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.
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.
CHAPTER V. 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.
Its internal and external conditions.—Two classes of creators—the cautious, the daring.—The initial moment of invention.—The importance of the intuitive mind.—Hypotheses in regard to its psychologic nature.—Its development: the creation of increasingly more simple processes of substitution.—Characters in common with the forms of creation already studied.—Characters peculiar to it—the combining imagination of the tactician; it is a form of war.—Creative intoxication.—Exclusive use of schematic representations.—Remarks on the various types of images.—The creators of great financial systems.—Brief remarks on the military imagination.
Successive appearances of ideal conceptions.—Creators in ethics and in the social realm.—Chimerical forms. Social novelists.—Ch. Fourrier, type of the great imaginer.—Practical invention—the collective ideal.—Imaginative regression.
Why man is able to create: two principal conditions.—"Creative spontaneity," which resolves itself into needs, tendencies, desires.—Every imaginative creation has a motor origin.—The spontaneous revival of images.—The creative imagination reduced to three forms: outlined, fixed, objectified. Their peculiar characteristics.
A view of the imaginative life in all its stages.—Reduction to a psychologic law.—Four stages characterized: 1, by the quantity of images; 2, by their quantity and intensity; 3, by quantity, intensity and duration; 4, by the complete and permanent systematization of the imaginary life.—Summary.
B. On the nature of the unconscious factor. Two categories—static unconscious, dynamic unconscious.—Theories as to the nature of the unconscious.—Objections, criticisms.
It has been often repeated that one of the principal conquests of contemporary psychology is the fact that it has firmly established the place and importance of movements; that it has especially through observation and experiment shown the representation of a movement to be a movement begun, a movement in the nascent state. Yet those who have most strenuously insisted on this proposition have hardly gone beyond the realm of the passive imagination; they have clung to facts of pure reproduction. My aim is to extend their formula, and to show that it explains, in large measure at least, the origin of the creative imagination.
