When we reflect on the origin of creativity, in whatever field of endeavor, our thoughts turn first to the imagination.
For the person who is endowed with imagination, everything serves as a pretext for imagining— in other words, for executing projects of the mind in a preferred field or fields. This becomes all the more rapidly a game because being experienced in this type of gymnastic one practices it with success and consequently with pleasure. And the imaginative person, gifted with taste, wiIl naturally be drawn in the direction of artistic creation.
Associations of Ideas
The imagination operates, mainly, by association of ideas. The most insignificant detail--occasionally even one that is alien to the field of perfumes--can trigger a first association of ideas, which can entail another such association, which may in turn instigate a third, and so on. This is how the process of creation develops progressively and is enriched on its course by all the ideas that have grafted themselves onto the initial idea and onto the subsequent ones. It is the very nature of an active mind to be constantly at work and to snap up everything that comes within its reach.
