Historically considered, in the species, the development of the imagination follows the same line of progress as in the individual. We will not repeat it; it would be mere reiteration in a vaguer form of what we have just said. A few brief notes will suffice.
Vico—whose name deserves to be mentioned here because he was the first to see the good that we can get from myths for the study of the imagination—divided the course of humanity into three successive ages: divine or theocratic, heroic or fabulous, human or historic, after which the cycle begins over again. Although this too hypothetic conception is now forgotten, it is sufficient for our purposes. What, indeed, are those first two stages that have everywhere and always been the harbingers and preparers of civilization, if not the triumphant period of the imagination? It has produced myths, religions, legends, epics and martial narratives, and imposing monuments erected in honor of gods and heroes. Many nations whose evolution has been incomplete have not gone beyond this stage.
Let us now consider this question under a more definite, more limited, better known form—the history of intellectual development in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. It shows very distinctly our three periods.
No one will question the preponderance of the imagination during the middle Ages: intensity of religious feeling, ceaselessly repeated epidemics of superstition; the institution of chivalry, with all its accessories; heroic poetry, chivalric romances; courts of love, efflorescence of Gothic art, the beginning of modern music, etc. On the other hand, the quantity of imagination applied during this epoch to practical, industrial, commercial invention is very small. Their scientific culture, buried in Latin jargon, is made up partly of antique traditions, partly of fancies; what the ten centuries added to positive science is almost nil. Our figure, with its two curves, one imaginative, the other rational, thus applies just as well to historical development as to individual development during this first period.
No more will anyone question that the Renaissance is a critical moment, a transition period, and a transformation analogous to that which we have noted in the individual, when there rises, opposed to imagination, a rival power.
Finally, it will be admitted without dissent that during the modern period social imagination has become partly decayed, partly rationalized, under the influence of two principal factors—one scientific, the other economic. On the one hand the development of science, on the other hand the great maritime discoveries, by stimulating industrial and commercial inventions, have given the imagination a new field of activity. There have arisen points of attraction that have drawn it into other paths, have imposed upon it other forms of creation that have often been neglected or misunderstood and that we shall study in the Third Part.