space--sight, movement, touch. Plastic imagination depends most on
spatial conditions. We shall see that its opposite, diffluent
imagination, is that which depends least upon that factor, or is most
free from it. Among these naturally objective elements the plastic
imagination chooses the most objective, which fact gives its creations
an air of reality and life.

The second characteristic is inferiority of the affective element; it
appears only intermittently and is entirely blotted out before sensory
impression. This form of the creative imagination, coming especially
from sensation, aims especially at sensation. Thus it is rather
superficial, greatly devoid of that internal mark that comes from
feeling.

But if it chance that both sensory and affective elements are equal in
power; if there is at the same time intense vision adequate to reality,
and profound emotion, violent shock, then there arise extraordinary
imaginative personages, like Shakespeare, Carlyle, Michelet. It is
needless to describe this form of imagination, excellent pen-pictures of
which have been given by the critics;[79] let us merely note that its
psychology reduces itself to an alternately ascending and descending
movement between the two limiting points of perception and idea. The
ascending process assigns to inanimate objects life, desires and
feelings. Thus Michelet: "The great streams of the Netherlands, _tired_
with their very long course, _perish_ as though from _weariness_ in the
_unfeeling_ ocean."[80] Elsewhere, the great folio begets the octavo,
"which becomes the parent of the small volume, of booklets, of ephemeral
pamphlets, invisible spirits flying in the night, creating under the
very eyes of tyrants the circulation of liberty." The descending process
materializes abstractions, gives them body, makes them flesh and bone;
the Middle Ages become "a poor child, torn from the bowels of
Christianity, born amidst tears, grown up in prayer and revery, in
anguish of heart, dying without achieving anything." In this dazzle of
images there is a momentary return to primitive animism.

II

In order to more fully understand the plastic imagination, let us take
up its principal manifestations.

1. First, the arts dealing with form, where its necessity is evident.
The sculptor, painter, architect, must have visual and tactile-motor
images; it is the material in which their creations are wrapped up. Even
leaving out the striking acts requi