al development in Europe
since the fall of the Roman Empire. It shows very distinctly our three
periods.

No one will question the preponderance of the imagination during the
middle Ages: intensity of religious feeling, ceaselessly repeated
epidemics of superstition; the institution of chivalry, with all its
accessories; heroic poetry, chivalric romances; courts of love,
efflorescence of Gothic art, the beginning of modern music, etc. On the
other hand, the _quantity_ of imagination applied during this epoch to
practical, industrial, commercial invention is very small. Their
scientific culture, buried in Latin jargon, is made up partly of antique
traditions, partly of fancies; what the ten centuries added to positive
science is almost _nil_. Our figure, with its two curves, one
imaginative, the other rational, thus applies just as well to historical
development as to individual development during this first period.

No more will anyone question that the Renaissance is a critical moment,
a transition period, and a transformation analogous to that which we
have noted in the individual, when there rises, opposed to imagination,
a rival power.

Finally, it will be admitted without dissent that during the modern
period social imagination has become partly decayed, partly
rationalized, under the influence of two principal factors--one
scientific, the other economic. On the one hand the development of
science, on the other hand the great maritime discoveries, by
stimulating industrial and commercial inventions, have given the
imagination a new field of activity. There have arisen points of
attraction that have drawn it into other paths, have imposed upon it
other forms of creation that have often been neglected or misunderstood
and that we shall study in the Third Part.

THIRD PART

THE PRINCIPAL TYPES OF IMAGINATION

PRELIMINARY

After having studied the creative imagination in its constitutive
elements and in its development we purpose, in this last part,
describing its principal forms. This will be neither analytic nor
genetic but concrete. The reader need not fear wearisome repetition; our
subject is sufficiently complex to permit a third treatment without
reiteration.

The expression "creative imagination," like all general terms, is an
abbreviation and an abstraction. There is no "imagination in general,"
but only _men who imagine_, and who do so in different ways; the reality
is in them. The di