This vague and "outline" imagination, penetrating our entire life, has its peculiar characters—the unifying principle is nil or ephemeral, which fact always reduces it to the dream as a type; it does not externalize itself, does not change into acts, a consequence of its basically chimerical nature or of weakness of will, which reduces it to a strictly internal and individual existence. It is needless to say that this kind of imagination is a permanent and definite form with the dreamers living in a world of ceaselessly reappearing images, having no power to organize them, to change them into a work of art, a theory, or a useful invention.
The "sketched" form is or remains an elementary, primitive, automatic form. Conformably to the general law ruling the development of mind—passage from indefinite to definite, from the incoherent to the coherent, from spontaneity to reflection, from the reflex to the voluntary period—the imagination comes out of its swaddling-clothes, is changed—through the intervention of a teleological act that assigns it an end; through the union of rational elements that subdue it for an adaptation. Then appear the other two forms.
(b) The fixed form comprises mythic and esthetic creations, philosophical and scientific hypotheses. While the "outline" imagination remains an internal phenomenon, existing only in and for a single individual, the fixed form is projected outwards, made something else. The former has no reality other than the momentary belief accompanying it; the latter exists by itself, for its creator and for others; the work is accepted, rejected, examined, criticised. Fiction rests on the same level as reality. Do not people discuss seriously the objective value of certain myths, and of metaphysical theories? the action of a novel or drama as though it were a matter of real events? the character of the dramatis personae as though they were living flesh and blood?
The fixed imagination moves in an elastic frame. The material elements circumscribing it and composing it have a certain fluidity; they are language, writing, musical sounds, colors, forms, lines. Furthermore, we know that its creations, in spite of the spontaneous adherence of the mind accepting them, are the work of a free will; they could have been otherwise—they preserve an indelible imprint of contingency and subjectivity.
(c) This last mark is rubbed out without disappearing (for a thing imagined is always a personal thing) in the objectified form that comprises successful practical inventions—whether mechanical, industrial, commercial, military, social, or political. These have no longer an arbitrary, borrowed reality; they have their place in the totality of physical and social phenomena. They resemble creations of nature, subject like them to fixed conditions of existence and to a limited determinism. We shall not dwell longer on this last character, so often pointed out.
In order the better to comprehend the distinction between the three forms of imagination let us borrow for a moment the terminology of spiritualism or of the common dualism—merely as a means of explaining the matter clearly. The "outline" imagination is a soul without a body, a pure spirit, without determination in space. The "fixed" imagination is a soul or spirit surrounded by an almost immaterial sheath, like angels or demons, genii, shadows, the "double" of savages, the peresprit of spiritualists, etc. The objectified imagination is soul and body, a complete organization after the pattern of living people; the ideal is incarnated, but it must undergo transformation, reductions and adaptations, in order that it may become practical—just as the soul, according to spiritualism, must bend to the necessities of the body, to be at the same time the servant of, and served by, the bodily organs.
According to general opinion the great imaginers are found only in the first two classes, which is, in the strict sense of the word, true; in the full sense of the word false. As long as it remains "outline," or even "fixed," the constructive imagination can reign as supreme mistress. Objectified, it still rules, but shares its power with competitors; it avails nought without them, they can do nothing without it. What deceives us is the fact that we see it no longer in the open. Here the imaginative stroke resembles those powerful streams of water that must be imprisoned in a complicated network of canals and ramifications varying in shape and in diameter before bursting forth in multiple jets and in liquid architecture.[148]
II
The Imaginative Type.
Let us try now, by way of conclusion, to present to the reader a picture of the whole of the imaginative life in all its degrees.