3. In the teeming mass of myths and religious conceptions that the nineteenth century has gathered with so much care we could establish various classifications—according to race, content, intellectual level; and, in a more artificial manner but one suitable for our subject, according to the degree of precision or fluidity.
Neglecting intermediate forms, we may, indeed, divide them into two groups; some are clear in outline, are consistent, relatively logical, resembling a definite historical relation; others are vague, multiform, incoherent, contradictory; their characters change into one another, the tales are mixed and are imperceptible in the whole.
The former types are the work of the plastic imagination. Such are, if we eliminate oriental influences, most of the myths belonging to Greece when, on emerging from the earliest period, they attained their definite constitution. It has been held that the plastic character of these religious conceptions is an effect of esthetic development: statues, bas-reliefs, poetry, and even painting, have made definite the attributes of the gods and their history. Without denying this influence we must nevertheless understand that it is only auxiliary. To those who would challenge this opinion let us recall that the Hindoos have had gigantic poems, have covered their temples with numberless sculptures, and yet their fluid mythology is the opposite of the Greek. Among the peoples who have incarnated their divinities in no statue, in no human or animal form, we find the Germans and the Celts. But the mythology of the former is clear, well kept within large lines; that of the latter is fleeting and inconsistent—the despair of scholars.[84]
It is, then, certain that myths of the plastic kind are the fruits of an innate quality of mind, of a mode of feeling and of translating, at a given moment in its history, the preponderating characters of a race; in short, of a form of imagination and ultimately of a special cerebral structure.
4. The most complete manifestation of the plastic imagination is met with in mechanical invention and what is allied thereto, in consequence of the need of very exact representations of qualities and relations. But this is a specialized form, and, as its importance has been too often misunderstood, it deserves a separate study. (See Chapter V, infra.)
III
Such are the principal traits of this type of imagination: clearness of outline, both of the whole and of the details. It is not identical with the form called realistic—it is more comprehensive; it is a genus of which "realism" is a species. Moreover, the latter expression being reserved by custom for esthetic creation, I purposely digress in order to dwell on this point: that the esthetic imagination has no essential character belonging exclusively to it, and that it differs from other forms (scientific, mechanical, etc.) only in its materials and in its end, not in its primary nature.
On the whole, the plastic imagination could be summed up in the expression, clearness in complexity. It always preserves the mark of its original source—i.e., in the creator and those disposed to enjoy and understand him it tends to approach the clearness of perception.
Would it be improper to consider as a variety of the genus a mode of representation that could be expressed as clearness in simplicity? It is the dry and rational imagination. Without depreciating it we may say that it is rather a condition of imaginative poverty. We hold with Fouillée that the average Frenchman furnishes a good example of it. "The Frenchman," says he, "does not usually have a very strong imagination. His internal vision has neither the hallucinative intensity nor the exuberant fancy of the German and Anglo-Saxon mind; it is an intellectual and distant view rather than a sensitive resurrection or an immediate contact with, and possession of, the things themselves. Inclined to deduce and construct, our intellect excels less in representing to itself real things than in discovering relations between possible or necessary things. In other words, it is a logical and combining imagination that takes pleasure in what has been termed the abstract view of life. The Chateaubriands, Hugos, Flauberts, Zolas, are exceptional with us. We reason more than we imagine."[85]