It makes use of vague images linked according to the least rigorous modes of association. Emotional abstractions; their nature.--Its characteristic of inwardness.--Its principal manifestations: revery, the romantic spirit, the chimerical spirit; myths and religious conceptions, literature and the fine arts (the symbolists), the class of the marvelous and fantastic.--Varieties of the diffluent imagination: first, numerical imagination; its nature; two principal forms, cosmogonic and scientific conceptions; second, musical imagination, the type of the affective imagination. Its characteristics; it does not develop save after an interval of time.--Natural transposition of events in musicians.--Antagonism between true musical imagination and plastic imagination. Inquiry and facts on the subject.--Two great types of imagination. 195
Its elements; its special characteristics.--Thinking symbolically.--Nature of this symbolism.--The mystic changes concrete images into symbolic images.--Their obscurity; whence it arises.--Extraordinary abuse of analogy.--Mystic labor on letters, numbers, etc.--Nature and extent of the belief accompanying this form of imagination: it is unconditional and permanent.--The mystic conception of the world a general symbolism.--Mystic imagination in religion and in metaphysics. 221
It is distinguishable into genera and species.--The need for monographs that have not yet appeared.--The imagination in growing sciences--belief is at its maximum; in the organized sciences--the negative rôle of method.--The conjectural phase; proof of its importance.--Abortive and dethroned hypotheses.--The imagination in the processes of verification.--The metaphysician's imagination arises from the same need as the scientist's.--Metaphysics is a rationalized myth.--Three moments.--Imaginative and rationalist. 236
THE PRACTICAL AND MECHANICAL IMAGINATION.
Indetermination of this imaginative form.--Inferior forms: the industrious, the unstable, the eccentric. Why people of lively imagination are changeable.--Superstitious beliefs. Origin of this form of imagination--its mental mechanism and its elements.--The higher form--mechanical imagination.--Man has expended at least as much imagination there as in esthetic creation.--Why the contrary view prevails.--Resemblances between these two forms of imagination.--Identity of development. Detail observation--four phases.--General characters. This form, at its best, supposes inspiration; periods of preparation, of maturity, and of decline.--Special characters: invention occurs in layers. Principal steps of its development.--It depends strictly on physical conditions.--A phase of pure imagination--mechanical romances. Examples.--Identical nature of the imagination of the mechanic and that of the artist. 256