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 (AugenblicksgÖtter).[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 naÏve 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 MÂya, 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 rÔle 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.

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 PrÉludes. 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 FreyschÜtz (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.