In our day of intense intellectual development, it is not given to many to return sincerely to a mental condition that recalls that of the earliest times. Even if we come near it, we still find a difference. Primitive man puts life, consciousness, activity, into everything; symbolism does likewise, but it does not believe in an autonomous, distinct, particular soul inherent in each thing. The absence of abstraction and generalization, characteristic of humanity in its early beginnings, when it peoples the world with myriads of animate beings, has disappeared. Every source of activity revealed by symbols appears as a fragmentary manifestation; it descends from a single primary, personal or impersonal, spring. At the root of this imaginative construction there is always either theism or pantheism.
(2) Mystical imagination has often and erroneously been identified with religious imagination. Although it may be held that every religion, no matter how dull and poor, presupposes a latent mysticism, because it supposes an Unknown beyond the reach of sense, there are religions very slightly mystical in fact—those of savages, strictly utilitarian; among barbarians, the martial cults of the Germans and the Aztecs; among civilized races, Rome and Greece.[105] However, even though the mystic imagination is not confined to the bounds of religious thought, history shows us that there it attains its completest expansion.
To be brief, and to keep strictly within our subject, let us note that in the completely developed great religions there has arisen opposition between the rationalists and the imaginative expounders, between the dogmatists and the mystics. The former, rational architects, build by means of abstract ideas, logical relations and methods, by deduction and induction; the others, imaginative builders, care little for this learned magnificence—they excel in vivid creations because the moving energy with them is in their feelings, "in their hearts;" because they speak a language made up of concrete images, and consequently their wholly symbolic speech is at the same time an original construction. The mystic imagination is a transformation of the mythic imagination, the myth changing into symbols. It cannot escape the necessity of this. On the other hand, the affective states cannot longer remain vague, diffuse, purely internal; they must become fixed in time and space, and condensed into images forming a personality, legend, event, or rite. Thus, Buddha represents the tendencies towards pity and resignation, summing up the aspirations for final rest. On the other hand, abstract ideas, pure concepts, being repugnant to the mystic's nature, it is also necessary that they take on images through which they may be seen—e.g., the relations between God and man, in the various forms of communion; the idea of divine protection in incarnations, mediators, etc. But the images made use of are not dry and colorless like words that by long use have lost all direct representative value and are merely marks or tags. Being symbolic, i.e., concrete, they are, as we have seen, direct substitutes for reality, and they differ as much from words as sketching and drawing differ from our alphabetical signs, which are, however, their derivatives or abbreviations.
It must, however, be noted that if "the mystic fact is a naïve effort to apprehend the absolute, a mode of symbolic, not dialectic, thinking, that lives on symbols and finds in them the only fitting expression,"[106] it seems that this imaginative phase has been to some minds only an internal form, for they have attempted to go beyond it through ecstacy, aspiring to grasp the ultimate principle as a pure unity, without image and without form,[107] which metaphysical realism hopes to attain by other methods and by a different route. However interesting they may be for psychology, these attempts, luring one on further and further, by their seeming or real elimination of every symbolic element, become foreign to our subject, and we cannot consider them at greater length here.
(3) "History shows that philosophy has done nothing but transform ideas of mystic production, substituting for the form of images and undemonstrated statements the form of assertions of a rational system."[108] This declaration of a metaphysician saves us from dwelling on the subject long.
When we seek the difference between religious and metaphysical or philosophical symbolism, we find it in the nature of the constitutive elements. Turned in the direction of religion, mystic symbolism presupposes two principal elements—imagination and feeling; turned in a metaphysical direction, it presupposes imagination and a very small rational element. This substitution involves appreciable deviation from the primitive type. The construction is of greater logical regularity. Besides, and this is the important characteristic, the subject-matter—though still resembling symbolic images—tends to become concepts: such are vivified abstractions, allegorical beings, hereditary entities of spirits and of gods. In short, metaphysical mysticism is a transition-form towards metaphysical rationalism, although these two tendencies have always been inimical in the history of philosophy, just as in the history of religion.
In this imaginative plan of the world we may recognize stages according to the increasing weakness of the systems, depending on the number and quality of the hypotheses. For example, the progression is apparent between Plotinus and the frenzied creations of the Gnostics and the Cabalists. With the latter, we come into a world of unbridled fancy which, in place of human romances, invents cosmic romances. Here appear the allegorical beings mentioned above, half concept, half symbol; the ten Sephiros of the Cabala, immutable forms of being; the syzygies or couples of Gnosticism—soul and reflection, depth and silence, reason and life, inspiration and truth, etc.; the absolute manifesting itself by the unfolding of fifty-two attributes, each unfolding comprising seven eons, corresponding to the 364 days of the year, etc. It would be wearisome to follow these extravagant thoughts, which, though the learned may treat them with some respect, have for the psychologist only the interest of pathologic evidence. Moreover, this form of mystic imagination presents too little that is new for us to speak of it without repeating ourselves.
To conclude: The mystic imagination, in its alluring freedom, its variety, and its richness, is second to no form, not even to esthetic invention, which, according to common prejudice, is the type par excellence. Following the most venturesome methods of analogy, it has constructed conceptions of the world made up almost wholly of feelings and images—symbolic architectures.
FOOTNOTES:
[99] Philosophy of the Unconscious, I, part 2, ch. IX.