ons, but the very essence of things.

This exaggerated symbolism, which makes the works of mystics so fragile,
and which permits the mind to feed only on glimpses, has nevertheless an
undeniable source of energy in its enchanting capacity to suggest.
Without doubt suggestion exists also in art, but much more weakly, for
reasons that we shall indicate.

(3) Another characteristic of mystic imagination is the nature and the
great degree of belief accompanying it. We already know[102] that when
an image enters consciousness, even in the form of a recollection, of a
purely passive reproduction, it appears at first, and for a moment, just
as real as a percept. Much more so, in the case of imaginative
constructions. But this illusion has degrees, and with mystics it
attains its maximum.

In the scientific and practical world, the work of the imagination is
accompanied by only a conditional and provisional belief. The
construction in images must justify its existence, in the case of the
scientist, by explaining; and in the case of the man of affairs, by
being embodied in an invention that is useful and answers its purpose.

In the esthetic field, creation is accompanied by a momentary belief.
Fancy, remarks Groos, is necessarily joined to appearance. Its special
character does not consist merely in freedom in images; what
distinguishes it from association and from memory is this--that what is
merely representative is taken for the reality. The creative artist has
a conscious illusion (_bewusste Selbsttaeuschung_): _the esthetic
pleasure is an oscillation between the appearance and the reality_.[103]

Mystic imagination presupposes an unconditioned and permanent belief.
Mystics are believers in the true sense--they have faith. This character
is peculiar to them, and has its origin in the intensity of the
affective state that excites and supports this form of invention.
Intuition becomes an object of knowledge only when clothed in images.
There has been much dispute as to the objective value of those symbolic
forms that are the working material of the mystic imagination. This
contest does not concern us here; but we may make the positive statement
that the constructive imagination has never obtained such a frequently
hallucinatory form as in the mystics. Visions, touch-illusions, external
voices, inner and "wordless" voices, which we now regard as psycho-motor
hallucinations--all that we meet every moment in their works, unt