CHAPTER III.
THE MYSTIC IMAGINATION
Mystic imagination deserves a place of honor, as it is the most complete and most daring of purely theoretic invention. Related to diffluent imagination, especially in the latter's affective form, it has its own special characters, which we shall try to separate out.
Mysticism rests essentially on two modes of mental life—feeling, which we need not study; and imagination, which, in the present instance, represents the intellectual factor. Whether the part of consciousness that this state of mind requires and permits be imaginative in nature and nothing else it is easy to find out. Indeed, the mystic considers the data of sense as vain appearances, or at the most as signs revealing and frequently laying bare the world of reality. He therefore finds no solid support in perception. On the other hand, he scorns reasoned thought, looking upon it as a cripple, halting half-way. He makes neither deductions nor inductions, and does not draw conclusions after the method of scientific hypotheses. The conclusion, then, is that he imagines, i.e., that he realizes a construction in images that is for him knowledge of the world; and he never proceeds, and does not proceed here, save ex analogia hominis.
I
The root of the mystic imagination consists of a tendency to incarnate the ideal in the sensible, to discover a hidden "idea" in every material phenomenon or occurrence, to suppose in things a supranatural principle that reveals itself to whoever may penetrate to it. Its fundamental character, from which the others are derived, is thus a way of thinking symbolically; but the algebraist also thinks by means of symbols, yet is not on that account a mystic. The nature of this symbolism must, then, be determined.
In doing so, let us note first of all that our images—understanding the word "image" in its broadest sense—may be divided into two distinct groups:
(1) Concrete images, earliest to be received, being representations of greatest power, residues of our perceptions, with which they have a direct and immediate relation.
(2) Symbolic images, or signs, of secondary acquirement, being representations of lesser power, having only indirect and mediate relations with things.