ssociation of perception and image, or of image and image. If they
have not the same origin, no more do they disappear in the same way, as
is proven by very numerous examples of aphasia.

The originality of mystic imagination is found in this fact: It
transforms concrete images into symbolic images, and uses them as such.
It extends this process even to perceptions, so that all manifestations
of nature or of human art take on a value as signs or symbols. We shall
later find numerous examples of this. Its mode of expression is
necessarily synthetic. In itself, and because of the materials that it
makes use of, it differs from the affective imagination previously
described; it also differs from sensuous imagination, which makes use
of forms, movements, colors, as having a value of their own; and from
the imagination developing in the functions of words, through an
analytic process. It has thus a rather special mark.

Other characters are related to this one of symbolism, or else are
derived from it, viz.:

(1) An external character: the manner of writing and of speaking, the
mode of expression, whatever it is. "The dominant style among mystics,"
says von Hartmann, "is metaphorical in the extreme--now flat and
ordinary, more often turgid and emphatic. Excess of imagination betrays
itself there, ordinarily, in the thought and in the form in which that
is rendered.... A sign of mysticism which it has been believed may often
be taken as an essential sign, is obscurity and unintelligibility of
language. We find it in almost all those who have written."[99] We might
add that even in the plastic arts, symbolists and "_decadents_" have
attempted, as far as possible, methods that merely indicate and suggest
or hint instead of giving real, definite objects: which fact makes them
inaccessible to the greater number of people.

This characteristic of obscurity is due to two causes. First, mystical
imagination is guided by the logic of feeling, which is purely
subjective, full of leaps, jerks, and gaps. Again, it makes use of the
language of images, especially visual images--a language whose ideal is
vagueness, just as the ideal of verbal language is precision. All this
can be summed up in a phrase--the subjective character inherent in the
symbol. While seeming to speak like everyone else, the mystic uses a
personal idiom: things becoming symbols at the pleasure of his fancy, he
does not use signs that have a fixed and universally a