; no language is more true and more
supple. It permits a glimpse of, or rather, it causes us to discern the
forms of clouds, movements of the air, changes of seasons, all the
happenings of sky, fire, storm: external nature has never met a mind so
impressionable and pliant in which to mirror itself in all the
inexhaustible variety of its appearances. However changeable nature may
be, this imagination corresponds to it. It has no fixed gods; they are
changeable like the things themselves; they blend one into another.
Everyone of them is in turn the supreme deity; no one of them is a
distinct personality; everyone is only a moment of nature, able,
according to the apperception of the moment, to include its neighbor or
be included by it. In this fashion they swarm and teem. Every moment of
nature and every apperceptive moment may furnish one of them."[89] Let
us, indeed, note that, for the worshiper, the god to whom he addresses
himself and while he is praying, is always the greatest and most
powerful. The assignment of attributes passes suddenly from one to the
other, regardless of contradiction. In this versatility some writers
believe they have discovered a vague pantheistic conception. Nothing is
more questionable, fundamentally, than this interpretation. It is more
in harmony with the psychology of these naive minds to assume simply an
extreme state of "impressionism," explicable by the logic of feeling.

Thus, there is a complete antithesis between the imagination that has
created the clear-cut and definite polytheism of the Greeks and that
whence have issued those fluctuating divinities that allow the
presentation of the future doctrine of _Maya_, of universal
illusion--another more refined form of the diffluent imagination.
Finally, let us note that the Hellenic imagination realized its gods
through anthropomorphism--they are the ideal forms of human
attributes[90]--majesty, beauty, power, wisdom, etc. The Hindoo
imagination proceeds through symbolism: its divinities have several
heads, several arms, several legs, to symbolize limitless intelligence,
power, etc.; or better still, animal forms, as e.g., Ganesa, the god of
wisdom, with the head of the elephant, reputed the wisest of animals.

(5) It would be easy to show by the history of literature and the fine
arts that the vague forms have been preferred according to peoples,
times, and places. Let us limit ourselves to a single contemporary
example that is comple