il they
become commonplace. But as to the nature of these psychic states there
are only two solutions possible--one, naturalistic, that we shall
indicate; the other, supernatural, which most theologians hold, and
which regards these phenomena as valid and true revelation. In either
case, the mystic imagination seems to us naturally tending toward
objectification. It tends outwardly, by a spontaneous movement that
places it on the same level as reality. Whichever conclusion we adopt,
no imaginative type has the same great gift of energy and permanence in
belief.

II

Mystic imagination, working along the lines peculiar to it, produces
cosmological, religious, and metaphysical constructions, a summary
exposition of which will help us understand its true nature.

(1) The all-embracing cosmological form is the conception of the world
by a purely imaginative being. It is rare, abnormal, and is nowadays met
with only in a few artists, dreamers, or morbidly esthetic persons, as a
kind of survival and temporary form. Thus, Victor Hugo sees in each
letter of the alphabet the pictured imitation of one of the objects
essential to human knowledge: "_A_ is the head, the gable, the
cross-beam, the arch, _arx_; _D_ is the back, _dos_; _E_ is the
basement, the console, etc., so that man's house and its architecture,
man's body and its structure, and then justice, music, the church, war,
harvesting, geometry, mountains, etc.--all that is comprised in the
alphabet through the mystic virtue of form."[104] Even more radical is
Gerard de Nerval (who, moreover, was frequently subject to
hallucinations): "At certain times everything takes on for me a new
aspect--secret voices come out of plant, tree, animals, from the
humblest insects, to caution and encourage me. Formless and lifeless
objects have mysterious turns the meaning of which I understand." To
others, contemporaries, "the real world is a fairy land."

The middle ages--a period of lively imagination and slight rational
culture--overflowed in this direction. "Many thought that on this earth
everything is a sign, a figure, and that the visible is worth nothing
except insofar as it covers up the invisible." Plants, animals--there is
nothing that does not become subject for interpretation; all the members
of the body are emblems; the head is Christ, the hairs are the saints,
the legs are the apostles, the eye is contemplation, etc. There are
extant special books in which all that