CREATIVE PERSONALITY

Ralph Tyler Flewelling

Ralph Tyler Flewelling (1871–1960), the leader of The Californian School of American Personalism, founder and editor of The Personalist, a Quarterly Journal of Philosophy, Theology and Literature, published at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, 1920-1979). His major books are: Bergson and Personal Realism (1920), Creative Personality (1926), Reflection on the Basic Ideas of East and West (1935), The Survival of Western Culture (1943), Conflict and Conciliation of Cultures (1951) and The Person; or The Significance of Man (1952).

“The only abiding basis for democracy is respect for the sanctity of the person” (“Peronalism,” 1943).

Creative imagination is part and parcel of one’s power to reflect upon his own conscious moods and is therefore the unique possession of man. The importance of simulation or play to the human being has long been known. The child in his play prepares for the activities and situations which will form a part of his workaday world. During the war it was found that the football experience of the men provided significant aid to their efficiency in war just as by creative imagination it does undoubtedly help to prepare the man for the exigencies contingent upon success and failure in the realm of peaceful vocations. By means of play the youth imagines itself in new situations and prepares mind and body to act when the situation actually occurs. Usually the lawyer, the doctor, the minister, the artist, the entertainer, the farmer, or the mechanic is given the bent of his life in the creative imagination long before his years of serious activity.

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