The second characteristic is inferiority of the affective element; it appears only intermittently and is entirely blotted out before sensory impression. This form of the creative imagination, coming especially from sensation, aims especially at sensation. Thus it is rather superficial, greatly devoid of that internal mark that comes from feeling.

But if it chance that both sensory and affective elements are equal in power; if there is at the same time intense vision adequate to reality, and profound emotion, violent shock, then there arise extraordinary imaginative personages, like Shakespeare, Carlyle, Michelet. It is needless to describe this form of imagination, excellent pen-pictures of which have been given by the critics;[79] let us merely note that its psychology reduces itself to an alternately ascending and descending movement between the two limiting points of perception and idea. The ascending process assigns to inanimate objects life, desires and feelings. Thus Michelet: "The great streams of the Netherlands, tired with their very long course, perish as though from weariness in the unfeeling ocean."[80] Elsewhere, the great folio begets the octavo, "which becomes the parent of the small volume, of booklets, of ephemeral pamphlets, invisible spirits flying in the night, creating under the very eyes of tyrants the circulation of liberty." The descending process materializes abstractions, gives them body, makes them flesh and bone; the Middle Ages become "a poor child, torn from the bowels of Christianity, born amidst tears, grown up in prayer and revery, in anguish of heart, dying without achieving anything." In this dazzle of images there is a momentary return to primitive animism.

II

In order to more fully understand the plastic imagination, let us take up its principal manifestations.

1. First, the arts dealing with form, where its necessity is evident. The sculptor, painter, architect, must have visual and tactile-motor images; it is the material in which their creations are wrapped up. Even leaving out the striking acts requiring such a sure and tenacious external vision (portraits executed from memory, exact remembrance of faces at the end of twenty years, as in the case of Gavarni, etc.[81]), and limiting ourselves merely to the usual, the plastic arts demand an observant imagination. For the majority of men the concrete image of a face, a form, a color, usually remains vague and fleeting; "red, blue, black, white, tree, animal, head, mouth, arm, etc., are scarcely more than words, symbols expressing a rough synthesis. For the painter, on the other hand, images have a very high precision of details, and what he sees beneath the words or in real objects are analyzed facts, positive elements of perception and movement."[82]

The role of tactile-motor images is not insignificant. There has often been cited the instance of sculptors who, becoming blind, have nevertheless been able to fashion busts of close resemblance to the original. This is memory of touch and of the muscular sense, entirely equivalent to the visual memory of the portrait painters mentioned above. Practical knowledge of design and modeling—i.e., of contour and relief—though resulting from natural or acquired disposition, depends on cerebral conditions, the development of definite sensory-motor regions and their connections; and on psychological conditions—the acquisition and organization of appropriate images. "We learn to paint and carve," wrote a contemporary painter, "as we do sewing, embroidery, sawing, filing and turning." In short, like all manual labor requiring associated and combined acts.

2. Another form of plastic imagination uses words as means for evoking vivid and clear impressions of sight, touch, movement; it is the poetic or literary form. Of it we find in Victor Hugo a finished type. As all know, we need only open his works at hazard to find a stream of glittering images. But what is their nature? His recent biographers, guided by contemporary psychology, have well shown that they always paint scenes or movements. It is unnecessary to give proofs. Some facts have a broader range and throw light upon his psychology. Thus we are told that "he never dictates or rhymes from memory and composes only in writing, for he believes that writing has its own features, and he wants to see the words. Theophile Gautier, who knows and understands him so well, says: 'I also believe that in the sentence we need most of all an ocular rhythm. A book is made to be read, not to be spoken aloud.'" It is added that "Victor Hugo never spoke his verses but wrote them out and would often illustrate them on the margin, as if he needed to fixate the image in order to find the appropriate word."[83]

After visual representations come those of movement: the steeple pierces the horizon, the mountain rends the cloud, the mountain raises himself and looks about, "the cold caverns open their mouths drowsily," the wind lashes the rock into tears with the waterfall, the thorn is an enraged plant, and so on indefinitely.

A more curious fact is the transposition of sonorous sensations or images of sound, and like them without form or figure, into visual and motor images: "The ruffles of sound that the fifer cuts out; the flute goes up to alto like a frail capital on a column." This thoroughly plastic imagination remains identical with itself while reducing everything spontaneously, unconsciously, to spatial terms.

In literature this altogether foreign mode of creative activity has found its most complete expression among the Parnassiens and their congeners, whose creed is summed up in the formula, faultless form and impassiveness. Theophile Gautier claims that "a poet, no matter what may be said of him, is a workman; it is not necessary that he have more intelligence than a laborer and have knowledge of a state other than his own, without which he does badly. I regard as perfectly absurd the mania that people have of hoisting them (the poets) up onto an ideal pedestal; nothing is less ideal than a poet. For him words have in themselves and outside the meaning they express, their own beauty and value, just like precious stones not yet cut and mounted in bracelets, necklaces and rings; they charm the understanding that looks at them and takes them from the finger to the little pile where they are put aside for future use." If this statement, whether sincere or not, is taken literally, I see no longer any difference, save as regards the materials employed, between the imagination of poets and the imagination active in the mechanical arts. For the usefulness of the one and the "uselessness" of the other is a characteristic foreign to invention itself.

3. In the teeming mass of myths and religious conceptions that the nineteenth century has gathered with so much care we could establish various classifications—according to race, content, intellectual level; and, in a more artificial manner but one suitable for our subject, according to the degree of precision or fluidity.

Neglecting intermediate forms, we may, indeed, divide them into two groups; some are clear in outline, are consistent, relatively logical, resembling a definite historical relation; others are vague, multiform, incoherent, contradictory; their characters change into one another, the tales are mixed and are imperceptible in the whole.

The former types are the work of the plastic imagination. Such are, if we eliminate oriental influences, most of the myths belonging to Greece when, on emerging from the earliest period, they attained their definite constitution. It has been held that the plastic character of these religious conceptions is an effect of esthetic development: statues, bas-reliefs, poetry, and even painting, have made definite the attributes of the gods and their history. Without denying this influence we must nevertheless understand that it is only auxiliary. To those who would challenge this opinion let us recall that the Hindoos have had gigantic poems, have covered their temples with numberless sculptures, and yet their fluid mythology is the opposite of the Greek. Among the peoples who have incarnated their divinities in no statue, in no human or animal form, we find the Germans and the Celts. But the mythology of the former is clear, well kept within large lines; that of the latter is fleeting and inconsistent—the despair of scholars.[84]

It is, then, certain that myths of the plastic kind are the fruits of an innate quality of mind, of a mode of feeling and of translating, at a given moment in its history, the preponderating characters of a race; in short, of a form of imagination and ultimately of a special cerebral structure.

4. The most complete manifestation of the plastic imagination is met with in mechanical invention and what is allied thereto, in consequence of the need of very exact representations of qualities and relations. But this is a specialized form, and, as its importance has been too often misunderstood, it deserves a separate study. (See Chapter V, infra.)

III

Such are the principal traits of this type of imagination: clearness of outline, both of the whole and of the details. It is not identical with the form called realistic—it is more comprehensive; it is a genus of which "realism" is a species. Moreover, the latter expression being reserved by custom for esthetic creation, I purposely digress in order to dwell on this point: that the esthetic imagination has no essential character belonging exclusively to it, and that it differs from other forms (scientific, mechanical, etc.) only in its materials and in its end, not in its primary nature.

On the whole, the plastic imagination could be summed up in the expression, clearness in complexity. It always preserves the mark of its original source—i.e., in the creator and those disposed to enjoy and understand him it tends to approach the clearness of perception.

Would it be improper to consider as a variety of the genus a mode of representation that could be expressed as clearness in simplicity? It is the dry and rational imagination. Without depreciating it we may say that it is rather a condition of imaginative poverty. We hold with Fouillee that the average Frenchman furnishes a good example of it. "The Frenchman," says he, "does not usually have a very strong imagination. His internal vision has neither the hallucinative intensity nor the exuberant fancy of the German and Anglo-Saxon mind; it is an intellectual and distant view rather than a sensitive resurrection or an immediate contact with, and possession of, the things themselves. Inclined to deduce and construct, our intellect excels less in representing to itself real things than in discovering relations between possible or necessary things. In other words, it is a logical and combining imagination that takes pleasure in what has been termed the abstract view of life. The Chateaubriands, Hugos, Flauberts, Zolas, are exceptional with us. We reason more than we imagine."[85]

Its psychological constitution is reducible to two elements: slightly concrete images, schemas approaching general ideas; for their association, relations predominantly rational, more the products of the logic of the intellect than of the logic of the feelings. It lacks the sudden, violent shock of emotion that gives brilliancy to images, making them arise and grouping them in unforeseen combinations. It is a form of invention and construction that is more the work of reason than of imagination proper.

Consequently, is it not paradoxical to relate it to plastic imagination, as species to genus? It would be idle to enter upon a discussion of the subject here without attempting a classification; let us merely note the likenesses and differences. Both are above all objective—the first, because it is sensory; the other, because it is rational. Both make use of analogous modes of association, dependent more on the nature of things than on the personal impression of the subject. Opposition exists only on one point: the former is made up of vivid images that approach perception; the latter is made up of internal images bordering upon concepts. Rational imagination is plastic imagination desiccated and simplified.

FOOTNOTES:

[79] Thus Taine says of Carlyle: "He cannot stick to simple expression; at every step he drops into figures, gives body to every idea, must touch forms. We see that he is possessed and haunted by glittering or saddening visions; in him every thought is an explosion; a flood of seething passion reaches the boiling-point in his brain, which overflows, and the torrent of images runs over the banks and rushes with all its mud and all its splendor. He cannot reason, he must paint." Despite the vigor of this sketch, the perusal of ten pages of Sartor Resartus or of the French Revolution teaches more in regard to the nature of this imagination than all the commentaries.

[80] For a point of view in criticism that has seemed correct to many on this matter, compare the well-known chapter on the "Pathetic Fallacy" by Ruskin, in his Modern Painters. (Tr.)

[81] Arreat (Psychologie du peintre, pp. 62 ff.) gives a large number of examples of this.

[82] Ibid., p. 115.

[83] For further details on this point, consult Mabilleau, Victor Hugo, 2nd part, chaps. II, III, IV.—Renouvier, in the book devoted to the poet, asserts that "on account of his aptitude for representing to himself the details of a figure, order and position in space, beyond any present sensation," Victor Hugo could have become a mathematician of the highest order.

[84] As bearing out the position of the author, we may also call attention to the fact that while the Hebrew race has had very slight development in the plastic arts, yet its mythology has always taken a very definite form, even when dealing with the vaguest and most abstract subjects. (Tr.)

[85] Fouillee, Psychologie du peuple francais, p. 185.



CHAPTER II

THE DIFFLUENT IMAGINATION

I

The diffluent imagination is another general form, but one that is completely opposed to the foregoing. It consists of vaguely-outlined, indistinct images that are evoked and joined according to the least rigorous modes of association. It presents, then, two things for our consideration—the nature of the images and of their associations.

(1) It employs neither the clear-cut, concrete, reality-penetrated images of the plastic imagination, nor the semi-schematic representations of the rational imagination, but those midway in that ascending and descending scale extending from perception to conception. This determination, however, is insufficient, and we can make it more precise. Analysis, indeed, discovers a certain class of ill-understood images, which I call emotional abstractions, and which are the proper material for the diffluent imagination. These images are reduced to certain qualities or attributes of things, taking the place of the whole, and chosen from among the others for various reasons, the origin of which is affective. We shall comprehend their nature better through the following comparison:

Intellectual or rational abstraction results from the choice of a fundamental, or at least principal, character, which becomes the substitute for all the rest that is omitted. Thus, extension, resistance, or impenetrability, come to represent, through simplification and abbreviation, what we call "matter."

Emotional abstraction, on the other hand, results from the permanent or temporary predominance of an emotional state. Some aspect of a thing, essential or not, comes into relief, solely because it is in direct relation to the disposition of our sensibility, with no other preoccupation; a quality, an attribute is spontaneously, arbitrarily selected because it impresses us at the given instant—in the final analysis, because it somehow pleases or displeases us. The images of this class have an "impressionist" mark. They are abstractions in the strict sense—i.e., extracts from and simplifications of the sensory data. They act less through a direct influence than by evoking, suggesting, whispering; they permit a glance, a passing glimpse: we may justly call them crepuscular or twilight ideas.

(2) As for the forms of association, the relations linking these images, they do not depend so much on the order and connections of things as on the changing dispositions of the mind. They have a very marked subjective character. Some depend on the intellectual factor; the most usual are based on chance, on distant and vacillating analogies—further down, even on assonance and alliteration. Others depend on the affective factor and are ruled by the disposition of the moment: association by contrast, especially those alike in emotional basis, which have been previously studied. (First Part, Chapter II.)

Thus the diffluent imagination is, trait for trait, the opposite of the plastic imagination. It has a general character of inwardness because it arises less from sensation than from feeling, often from a simple and fugitive impression. Its creations have not the organic character of the other, lacking a stable center of attraction; but they act by diffusion and inclusion.

II

By its very nature it is de jure, if not de facto, excluded from certain territories—if it ventures therein it produces only abortions. This is true of the practical sphere, which permits neither vague images nor approximate constructions; and of the scientific world, where the imagination may be used only to create a theory or invent processes of discovery (experiments, schemes of reasoning). Even with these exceptions there is still left for it a very wide range.

Let us rapidly pass over some very frequent, very well-known manifestations of the diffluent imagination—those obliterated forms in which it does not reach complete development and cannot give the full measure of its power.

(1) Revery and related states. This is perhaps the purest specimen of the kind, but it remains embryonic.

(2) The romantic turn of mind. This is seen in those who, confronted by any event whatever or an unknown person, make up, spontaneously, involuntarily, in spite of themselves, a story out of whole cloth. I shall later give examples of it according to the written testimony of several people.[86] In whatever concerns themselves or others they create an imagined world, which they substitute for the real.

(3) The fantastic mind. Here we come away from the vague forms; the diffluent imagination becomes substantial and asserts itself through its permanence. At bottom this fantastic form is the romantic spirit tending toward objectification. The invention, which was at first only a thoroughly internal construction and recognized as such, aspires to become external, to become realized, and when it ventures into a world other than its own, one requiring the rigorous conditions of the practical imagination, it is wrecked, or succeeds only through chance, and that very rarely. To this class belong those inventors, known to everyone, who are fertile in methods of enriching themselves or their country by means of agricultural, mining, industrial or commercial enterprises; the makers of the utopias of finance, politics, society, etc. It is a form of imagination unnaturally oriented toward the practical.[87]

(4) The list increases with myths and religious conceptions; the imagination in its diffuse form here finds itself on its own ground.

Depending on linguistics, it has recently been maintained that, among the Aryans at least, the imagination created at first only momentary gods (Augenblicksgoetter).[88] Every time that primitive man, in the presence of a phenomenon, experienced a perceptible emotion, he translated it by a name, the manifestation of what was imagined the divine part in the emotion felt. "Every religious emotion gives rise to a new name—i.e., a new divinity. But the religious imagination is never identical with itself; though produced by the same phenomenon, it translates itself, at two different moments, by two different words." As a consequence, "during the early periods of the human race, religious names must have been applied not to classes of beings or events but to individual beings or events. Before worshipping the comet or the fig-tree, men must have worshiped each one of the comets they beheld crossing the sky, every one of the fig-trees that their eyes saw." Later, with advancing capacity for generalization, these "instantaneous" divinities would be condensed into more consistent gods. If this hypothesis, which has aroused many criticisms, be sound—if this state were met with—it would be the ideal type of imaginative instability in the religious order.

Nearer to us, authentic evidence shows that certain peoples, at given stages of their history, have created such vague, fluid myths, that we cannot succeed in delimiting them. Every god can change himself into another, different, or even opposite, one. The Semitic religions might furnish examples of this. There has been established the identity of Istar, Astarte, Tanit, Baalath, Derketo, Mylitta, Aschera, and still others. But it is in the early religion of the Hindoos that we perceive best this kaleidoscopic process applied to divine beings. In the vedic hymns not only are the clouds now serpents, now cows and later fortresses (the retreats of dark Asuras), but we see Agni (fire) becoming Kama (desire or love), and Indra becoming Varuna, and so on. "We cannot imagine," says Taine, "such a great clearness. The myth here is not a disguise, but an expression; no language is more true and more supple. It permits a glimpse of, or rather, it causes us to discern the forms of clouds, movements of the air, changes of seasons, all the happenings of sky, fire, storm: external nature has never met a mind so impressionable and pliant in which to mirror itself in all the inexhaustible variety of its appearances. However changeable nature may be, this imagination corresponds to it. It has no fixed gods; they are changeable like the things themselves; they blend one into another. Everyone of them is in turn the supreme deity; no one of them is a distinct personality; everyone is only a moment of nature, able, according to the apperception of the moment, to include its neighbor or be included by it. In this fashion they swarm and teem. Every moment of nature and every apperceptive moment may furnish one of them."[89] Let us, indeed, note that, for the worshiper, the god to whom he addresses himself and while he is praying, is always the greatest and most powerful. The assignment of attributes passes suddenly from one to the other, regardless of contradiction. In this versatility some writers believe they have discovered a vague pantheistic conception. Nothing is more questionable, fundamentally, than this interpretation. It is more in harmony with the psychology of these naive minds to assume simply an extreme state of "impressionism," explicable by the logic of feeling.

Thus, there is a complete antithesis between the imagination that has created the clear-cut and definite polytheism of the Greeks and that whence have issued those fluctuating divinities that allow the presentation of the future doctrine of Maya, of universal illusion—another more refined form of the diffluent imagination. Finally, let us note that the Hellenic imagination realized its gods through anthropomorphism—they are the ideal forms of human attributes[90]—majesty, beauty, power, wisdom, etc. The Hindoo imagination proceeds through symbolism: its divinities have several heads, several arms, several legs, to symbolize limitless intelligence, power, etc.; or better still, animal forms, as e.g., Ganesa, the god of wisdom, with the head of the elephant, reputed the wisest of animals.

(5) It would be easy to show by the history of literature and the fine arts that the vague forms have been preferred according to peoples, times, and places. Let us limit ourselves to a single contemporary example that is complete and systematically created—the art of the "symbolists." It is not here a question of criticism, of praise, or even of appreciation, but merely of a consideration of it as a psychological fact likely to instruct us in regard to the nature of the diffluent imagination.

This form of art despises the clear and exact representation of the outer world: it replaces it by a sort of music that aspires to express the changing and fleeting inwardness of the human soul. It is the school of the subject "who wants to know only mental states." To that end, it makes use of a natural or artificial lack of precision: everything floats in a dream, men as well as things, often without mark in time and space. Something happens, one knows not where or when; it belongs to no country, is of no period in time: it is the forest, the traveler, the city, the knight, the wood; less frequently, even He, She, It. In short, all the vague and unstable characters of the pure, content-less affective state. This process of "suggestion" sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails.

The word is the sign par excellence. As, according to the symbolists, it should give us emotions rather than representations, it is necessary that it lose, partially, its intellectual function and undergo a new adaptation.

A principal process consists of employing usual words and changing their ordinary acceptation, or rather, associating them in such a way that they lose their precise meaning, and appear vague and mysterious: these are the words "written in the depths." The writers do not name—they leave it for us to infer. "They banish commonplaces through lack of precision, and leave to things only the power of moving." A rose is not described by the particular sensations that it causes, but by the general condition that it excites.

Another method is the employment of new words or words that have fallen into disuse. Ordinary words retain, in spite of everything, somewhat of their customary meaning, associations and thoughts condensed in them through long habit; words forgotten during four or five centuries escape this condition—they are coins without fixed value.

Lastly, a still more radical method is the attempt to give to words an exclusively emotional valuation. Unconsciously or as the result of reflection some symbolists have come to this extreme trial, which the logic of events imposed upon them. Ordinarily, thought expresses itself in words; feeling, in gestures, cries, interjections, change of tone: it finds its complete and classic expression in music. The symbolists want to transfer the role of sound to words, to make of them the instrument for translating and suggesting emotion through sound alone: words have to act not as signs but as sounds: they are "musical notes in the service of an impassioned psychology."

All this, indeed, concerns only imagination expressing itself in words; but we know that the symbolic school has applied itself to the plastic arts, to treat them in its own way. The difference, however, is in the vesture that the esthetic ideal assumes. The pre-Raphaelites have attempted, by effacing forms, outlines, semblances, colors, "to cause things to appear as mere sources of emotion," in a word, to paint emotions.

To sum up—In this form of the diffluent imagination the emotional factor exercises supreme authority.

May the type of imagination, the chief manifestations of which we have just enumerated, be considered as identical with the idealistic imagination? This question is similar to that asked in the preceding chapter, and permits the same answer. In idealistic art, doubtless, the material element furnished in perception (form, color, touch, effort) is minimized, subtilized, sublimated, refined, so as to approach as nearly as possible to a purely internal state. By the nature of its favorite images, by its preference for vague associations and uncertain relations, it presents all the characteristics of diffluent imagination; but the latter covers a much broader field: it is the genus of which the other is a species. Thus, it would be erroneous to regard the fantastic imagination as idealistic; it has no claim to the term: on the contrary, it believes itself adapted for practical work and acts in that direction.

In addition, it must be recognized that were we to make a complete review of all the forms of esthetic creation, we should frequently be embarrassed to classify them, because there are among them, as in the case of characters, mixed or composite forms. Here, for example, are two kinds seemingly belonging to the diffluent imagination which, however, do not permit it to completely include them.

(a) The "wonder" class (fairy-tales, the Thousand and One Nights, romances of chivalry, Ariosto's poem, etc.) is a survival of the mythic epoch, when the imagination is given free play without control or check; whereas, in the course of centuries, art—and especially literary creation—becomes, as we have already said, a decadent and rationalized mythology. This form of invention consists neither of idealizing the external world, nor reproducing it with the minuteness of realism, but remaking the universe to suit oneself, without taking into account natural laws, and despising the impossible: it is a liberated realism. Often, in an environment of pure fancy, where only caprice reigns, the characters appear clear, well-fashioned, living. The "wonder" class belongs, then, to the vague as well as to the plastic imagination; more or less to one or to the other, according to the temperament of the creator.

(b) The fantastic class develops under the same conditions. Its chiefs (Hoffmann, Poe, et al.) are classed by critics as realists. They are such by virtue of their vision, intensified to hallucination, the precision in details, the rigorous logic of characters and events: they rationalize the improbable.[91] On the other hand, the environment is strange, shrouded in mystery: men and things move in an unreal atmosphere, where one feels rather than perceives. It is thus proper to remark that this class easily glides into the deeply sad, the horrible, terrifying, nightmare-producing, "satanic literature;" Goya's paintings of robbers and thieves being garroted; Wiertz, a genius bizarre to the point of extravagance, who paints only suicides or the heads of guillotined criminals.

Religious conceptions could also furnish a fine lot of examples: Dante's Inferno, the twenty-eight hells of Buddhism, which are perhaps the masterpieces of this class, etc. But all this belongs to another division of our subject, one that I have expressly eliminated from this essay—the pathology of the creative imagination.

III

There yet remains for us to study two important varieties that I connect with the diffluent imagination.

NUMERICAL IMAGINATION

Under this head I designate the imagination that takes pleasure in the unlimited—in infinity of time and space—under the form of number. It seems at first that these two terms—imagination and number—must be mutually exclusive. Every number is precise, rigorously determined, since we can always reduce it to a relation with unity; it owes nothing to fancy. But the series of numbers is unlimited in two directions: starting from any term in the series, we may go on ever increasingly or ever decreasingly. The working of the mind gives rise to a possible infinity that is limitless: it thus traces a route for the movement of the imagination. The number, or rather the series of numbers, is less an object than a vehicle.

This form of imagination is produced in two principal ways—in religious conceptions and cosmogonies, and in science.

(1) Numerical imagination has nowhere been more exuberant than among the peoples of the Orient. They have played with number with magnificent audacity and prodigality. Chaldean cosmogony relates that Oannes, the Fish-god, devoted 259,200 years to the education of mankind, then came a period of 432,000 years taken up with the reigns of mythical personages, and at the end of these 691,000 years, the deluge renewed the face of the earth. The Egyptians, also, were liberal with millions of years, and in the face of the brief and limited chronology of the Greeks (another kind of imagination) were wont to exclaim, "You, O Greeks, you are only children!" But the Hindoos have done better than all that. They have invented enormous units to serve as basis and content for their numerical fancies: the Koti, equivalent to ten millions; the Kalpa (or the age of the world between two destructions), 4,328,000,000 years. Each Kalpa is merely one of 365 days of divine life: I leave to the reader, if he is so inclined, the work of calculating this appalling number. The Djanas divide time into two periods, one ascending, the other descending: each is of fabulous duration, 2,000,000,000,000,000 oceans of years; each ocean being itself equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000 years. "If there were a lofty rock, sixteen miles in each dimension, and one touched it once in a hundred years with a bit of the finest Benares linen, it would be reduced to the size of a wango-stone before a fourth of one of these Kalpas had rolled by." In the sacred books of Buddhism, poor, dry, colorless, as they ordinarily are, imagination in its numerical forms is triumphant. The Lalitavistara is full of nomenclatures and enumerations of fatiguing monotony: Buddha is seated on a rock shaded by 100,000 parasols, surrounded by minor gods forming an assemblage of 68,000 Kotis (i.e., 680,000,000 persons), and—this surpasses all the rest—"he had experienced many vicissitudes during 10,100,000,000 Kalpas." This makes one dizzy.

(2) Numerical imagination in the sciences does not take on these delirious forms; it has the advantage of resting on an objective basis: it is the substitute of an unrepresentable reality. Scientific culture, which people often accuse of stifling imagination, on the contrary opens to it a field much vaster than esthetics. Astronomy delights in infinitudes of time and space: it sees worlds arise, burn at first with the feeble light of a nebular mass, glow like suns, become chilled, covered with spots, and then become condensed. Geology follows the development of our earth through upheavals and cataclysms: it foresees a distant future when our globe, deprived of the atmospheric vapors that protect it, will perish of cold. The hypotheses of physics and chemistry in regard to atoms and molecules are not less reckless than the speculations of the Hindoo imagination. "Physicists have determined the volume of a molecule, and referring to the numbers that they give, we find that a cube, a millimeter each way (scarcely the volume of a silkworm's egg), would contain a number of molecules at least equal to the cube of 10,000,000—i.e., unity followed by twenty-one zeros. One scientist has calculated that if one had to count them and could separate in thought a million per second, it would take more than 250,000,000 years: the being who commenced the task at the time that our solar system could have been no more than a formless nebula, would not yet have reached the end."[92] Biology, with its protoplasmic elements, its plastids, gemmules, hypotheses on hereditary transmission by means of infinitesimal subdivisions; the theory of evolution, which speaks off-hand of periods of a hundred thousand years; and many other scientific theses that I omit, offer fine material for the numerical imagination.

More than one scientist has even made use of this form of imagination for the pleasure of developing a purely fanciful notion. Thus Von Baer, supposing that we might perceive the portions of duration in another way, imagines the changes that would result therefrom in our outlook on nature: "Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1,000 times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1,000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1,000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannonballs; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc."[93]

The psychologic conditions of this variety of the creative imagination are, then, these: Absence of limitation in time and space, whence the possibility of an endless movement in all directions, and the possibility of filling either with a myriad of dimly-perceived events. These events not being susceptible of clear representation as to their nature and quantity, escaping even a schematic representation, the imagination makes its constructions with substitutes that are, in this case, numbers.

IV

MUSICAL IMAGINATION

Musical imagination deserves a separate monograph. As the task requires, in addition to psychological capacity, a profound knowledge of musical history and technique, it cannot be undertaken here. I purpose only one thing, namely, to show that it has its own individual mark—that it is the type of affective imagination.

I have elsewhere[94] attempted to prove that, contrary to the general opinion of psychologists, there exists, in many men at least, an affective memory; that is, a memory of emotions strictly so called, and not merely of the intellectual conditions that caused and accompanied them. I hold that there exists also a form of the creative imagination that is purely emotional—the contents of which are wholly made up of states of mind, dispositions, wants, aspirations, feelings, and emotions of all kinds, and that it is the characteristic of the composer of genius, of the born musician.

The musician sees in the world what concerns him. "He carries in his head a coherent system of tone-images, in which every element has its place and value; he perceives delicate differences of sound, of timbre; he succeeds, through exercise, in penetrating into their most varied combinations, and the knowledge of harmonious relations is for him what design and the knowledge of color are for the painter: intervals and harmony, rhythm and tone-qualities are, as it were, standards to which he relates his present perceptions and which he causes to enter into the marvelous constructions of his fancy."[95]

These sound-elements and their combinations are the words of a special language that is very clear for some, impenetrable for others. People have spoken to a tiresome extent of the vagueness of musical expression; some have been pleased to hold that every one may interpret it in his own way. We must surely recognize that emotional language does not possess the precision of intellectual language; but in music it is the same as in any other idiom: there are those who do not understand at all; those who half understand and consequently always give wrong renderings; and those who understand well—and in this last category there are grades as varying as the aptitude for perceiving the delicate and subtle shades of speech.[96]

The materials necessary for this form of imaginative construction are gathered slowly. Many centuries passed between the early ages when man's voice and the simple instruments imitating it translated simple emotions, to the period when the efforts of antiquity and of the middle ages finally furnished the musical imagination with the means of expressing itself completely, and allowed complex and difficult constructions in sound. The development of music—slow and belated as compared to the other arts—has perhaps been due, in part at least, to the fact that the affective imagination, its chief province (imitative, descriptive, picturesque music being only an episode and accessory), being made up, contrary to sensorial imagination, of tenuous, subtle, fugitive states, has been long in seeking its methods of analysis and of expression. However it be, Bach and the contrapuntists, by their treatment in an independent manner of the different voices constituting harmony, have opened a new path. Henceforth melody will be able to develop and give rise to the richest combinations. We shall be able to associate various melodies, sing them at the same time, or in alternation, assign them to various instruments, vary indefinitely the pitch of singing and concerted voices. The boundless realm of musical combinations is open; it has been worth while to take the trouble to invent. Modern polyphony with its power of expressing at the same time different, even opposing, feelings is a marvelous instrument for a form of imagination which, alien to the forms clear-cut in space, moves only in time.

What furnishes us the best entrance into the psychology of this form of imagination is the natural transposition operative in musicians. It consists in this: An external or internal impression, any occurrence whatever, even a metaphysical idea, undergoes change of a certain kind, which the following examples will make better understood than any amount of commentary.

Beethoven said of Klopstock's Messiah, "always maestoso, written in D flat major." In his fourth symphony he expressed musically the destiny of Napoleon; in the ninth symphony he tries to give a proof of the existence of God. By the side of a dead friend, in a room draped in black, he improvises the adagio of the sonata in C sharp minor. The biographers of Mendelssohn relate analogous instances of transposition under musical form. During a storm that almost engulfed George Sand, Chopin, alone in the house, under the influence of his agony, and half unconsciously, composed one of his Preludes. The case of Schumann is perhaps the most curious of all: "From the age of eight, he would amuse himself with sketching what might be called musical portraits, drawing by means of various turns of song and varied rhythms the shades of character, and even the physical peculiarities, of his young comrades. He sometimes succeeded in making such striking resemblances that all would recognize, with no further designation, the figure indicated by the skillful fingers that genius was already guiding." He said later: "I feel myself affected by all that goes on in the world—men, politics, literature; I reflect on all that in my own way and it issues outwards in the form of music. That is why many of my compositions are so hard to understand: they relate to events of distant interest, though important; but everything remarkable that is furnished me by the period I must express musically." Let us recall again that Weber interpreted in one of the finest scenes of his Freyschuetz (the bullet-casting scene) "a landscape that he had seen near the falls of Geroldsau, at the hour when the moon's rays cause the basin in which the water rushes and boils to glisten like silver."[97] In short, the events go into the composer's brain, mix there, and come out changed into a musical structure.

The plastic imagination furnishes us a counter-proof: it transposes inversely. The musical impression traverses the brain, sets it in turmoil, but comes out transformed into visual images. We have already cited examples from Victor Hugo (ch. I); Goethe, we know, had poor musical gifts. After having the young Mendelssohn render an overture from Bach, he exclaimed, "How pompous and grand that is! It seems to me like a procession of grand personages, in gala attire, descending the steps of a gigantic staircase."

We might generalize the question and ask whether or no there exists a natural antagonism between true musical imagination and plastic imagination. An answer in the affirmative seems scarcely liable to be challenged. I had undertaken an investigation which, at the outset, made for a different goal. It happens that it answered clearly enough the question propounded above: the conclusion has arisen of itself, unsought; which fact saves me from any charge of a preconceived opinion.

The question asked orally of a large number of people was this: "Does hearing or even remembering a bit of symphonic music excite visual images in you and of what kind are they?" For self evident reasons dramatic music was expressly excluded: the appearance of the theater, stage, and scenery impose on the observer visual perceptions that have a tendency to be repeated later in the form of memories.

The result of observation and of the collected answers are summed up as follows:

Those who possess great musical culture and—this is by far more important—taste or passion for music, generally have no visual images. If these arise, it is only momentarily, and by chance. I give a few of the answers: "I see absolutely nothing; I am occupied altogether with the pleasure of the music: I live entirely in a world of sound. In accordance with my knowledge of harmony, I analyze the harmonies but not for long. I follow the development of the phrasing." "I see nothing: I am given up wholly to my impressions. I believe that the chief effect of music is to heighten in everyone the predominating feelings."

Those who possess little musical culture, and especially those having little taste for music, have very clear visual representations. It must nevertheless be admitted that it is very hard to investigate these people. Because of their anti-musical natures, they avoid concerts, or at the most, resign themselves to sit through an opera. However, since the nature and quality of the music does not matter here, we may quote: "Hearing a Barbary organ in the street, I picture the instrument to myself. I see the man turning the crank. If military music sounds from afar, I see a regiment marching." An excellent pianist plays for a friend Beethoven's sonata in C sharp minor, putting into its execution all the pathos of which he is capable. The other sees in it "the tumult and excitement of a fair." Here the musical rendering is misinterpreted through misapprehension. I have several times noted this—in people familiar with design or painting, music calls up pictures and various scenes; one of these persons says that he is "besieged by visual images." Here the hearing of music evidently acts as excitant.[98]

In a word, insofar as it is permissible in psychology to make use of general formulas—and with the proviso that they apply to most, not to all cases—we may say that during the working of the musical imagination the appearance of visual images is the exception; that when this form of imagination is weak, the appearance of images is the rule.

Furthermore, this result of observation is altogether in accord with logic. There is an irreducible antithesis between affective imagination, the characteristic of which is interiority, and visual imagination, basically objective. Intellectual language—speech—is an arrangement of words that stand for objects, qualities, relations, extracts of things: in order to be understood they must call up in consciousness the corresponding images. Emotional language—music—is an appropriate ordering of successive or simultaneous sounds, of melodies and harmonies that are signs of affective states: in order to be understood, they must call up in consciousness the corresponding affective modifications. But, in the non-musically inclined, the evocative power is small—sonorous combinations excite only superficial and unstable internal states. The exterior excitation, that of the sounds, follows the line of least resistance, and acting according to the psychic nature of the individual, tends to arouse objective images, pictures, visual representations, well or ill adapted.

To sum up: In contrast to sensorial imagination, which has its origin without, affective imagination begins within. The stuff of its creation is found in the mental states enumerated above, and in their innumerable combinations, which it expresses and fixes in language peculiar to itself, of which it has been able to make wonderful use. Taking it altogether, the only great division possible between the different types of imagination is perhaps reducible to this: To speak more exactly, there are exterior and interior imaginations. These two chapters have given a sketch of them. There now remains for us to study the less general forms of the creative power.

FOOTNOTES:

[86] See Appendix E.

[87] Let us cite merely the case of Balzac who, says one of his biographers, "was always odd." He buys a property, in order to start a dairy there with "the best cows in the world," from which he expects to receive a net income of 3,000 francs. In addition, high-grade vegetable gardens, same income; vineyard, with Malaga plants, which should bring about 2,000 fr. He has the commune of Sevres deed over to him a walnut tree, worth annually 2,000 francs to him, because all the townspeople dump their rubbish there. And so on, until at the end of four years he sees himself obliged to sell his domain for 3,000 francs, after spending on it thrice that sum.

[88] Usener, Goetternamen, 1896.

[89] Nouveaux Essais de critique, p. 320.

[90] Or, as it has been expressed, "human qualities raised to their highest power." (Tr.)

[91] The same statement holds good as regards the "Temptations of Saint Anthony" and other analogous subjects that have often attracted painters.

[92] R. Dubois, Lecons de physiologie generale et comparee, p. 286.

[93] Von Baer, in James, Psychology, I, 639.

[94] Psychology of the Emotions, Part I, Chapter IX.

[95] Arreat, Memoire et Imagination, p. 118.

[96] Mendelssohn wrote to an author who composed verses for his Lieder: "Music is more definite than speech, and to want to explain it by means of words is to make the meaning obscure. I do not think that words suffice for that end, and were I persuaded to the contrary, I would not compose music. There are people who accuse music of being ambiguous, who allege that words are always understood: for me it is just the other way; words seem to me vague, ambiguous, unintelligible, if we compare them to the true music that fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. What the music that I like expresses to me seems to me too definite, rather than too indefinite, for anyone to be able to match words to it."

[97] Oelzelt-Newin, op. cit., pp. 22-23. For analogous facts from contemporary musicians, see Paulhan, Rev. Phil., 1898, pp. 234-35.

[98] For the sake of brevity and clearness I do not give here the observations and evidence. They will be found at the end of this work, as Appendix D.

Under the title "An experimental test of musical expressiveness," Gilman, in American Journal of Psychology, vol. IV, No. 4, and vol. V, No. 1 (1892-3), has studied from another point of view the effect of music on various listeners. Eleven selections were given; I note that three or four at the most excited visual images—ten (perhaps eleven), emotional states. More recently, the Psychological Review (September, 1898, pp. 463 ff.) has published a personal observation of Macdougal in which sight-images accompany the hearing of music only exceptionally and under special conditions. The author characterizes himself as a "poor visualizer;" he declares that music arouses in him only very rarely visual representations; "even then they are fragmentary, consisting of simple forms without bond between them, appearing on a dark background, remaining visible for a moment or two, and soon disappearing." But, having gone to the concert fatigued and jaded, he sees nothing during the first number: the visions begin during the andante of the second, and accompany "in profusion" the rendering of the third. (See Appendix D.) May we not assume that the state of fatigue, by lowering the vital tone, which is the basis of the emotional life, likewise diminishes the tendency of affective dispositions to arise again under the form of memory? On the other hand, sensory images remain without opposition and come to the front; at least, unless they are reenforced by a state of semi-morbid excitation.



CHAPTER III.

THE MYSTIC IMAGINATION

Mystic imagination deserves a place of honor, as it is the most complete and most daring of purely theoretic invention. Related to diffluent imagination, especially in the latter's affective form, it has its own special characters, which we shall try to separate out.

Mysticism rests essentially on two modes of mental life—feeling, which we need not study; and imagination, which, in the present instance, represents the intellectual factor. Whether the part of consciousness that this state of mind requires and permits be imaginative in nature and nothing else it is easy to find out. Indeed, the mystic considers the data of sense as vain appearances, or at the most as signs revealing and frequently laying bare the world of reality. He therefore finds no solid support in perception. On the other hand, he scorns reasoned thought, looking upon it as a cripple, halting half-way. He makes neither deductions nor inductions, and does not draw conclusions after the method of scientific hypotheses. The conclusion, then, is that he imagines, i.e., that he realizes a construction in images that is for him knowledge of the world; and he never proceeds, and does not proceed here, save ex analogia hominis.

I

The root of the mystic imagination consists of a tendency to incarnate the ideal in the sensible, to discover a hidden "idea" in every material phenomenon or occurrence, to suppose in things a supranatural principle that reveals itself to whoever may penetrate to it. Its fundamental character, from which the others are derived, is thus a way of thinking symbolically; but the algebraist also thinks by means of symbols, yet is not on that account a mystic. The nature of this symbolism must, then, be determined.

In doing so, let us note first of all that our images—understanding the word "image" in its broadest sense—may be divided into two distinct groups:

(1) Concrete images, earliest to be received, being representations of greatest power, residues of our perceptions, with which they have a direct and immediate relation.

(2) Symbolic images, or signs, of secondary acquirement, being representations of lesser power, having only indirect and mediate relations with things.

Let us make the differences between the two clear by a few simple examples.

Concrete images are: In the visual sphere, the recollection of faces, monuments, landscapes, etc.; in the auditory sphere, the remembrance of the sounds of the sea, wind, the human voice, a melody, etc.; in the motor sphere, the tossings one feels when resting after having been at sea, the illusions of those who have had limbs amputated, etc.

Symbolic images are: In the visual order, written words, ideographic signs, etc.; in the auditory order, spoken words or verbal images; in the motor order, significant gestures, and even better, the finger-language of deaf-mutes.

Psychologically, these two groups are not identical in nature. Concrete images result from a persistence of perceptions and draw from the latter all their validity; symbolic images result from a mental synthesis, from an association of perception and image, or of image and image. If they have not the same origin, no more do they disappear in the same way, as is proven by very numerous examples of aphasia.

The originality of mystic imagination is found in this fact: It transforms concrete images into symbolic images, and uses them as such. It extends this process even to perceptions, so that all manifestations of nature or of human art take on a value as signs or symbols. We shall later find numerous examples of this. Its mode of expression is necessarily synthetic. In itself, and because of the materials that it makes use of, it differs from the affective imagination previously described; it also differs from sensuous imagination, which makes use of forms, movements, colors, as having a value of their own; and from the imagination developing in the functions of words, through an analytic process. It has thus a rather special mark.

Other characters are related to this one of symbolism, or else are derived from it, viz.:

(1) An external character: the manner of writing and of speaking, the mode of expression, whatever it is. "The dominant style among mystics," says von Hartmann, "is metaphorical in the extreme—now flat and ordinary, more often turgid and emphatic. Excess of imagination betrays itself there, ordinarily, in the thought and in the form in which that is rendered.... A sign of mysticism which it has been believed may often be taken as an essential sign, is obscurity and unintelligibility of language. We find it in almost all those who have written."[99] We might add that even in the plastic arts, symbolists and "decadents" have attempted, as far as possible, methods that merely indicate and suggest or hint instead of giving real, definite objects: which fact makes them inaccessible to the greater number of people.

This characteristic of obscurity is due to two causes. First, mystical imagination is guided by the logic of feeling, which is purely subjective, full of leaps, jerks, and gaps. Again, it makes use of the language of images, especially visual images—a language whose ideal is vagueness, just as the ideal of verbal language is precision. All this can be summed up in a phrase—the subjective character inherent in the symbol. While seeming to speak like everyone else, the mystic uses a personal idiom: things becoming symbols at the pleasure of his fancy, he does not use signs that have a fixed and universally admitted value. It is not surprising if we do not understand him.

(2) An extraordinary abuse of analogy and comparison in their various forms (allegory, parable, etc.)—a natural consequence of a mode of thinking that proceeds by means of symbols, not concepts. It has been said, and rightly, that "the only force that makes the vast field of mysticism fruitful is analogy."[100] Bossuet, a great opponent of mystics, had already remarked: "One of the characteristics of these authors is the pushing of allegories to the extreme limit." With warm imagination, having at their disposal overexcited senses, they are lavish of changes of expressions and figures, hoping thereby to explain the world's mysteries. We know to what inventive labors the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran, and other sacred books have given rise. The distinction between literal and figurative sense, which is boundlessly arbitrary, has given commentators a freedom to imagine equal to that of the myth-creators.

All this is yet very reasonable; but the imagination left to itself stops at no extravagance. After having strained the meaning of expressions, the imaginative mind exercises itself on words and letters. Thus, the cabalists would take the first or the last letters of the words composing a verse, and would form with them a new word which was to reveal the hidden meaning. Again, they would substitute for the letters composing words the numbers that these letters represent in the Hebrew numerical system and form the strangest combinations with them. In the Zohar, all the letters of the alphabet come before God, each one begging to be chosen as the creative element of the universe.

Let us also bring to mind numerical mysticism, different from numerical imagination heretofore studied. Here, number is no longer the means that mind employs in order to soar in time and space; it becomes a symbol and material for fanciful construction. Hence arise those "sacred numbers" teeming in the old oriental religions:—3, symbol of the trinity; 4, symbol of the cosmic elements; 7, representing the moon and the planets, etc.[101] Besides these fantastic meanings, there are more complicated inventions—calculating, from the letters of one's name, the years of life of a sick person, the auspices of a marriage, etc. The Pythagorean philosophy, as Zeller has shown, is the systematic form of this mathematical mysticism, for which numbers are not symbols of quantitative relations, but the very essence of things.

This exaggerated symbolism, which makes the works of mystics so fragile, and which permits the mind to feed only on glimpses, has nevertheless an undeniable source of energy in its enchanting capacity to suggest. Without doubt suggestion exists also in art, but much more weakly, for reasons that we shall indicate.

(3) Another characteristic of mystic imagination is the nature and the great degree of belief accompanying it. We already know[102] that when an image enters consciousness, even in the form of a recollection, of a purely passive reproduction, it appears at first, and for a moment, just as real as a percept. Much more so, in the case of imaginative constructions. But this illusion has degrees, and with mystics it attains its maximum.

In the scientific and practical world, the work of the imagination is accompanied by only a conditional and provisional belief. The construction in images must justify its existence, in the case of the scientist, by explaining; and in the case of the man of affairs, by being embodied in an invention that is useful and answers its purpose.

In the esthetic field, creation is accompanied by a momentary belief. Fancy, remarks Groos, is necessarily joined to appearance. Its special character does not consist merely in freedom in images; what distinguishes it from association and from memory is this—that what is merely representative is taken for the reality. The creative artist has a conscious illusion (bewusste Selbsttaeuschung): the esthetic pleasure is an oscillation between the appearance and the reality.[103]

Mystic imagination presupposes an unconditioned and permanent belief. Mystics are believers in the true sense—they have faith. This character is peculiar to them, and has its origin in the intensity of the affective state that excites and supports this form of invention. Intuition becomes an object of knowledge only when clothed in images. There has been much dispute as to the objective value of those symbolic forms that are the working material of the mystic imagination. This contest does not concern us here; but we may make the positive statement that the constructive imagination has never obtained such a frequently hallucinatory form as in the mystics. Visions, touch-illusions, external voices, inner and "wordless" voices, which we now regard as psycho-motor hallucinations—all that we meet every moment in their works, until they become commonplace. But as to the nature of these psychic states there are only two solutions possible—one, naturalistic, that we shall indicate; the other, supernatural, which most theologians hold, and which regards these phenomena as valid and true revelation. In either case, the mystic imagination seems to us naturally tending toward objectification. It tends outwardly, by a spontaneous movement that places it on the same level as reality. Whichever conclusion we adopt, no imaginative type has the same great gift of energy and permanence in belief.

II

Mystic imagination, working along the lines peculiar to it, produces cosmological, religious, and metaphysical constructions, a summary exposition of which will help us understand its true nature.

(1) The all-embracing cosmological form is the conception of the world by a purely imaginative being. It is rare, abnormal, and is nowadays met with only in a few artists, dreamers, or morbidly esthetic persons, as a kind of survival and temporary form. Thus, Victor Hugo sees in each letter of the alphabet the pictured imitation of one of the objects essential to human knowledge: "A is the head, the gable, the cross-beam, the arch, arx; D is the back, dos; E is the basement, the console, etc., so that man's house and its architecture, man's body and its structure, and then justice, music, the church, war, harvesting, geometry, mountains, etc.—all that is comprised in the alphabet through the mystic virtue of form."[104] Even more radical is Gerard de Nerval (who, moreover, was frequently subject to hallucinations): "At certain times everything takes on for me a new aspect—secret voices come out of plant, tree, animals, from the humblest insects, to caution and encourage me. Formless and lifeless objects have mysterious turns the meaning of which I understand." To others, contemporaries, "the real world is a fairy land."

The middle ages—a period of lively imagination and slight rational culture—overflowed in this direction. "Many thought that on this earth everything is a sign, a figure, and that the visible is worth nothing except insofar as it covers up the invisible." Plants, animals—there is nothing that does not become subject for interpretation; all the members of the body are emblems; the head is Christ, the hairs are the saints, the legs are the apostles, the eye is contemplation, etc. There are extant special books in which all that is seriously explained. Who does not know the symbolism of the cathedrals, and the vagaries to which it has given rise? The towers are prayer, the columns the apostles, the stones and the mortar the assembly of the faithful; the windows are the organs of sense, the buttresses and abutments are the divine assistance; and so on to the minutest detail.

In our day of intense intellectual development, it is not given to many to return sincerely to a mental condition that recalls that of the earliest times. Even if we come near it, we still find a difference. Primitive man puts life, consciousness, activity, into everything; symbolism does likewise, but it does not believe in an autonomous, distinct, particular soul inherent in each thing. The absence of abstraction and generalization, characteristic of humanity in its early beginnings, when it peoples the world with myriads of animate beings, has disappeared. Every source of activity revealed by symbols appears as a fragmentary manifestation; it descends from a single primary, personal or impersonal, spring. At the root of this imaginative construction there is always either theism or pantheism.

(2) Mystical imagination has often and erroneously been identified with religious imagination. Although it may be held that every religion, no matter how dull and poor, presupposes a latent mysticism, because it supposes an Unknown beyond the reach of sense, there are religions very slightly mystical in fact—those of savages, strictly utilitarian; among barbarians, the martial cults of the Germans and the Aztecs; among civilized races, Rome and Greece.[105] However, even though the mystic imagination is not confined to the bounds of religious thought, history shows us that there it attains its completest expansion.

To be brief, and to keep strictly within our subject, let us note that in the completely developed great religions there has arisen opposition between the rationalists and the imaginative expounders, between the dogmatists and the mystics. The former, rational architects, build by means of abstract ideas, logical relations and methods, by deduction and induction; the others, imaginative builders, care little for this learned magnificence—they excel in vivid creations because the moving energy with them is in their feelings, "in their hearts;" because they speak a language made up of concrete images, and consequently their wholly symbolic speech is at the same time an original construction. The mystic imagination is a transformation of the mythic imagination, the myth changing into symbols. It cannot escape the necessity of this. On the other hand, the affective states cannot longer remain vague, diffuse, purely internal; they must become fixed in time and space, and condensed into images forming a personality, legend, event, or rite. Thus, Buddha represents the tendencies towards pity and resignation, summing up the aspirations for final rest. On the other hand, abstract ideas, pure concepts, being repugnant to the mystic's nature, it is also necessary that they take on images through which they may be seen—e.g., the relations between God and man, in the various forms of communion; the idea of divine protection in incarnations, mediators, etc. But the images made use of are not dry and colorless like words that by long use have lost all direct representative value and are merely marks or tags. Being symbolic, i.e., concrete, they are, as we have seen, direct substitutes for reality, and they differ as much from words as sketching and drawing differ from our alphabetical signs, which are, however, their derivatives or abbreviations.

It must, however, be noted that if "the mystic fact is a naive effort to apprehend the absolute, a mode of symbolic, not dialectic, thinking, that lives on symbols and finds in them the only fitting expression,"[106] it seems that this imaginative phase has been to some minds only an internal form, for they have attempted to go beyond it through ecstacy, aspiring to grasp the ultimate principle as a pure unity, without image and without form,[107] which metaphysical realism hopes to attain by other methods and by a different route. However interesting they may be for psychology, these attempts, luring one on further and further, by their seeming or real elimination of every symbolic element, become foreign to our subject, and we cannot consider them at greater length here.

(3) "History shows that philosophy has done nothing but transform ideas of mystic production, substituting for the form of images and undemonstrated statements the form of assertions of a rational system."[108] This declaration of a metaphysician saves us from dwelling on the subject long.

When we seek the difference between religious and metaphysical or philosophical symbolism, we find it in the nature of the constitutive elements. Turned in the direction of religion, mystic symbolism presupposes two principal elements—imagination and feeling; turned in a metaphysical direction, it presupposes imagination and a very small rational element. This substitution involves appreciable deviation from the primitive type. The construction is of greater logical regularity. Besides, and this is the important characteristic, the subject-matter—though still resembling symbolic images—tends to become concepts: such are vivified abstractions, allegorical beings, hereditary entities of spirits and of gods. In short, metaphysical mysticism is a transition-form towards metaphysical rationalism, although these two tendencies have always been inimical in the history of philosophy, just as in the history of religion.

In this imaginative plan of the world we may recognize stages according to the increasing weakness of the systems, depending on the number and quality of the hypotheses. For example, the progression is apparent between Plotinus and the frenzied creations of the Gnostics and the Cabalists. With the latter, we come into a world of unbridled fancy which, in place of human romances, invents cosmic romances. Here appear the allegorical beings mentioned above, half concept, half symbol; the ten Sephiros of the Cabala, immutable forms of being; the syzygies or couples of Gnosticism—soul and reflection, depth and silence, reason and life, inspiration and truth, etc.; the absolute manifesting itself by the unfolding of fifty-two attributes, each unfolding comprising seven eons, corresponding to the 364 days of the year, etc. It would be wearisome to follow these extravagant thoughts, which, though the learned may treat them with some respect, have for the psychologist only the interest of pathologic evidence. Moreover, this form of mystic imagination presents too little that is new for us to speak of it without repeating ourselves.

To conclude: The mystic imagination, in its alluring freedom, its variety, and its richness, is second to no form, not even to esthetic invention, which, according to common prejudice, is the type par excellence. Following the most venturesome methods of analogy, it has constructed conceptions of the world made up almost wholly of feelings and images—symbolic architectures.

FOOTNOTES:

[99] Philosophy of the Unconscious, I, part 2, ch. IX.

[100] J. Darmesteter, in Recejac, Essai sur les fondements de la connaissance mystique, p. 124.

[101] In such notions may perhaps be best found the genesis of the present superstitions in regard to "lucky" and "unlucky" numbers, like the number 13, which have such persistence. (Tr.)

[102] See Part Two, chapter II.

[103] Groos, Die Spiele der Thiere, pp. 308-312.

[104] Mabilleau, op. cit., p. 132.

[105] If we leave out oriental influences and the Mysteries, which, according to Aristotle, were not dogmatic teaching, but a show, an assemblage of symbols, acting by evocation, or suggestion, following the special mode of mystic imagination that we already know.

[106] Recejac, op. cit., pp. 139 ff.

[107] One at once calls to mind Plotinus, whose highest philosophy is a kind of indescribable ecstacy. (Tr.)

[108] Hartmann, op. cit., vol. I, part 2, chapter IX.



CHAPTER IV

THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGINATION

It is quite generally recognized that imagination is indispensable in all sciences; that without it we could only copy, repeat, imitate; that it is a stimulus driving us onward and launching us into the unknown. If there does exist a very widespread prejudice to the contrary—if many hold that scientific culture throttles imagination—we must look for the explanation of this view first, in the equivocation, pointed out several times, that makes the essence of the creative imagination consist of images, which are here most often replaced by abstractions or extracts of things—whence it results that the created work does not have the living forms of religion, of art, or even of mechanical invention; and then, in the rational requirements regulating the development of the creative faculty—it may not wander at will. In either case its end is determined, and in order to exist, i.e., in order to be accepted, the invention must become subject to preestablished rules.

This variety of imagination being, after the esthetic form, the one that psychologists have best described, we may therefore be brief. A complete study of the subject, however, remains yet to be made. Indeed, we may remark that there is no "scientific imagination" in general, that its form must vary according to the nature of the science, and that, consequently, it really resolves itself into a certain number of genera and even of species. Whence arises the need of monographs, each one of which should be the work of a competent man.

No one will question that mathematicians have a way of thinking all their own; but even this is too general. The arithmetician, the algebraist, and more generally the analyst, in whom invention obtains in the most abstract form of discontinuous functions—symbols and their relations—cannot imagine like the geometrician. One may well speak of the ideal figures of geometry—the empirical origin of which is no longer anywhere contested—but we cannot escape from representing them as somehow in space. Does anyone think that Monge, the creator of descriptive geometry, who by his work has aided builders, architects, mechanics, stone cutters in their labors, could have the same type of imagination as the mathematician who has been given up all his life to the theory of number? Here, then, are at least two well-marked varieties, to say nothing of mixed forms. The physicist's imagination is necessarily more concrete; since he is incessantly obliged to refer to the data of sense or to that totality of visual, tactile, motor, acoustic, thermic, etc., representations that we term the "properties of matter." Our eye, says Tyndall, cannot see sound waves contract and dilate, but we construct them in thought—i.e., by means of visual images. The same remarks are true of chemists. The founders of the atomic theory certainly saw atoms, and pictured them in the mind's eye, and their arrangement in compound bodies. The complexity of the imagination increases still more in the geologist, the botanist, the zoologist; it approaches more and more, with its increasing details, to the level of perception. The physician, in whom science becomes also an art, has need of visual representations of the exterior and interior, microscopic and macroscopic, of the various forms of diseased conditions; auditory representations (auscultation); tactile representations (touch, reverberation, etc.); and let us also add that we are not speaking merely of diagnosis of diseases, which is a matter of reproductive imagination, but of the discovery of a new pathologic "entity," proven and made certain from the symptoms. Lastly, if we do not hesitate to give a very broad extension to the term "scientific," and apply it also to invention in social matters, we shall see that the latter is still more exacting, for one must represent to oneself not only the elements of the past and of the present, but in addition construct a picture of the future according to probable inductions and deductions.

It might be objected that the foregoing enumeration proves a great variety in the content of creative imagination but not in the imagination itself, and that nothing has proven that, under all these various aspects, there does not exist a so-called scientific imagination, that always remains identical. This position is untenable. For we have seen above[109] that there exists no creative instinct in general, no one mere indeterminate "creative power," but only wants that, in certain cases, excite novel combinations of images. The nature of the separable materials, then, is a factor of the first importance; it is determining, and indicates to the mind the direction in which it is turned, and all treason in this regard is paid for by aborted construction, by painful labor for some petty result. Invention, separated from what gives it body and soul, is nothing but a pure abstraction.

The monographs called for above would, then, be a not unneeded work. It is only from them collectively that the role of the imagination in the sciences could be completely shown, and we might by abstraction separate out the characters common to all varieties—the essential marks of this imaginative type.

Mathematics aside, all the sciences dealing with facts—from astronomy to sociology—suppose three moments, namely, observation, conjecture, verification. The first depends on external and internal sense, the second on the creative imagination, the third on rational operations, although the imagination is not entirely barred from it. In order to study its influence on scientific development, we shall study it (a) in the sciences in process of formation; (b) in the established sciences; (c) in the processes of verification.

II

It has often been said that the perfection of a science is measured by the amount of mathematics it requires; we might say, conversely, that its lack of completeness is measured by the amount of imagination that it includes. It is a psychological necessity. Where the human mind cannot explain or prove, there it invents; preferring a semblance of knowledge to its total absence.[110] Imagination fulfills the function of a substitute; it furnishes a subjective, conjectural solution in place of an objective, rational explanation. This substitution has degrees:

(1) The sway of the imagination is almost complete in the pseudo-sciences (alchemy, astrology, magic, occultism, etc.), which it would be more proper to call embryonic sciences, for they were the beginnings of more exact disciplines and their fancies have not been without use. In the history of science, this is the golden age of the creative imagination, corresponding to the myth-making period already studied.

(2) The semi-sciences, incompletely proved (certain portions of biology, psychology, sociology, etc.), although they show a regression of imaginative explanation repulsed by the hitherto absent or insufficient experimentation, nevertheless abound in hypotheses, that succeed, contradict, destroy one another. It is a commonplace truism that does not need to be dwelt on—they furnish ad libitum examples of what has been rightly termed scientific mythology.

Aside from the quantity of imagination expended, often without great profit, there is another character to be noted—the nature of the belief that accompanies imaginative creation. We have already seen repeatedly that the intensity of the imaginary conception is in direct ratio to the accompanying belief, or rather, that the two phenomena are really one—merely the two aspects of one and the same state of consciousness. But faith—i.e., the adherence of the mind to an undemonstrated assertion—is here at its maximum.

There are in the sciences hypotheses that are not believed in, that are preserved for their didactic usefulness, because they furnish a simple and convenient method of explanation. Thus the "properties of matter" (heat, electricity, magnetism, etc.), regarded by physicists as distinct qualities even in the first half of the last century; the "two electric fluids;" cohesion, affinity, etc., in chemistry—these are some of the convenient and admitted expressions to which, however, we attach no explanatory value.

There is also to be mentioned the hypothesis held as an approximation of reality—this is the truly scientific position. It is accompanied by a provisional and ever-revocable belief. This is admitted, in principle at least, by all scientists, and has been put into practice by many of them.

Lastly, there is the hypothesis regarded as the truth itself—one that is accompanied by a complete, absolute, belief. But daily observation and history show us that in the realm of embryonic and ill-proven sciences this disposition is more flourishing than anywhere else. The less proof there is, the more we believe. This attitude, however wrong from the standpoint of the logician, seems to the psychologist natural. The mind clings tenaciously to the hypothesis because the latter is its own creation, or, because in adopting it, it seems to the mind that it should have itself discovered the hypothesis, so much does the latter harmonize with its inner states. Let us take the hypothesis of evolution, for example: we need not mention its high philosophical bearing, and the immense influence that it exerts on almost all forms of human thought. Nevertheless, it still remains an hypothesis; but for many it is an indisputable and inviolable dogma, raised far above all controversy. They accept it with the uncompromising fervor of believers: a new proof of the underlying connection between imagination and belief—they increase and decrease pari passu.

III

Should we assign as belonging solely to the imagination every invention or discovery—in a word, whatever is new—in the well-organized sciences that form a body of solid, constantly-broadening doctrine? It is a hard question. That which raises scientific knowledge above popular knowledge is the use of an experimental method and rigorous reasoning processes; but, is not induction and deduction going from the known to the unknown? Without desiring to depreciate the method and its value, it must nevertheless be admitted that it is preventive, not inventive. It resembles, says Condillac, the parapets of a bridge, which do not help the traveler to walk, but keep him from falling over. It is of value especially as a habit of mind. People have wisely discoursed on the "methods" of invention. There are none; but for which fact we could manufacture inventors just as we make mechanics and watchmakers. It is the imagination that invents, that provides the rational faculties with their materials, with the position, and even the solution of their problems. Reasoning is only a means for control and proof; it transforms the work of the imagination into acceptable, logical results. If one has not imagined beforehand, the logical method is aimless and useless, for we cannot reason concerning the completely unknown. Even when a problem seems to advance towards solution wholly through the reason, the imagination ceaselessly intervenes in the form of a succession of groupings, trials, guesses, and possibilities that it proposes. The function of method is to determine its value, to accept or reject it.[111]