Chapter 12

THE DIFFLUENT IMAGINATION.

It makes use of vague images linked according to the least rigorous modes of association. Emotional abstractions; their nature.--Its characteristic of inwardness.--Its principal manifestations: revery, the romantic spirit, the chimerical spirit; myths and religious conceptions, literature and the fine arts (the symbolists), the class of the marvelous and fantastic.--Varieties of the diffluent imagination: first, numerical imagination; its nature; two principal forms, cosmogonic and scientific conceptions; second, musical imagination, the type of the affective imagination. Its characteristics; it does not develop save after an interval of time.--Natural transposition of events in musicians.--Antagonism between true musical imagination and plastic imagination. Inquiry and facts on the subject.--Two great types of imagination. 195