The Creative Process in the Individual

Troward opens with an old saying, "Order is Heaven's First Law," and then points at the newest wonder of his day: people were flying.

Nobody had changed the laws of nature to get a machine into the air. Air, lift and gravity had been there since the beginning of the world. What was missing was a mind that saw what those laws allowed and arranged things in the right order. Troward calls that mind the Personal Factor, and it runs through the whole book.

So the real lesson of flight is principle over precedent. Every earlier generation had the accumulated evidence that people cannot fly. The principle never read the evidence.

Before any investigation, Troward says, you need a rough idea of what you are after, just as "you would not go up a tree to find fish though you would for birds' eggs."

His answer is disarmingly plain. We all want to get more out of Life. We want to feel more alive in ourselves, and we want better conditions around us. Even someone whose life is going well can picture something better, or would at least like to keep the good from slipping away.

And since every gain opens a view of the next one, the goal is not a single improvement. It is more life, in a degree that keeps rising. The target moves, and for Troward that is exactly how it should be.

Look at what that ordinary wish actually contains. It is personal: it is about your life, not life in general. And it asks for conditions that do not exist yet.

Producing what does not yet exist is creation. So, without a word of mysticism, Troward arrives at the real subject of the book: a creative power working through a person, inside the sphere of her own world. He describes it as bringing our own Personal Factor into the realm of unseen causes.

He was a retired judge, and it shows. If such a power exists, it cannot run on luck or favour. It has to work by a sequence of cause and effect, and finding that sequence is the whole project.

According to Troward, what made flight possible in his day?

• Past experience had slowly shown that it could work
• Nature's laws had shifted just enough to allow it
• Someone arranged existing things in the right order✓Correct answer
• An entirely new force had been added to nature

Nothing in nature changed: the things themselves had existed from the beginning. A Personal Factor saw what the laws allowed and put things in order, in spite of all past experience rather than because of it.

This is where many readers expect the method to arrive: what to think, how often, in which words. Troward does something slower and more useful. Before asking how to use a creative power, he asks what such a power would have to be like to exist at all.

His first test is a thought experiment. Suppose you discover the secret. Then somebody else can discover it too. Now two people each hold an irresistible power, and they want opposite things.

That is not a law. It is an impasse between two irresistible powers, and a universe built that way could not keep working for a single day.

So Troward concludes that its first principle must be Harmony. The power cannot be fighting itself from different centres. It has to act in step at every point at once.

That gives you a test long before you reach any technique. A method that only succeeds by overriding someone else's equal claim is not the power he is describing. Whatever breaks harmony, he says, goes against the very nature of the law, and so it cannot lead to true creative power, however well it seems to work.

What he is looking for, then, is a law wide enough to hold every individual variation without collision: your conditions improving without closing off anyone else's ability to do the same.