Let us rapidly pass over some very frequent, very well-known manifestations of the diffluent imagination--those obliterated forms in which it does not reach complete development and cannot give the full measure of its power.
(1) Revery and related states. This is perhaps the purest specimen of the kind, but it remains embryonic.
(2) The romantic turn of mind. This is seen in those who, confronted by any event whatever or an unknown person, make up, spontaneously, involuntarily, in spite of themselves, a story out of whole cloth. I shall later give examples of it according to the written testimony of several people.[86] In whatever concerns themselves or others they create an imagined world, which they substitute for the real.
(3) The fantastic mind. Here we come away from the vague forms; the diffluent imagination becomes substantial and asserts itself through its permanence. At bottom this fantastic form is the romantic spirit tending toward objectification. The invention, which was at first only a thoroughly internal construction and recognized as such, aspires to become external, to become realized, and when it ventures into a world other than its own, one requiring the rigorous conditions of the practical imagination, it is wrecked, or succeeds only through chance, and that very rarely. To this class belong those inventors, known to everyone, who are fertile in methods of enriching themselves or their country by means of agricultural, mining, industrial or commercial enterprises; the makers of the utopias of finance, politics, society, etc. It is a form of imagination unnaturally oriented toward the practical.[87]
(4) The list increases with myths and religious conceptions; the imagination in its diffuse form here finds itself on its own ground.
Depending on linguistics, it has recently been maintained that, among the Aryans at least, the imagination created at first only momentary gods (_Augenblicksgötter_).[88] Every time that primitive man, in the presence of a phenomenon, experienced a perceptible emotion, he translated it by a name, the manifestation of what was imagined the divine part in the emotion felt. "Every religious emotion gives rise to a new name--i.e., a new divinity. But the religious imagination is never identical with itself; though produced by the same phenomenon, it translates itself, at two different moments, by two different words." As a consequence, "during the early periods of the human race, religious names must have been applied not to _classes_ of beings or events but to _individual_ beings or events. Before worshipping the comet or the fig-tree, men must have worshiped each one of the comets they beheld crossing the sky, every one of the fig-trees that their eyes saw." Later, with advancing capacity for generalization, these "instantaneous" divinities would be condensed into more consistent gods. If this hypothesis, which has aroused many criticisms, be sound--if this state were met with--it would be the ideal type of imaginative instability in the religious order.