17.     As a "universalistic," Poincaré would want his theory of creativity to be related to all of nature. But Poincaré's specific metaphor of "gaseous like molecules" (his words) "colliding" (his words) in the unconscious, and then "sifted by seives" (his words) also in the unconscious mind sounds whacky and irrational when coming from a scientist! That this "irrational" description and theory was popularized by the foremost scientist in France (where even "shopgirls" were said to be seen reading Poincaré's popular works in parks) would have been an irony very appealing to Duchamp.