For most of history, humans weren't thought capable of creating anything
Ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians had no real concept of creativity: art was discovery, not invention. Plato insisted a painter merely imitates. In Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition, only God could truly create. The idea that ordinary people generate genuinely new things is surprisingly recent, a product of the Renaissance.
The Greeks had no words for create or creator, only poiein, to make, which applied to poetry and the poet. Inspiration came from outside: the Muses relayed it from the gods, and Greeks and Romans spoke of a guiding daemon or genius tied to the divine. The English verb create shows up in the 14th century, in Chaucer's Parson's Tale, where it refers to God's work. The Latin root creare sits beside crescere, to let things grow, a sense stressed more in Indigenous and Eastern ideas of creativity.
Renaissance humanism changed the picture by crediting creation to the abilities of exceptional individuals, embodied by the polymath, with Leonardo da Vinci the famous example. The shift was slow. Only in the Enlightenment did creativity become firmly tied to imagination, which Thomas Hobbes placed at the centre of human thinking, and William Duff was among the first to separate genius, which breaks new ground, from mere talent.
Serious study began late. Mark Runco and Robert Albert trace it to the late 19th century and the interest in individual differences sparked by Darwinism, especially Francis Galton's work on inherited ability. Hermann von Helmholtz in 1896 and Henri Poincaré in 1908 described how their own ideas arrived, inspiring Graham Wallas, whose 1926 book Art of Thought offered one of the first models of the creative process: preparation, incubation while the unconscious works, a hunch that an answer is near, and then sudden illumination.
Definitions remain slippery. Researchers broadly agree on novel and useful, or in Robert Sternberg's phrase, original and worthwhile, but the geographer Peter Meusburger counted more than a hundred definitions in the literature. The philosopher Ignacio Götz argued one can be creative without being original. Teresa Amabile and Michael Pratt separate creativity, producing new ideas, from innovation, putting them into practice. Scholars now also speak of emotional creativity, originality in how people experience feelings.
Source: Creativity
