Let us also bring to mind numerical mysticism, different from numerical imagination heretofore studied. Here, number is no longer the means that mind employs in order to soar in time and space; it becomes a symbol and material for fanciful construction. Hence arise those "sacred numbers" teeming in the old oriental religions:—3, symbol of the trinity; 4, symbol of the cosmic elements; 7, representing the moon and the planets, etc.[101] Besides these fantastic meanings, there are more complicated inventions—calculating, from the letters of one's name, the years of life of a sick person, the auspices of a marriage, etc. The Pythagorean philosophy, as Zeller has shown, is the systematic form of this mathematical mysticism, for which numbers are not symbols of quantitative relations, but the very essence of things.
This exaggerated symbolism, which makes the works of mystics so fragile, and which permits the mind to feed only on glimpses, has nevertheless an undeniable source of energy in its enchanting capacity to suggest. Without doubt suggestion exists also in art, but much more weakly, for reasons that we shall indicate.
(3) Another characteristic of mystic imagination is the nature and the great degree of belief accompanying it. We already know[102] that when an image enters consciousness, even in the form of a recollection, of a purely passive reproduction, it appears at first, and for a moment, just as real as a percept. Much more so, in the case of imaginative constructions. But this illusion has degrees, and with mystics it attains its maximum.
In the scientific and practical world, the work of the imagination is accompanied by only a conditional and provisional belief. The construction in images must justify its existence, in the case of the scientist, by explaining; and in the case of the man of affairs, by being embodied in an invention that is useful and answers its purpose.
In the esthetic field, creation is accompanied by a momentary belief. Fancy, remarks Groos, is necessarily joined to appearance. Its special character does not consist merely in freedom in images; what distinguishes it from association and from memory is this—that what is merely representative is taken for the reality. The creative artist has a conscious illusion (bewusste Selbsttäuschung): the esthetic pleasure is an oscillation between the appearance and the reality.[103]
Mystic imagination presupposes an unconditioned and permanent belief. Mystics are believers in the true sense—they have faith. This character is peculiar to them, and has its origin in the intensity of the affective state that excites and supports this form of invention. Intuition becomes an object of knowledge only when clothed in images. There has been much dispute as to the objective value of those symbolic forms that are the working material of the mystic imagination. This contest does not concern us here; but we may make the positive statement that the constructive imagination has never obtained such a frequently hallucinatory form as in the mystics. Visions, touch-illusions, external voices, inner and "wordless" voices, which we now regard as psycho-motor hallucinations—all that we meet every moment in their works, until they become commonplace. But as to the nature of these psychic states there are only two solutions possible—one, naturalistic, that we shall indicate; the other, supernatural, which most theologians hold, and which regards these phenomena as valid and true revelation. In either case, the mystic imagination seems to us naturally tending toward objectification. It tends outwardly, by a spontaneous movement that places it on the same level as reality. Whichever conclusion we adopt, no imaginative type has the same great gift of energy and permanence in belief.
II
Mystic imagination, working along the lines peculiar to it, produces cosmological, religious, and metaphysical constructions, a summary exposition of which will help us understand its true nature.
(1) The all-embracing cosmological form is the conception of the world by a purely imaginative being. It is rare, abnormal, and is nowadays met with only in a few artists, dreamers, or morbidly esthetic persons, as a kind of survival and temporary form. Thus, Victor Hugo sees in each letter of the alphabet the pictured imitation of one of the objects essential to human knowledge: "A is the head, the gable, the cross-beam, the arch, arx; D is the back, dos; E is the basement, the console, etc., so that man's house and its architecture, man's body and its structure, and then justice, music, the church, war, harvesting, geometry, mountains, etc.—all that is comprised in the alphabet through the mystic virtue of form."[104] Even more radical is Gérard de Nerval (who, moreover, was frequently subject to hallucinations): "At certain times everything takes on for me a new aspect—secret voices come out of plant, tree, animals, from the humblest insects, to caution and encourage me. Formless and lifeless objects have mysterious turns the meaning of which I understand." To others, contemporaries, "the real world is a fairy land."
The middle ages—a period of lively imagination and slight rational culture—overflowed in this direction. "Many thought that on this earth everything is a sign, a figure, and that the visible is worth nothing except insofar as it covers up the invisible." Plants, animals—there is nothing that does not become subject for interpretation; all the members of the body are emblems; the head is Christ, the hairs are the saints, the legs are the apostles, the eye is contemplation, etc. There are extant special books in which all that is seriously explained. Who does not know the symbolism of the cathedrals, and the vagaries to which it has given rise? The towers are prayer, the columns the apostles, the stones and the mortar the assembly of the faithful; the windows are the organs of sense, the buttresses and abutments are the divine assistance; and so on to the minutest detail.