One, subjective, having no reality except in consciousness, for the one experiencing it, its reality being due only to belief, to that first affirmation of the mind so often described.
The other, objective, existing in consciousness and outside of it, being real not only for me but for all those whose constitution is similar or analogous to mine.
This much borne in mind, let us compare the last two degrees of the development of the imaginative life.
For the imaginer of the third stage, the two forms of existence are not confounded. He distinguishes _two_ worlds, preferring one and making the best of the other, but believing in both. He is conscious of passing from one to the other. There is an alternation. The observation of Féré, although extreme, is a proof of this.
At the fourth stage, in the insane, imaginative labor--the only kind with which we are concerned--is so systematized that the distinction between the two kinds of existence has disappeared. All the phantoms of his brain are invested with objective reality. Occurrences without, even the most extraordinary, do not reach one in this stage, or else are interpreted in accordance with the diseased fancy. There is no longer any alternation.[154]
By way of summary we may say: The creative imagination consists of the property that images have of gathering in new combinations, through the effect of a spontaneity whose nature we have attempted to describe. It always tends to realize itself in degrees that vary from mere momentary belief to complete objectivity. Throughout its multiple manifestations, it remains identical with itself in its basic nature, in its constitutive elements. The diversity of its deeds depends on the end desired, the conditions required for its attainment, materials employed which, as we have seen, under the collective name "representations" are very unlike one another, not only as regards their sensuous origin (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) but also as regards their psychologic nature (concrete, symbolic, affective, emotional-abstract images; generic and schematic images, concepts--each group itself having shades or degrees).
This constructive activity, applying itself to everything and radiating in all directions, is in its early, typical form a mythic creation. It is an invincible need of man to reflect and reproduce his own nature in the world surrounding him. The first application of his mind is thinking by analogy, which vivifies everything after the human model and attempts to know everything according to arbitrary resemblances. Myth-making activity, which we have studied in the child and in primitive man, is the embryonic form whence arise by a slow evolution religious creations--gross or refined; esthetic development, which is a fallen, impoverished mythology; the fantastic conceptions of the world that may little by little become scientific conceptions, with, however, an irreducible residuum of hypotheses. Alongside of these creations, all bordering upon what we have called the fixed form, there are practical, objective creations. As for the latter, we could not trace them to the same mythic source except by dialectic subtleties which we renounce. The former arise from an internal efflorescence; the latter from urgent life-needs; they appear later and are a bifurcation of the early trunk: but the same sap flows in both branches.