invention is opposed to imitation (Jaffe, 1980, pp. 586–587). Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783) expressed virtually the same idea and extended the notion of genius as an ability to establish previously unrecognized relationships from art to logic and science (Jaffe, 1980, pp. 588–589).
In 1753, Denis Diderot synthesized both ancient and modern trends of thought admitting the importance of both reason and passion in the formation of a genius. In Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (Pensée sur l'Interprétation de la Nature), he defined génie as “an inexplicable intuitive awareness of the workings of nature.” In his opinion, genius is different from imagination, wit, sensibility or taste. It is, rather, “a certain conformation of the head and the viscera, a certain constitution of the humors.” Everyone is endowed with a genius, but it takes specific circumstances to bring it out. The difference between a genius and an imitator springs from the fact that a genius admits no intermediaries between himself and nature (Dieckmann, 1941, pp. 159–160).
The strengthening focus on genius also reflected the changing style of art criticism, which was shifting from the observation over created things, to observation over the creative process (Zammito, 2002, pp. 239–240). The culmination of the Enlightenment's speculation on the nature of human creativity was a theory according to which