ning, 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 (_Augenblicksgoetter_).[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.

Nearer to us, authentic evidence shows that certain peoples, at given
stages of their history, have created such vague, fluid myths, that we
cannot succeed in delimiting them. Every god can change himself into
another, different, or even opposite, one. The Semitic religions might
furnish examples of this. There has been established the identity of
Istar, Astarte, Tanit, Baalath, Derketo, Mylitta, Aschera, and still
others. But it is in the early religion of the Hindoos that we perceive
best this kaleidoscopic process applied to divine beings. In the vedic
hymns not only are the clouds now serpents, now cows and later
fortresses (the retreats of dark Asuras), but we see Agni (fire)
becoming Kama (desire or love), and Indra becoming Varuna, and so on.
"We cannot imagine," says Taine, "such a great clearness. The myth here
is not a disguise, but an expression