is seriously explained. Who does
not know the symbolism of the cathedrals, and the vagaries to which it
has given rise? The towers are prayer, the columns the apostles, the
stones and the mortar the assembly of the faithful; the windows are the
organs of sense, the buttresses and abutments are the divine assistance;
and so on to the minutest detail.

In our day of intense intellectual development, it is not given to many
to return sincerely to a mental condition that recalls that of the
earliest times. Even if we come near it, we still find a difference.
Primitive man puts life, consciousness, activity, into everything;
symbolism does likewise, but it does not believe in an autonomous,
distinct, particular soul inherent in each thing. The absence of
abstraction and generalization, characteristic of humanity in its early
beginnings, when it peoples the world with myriads of animate beings,
has disappeared. Every source of activity revealed by symbols appears
as a fragmentary manifestation; it descends from a single primary,
personal or impersonal, spring. At the root of this imaginative
construction there is always either theism or pantheism.

(2) Mystical imagination has often and erroneously been identified with
religious imagination. Although it may be held that every religion, no
matter how dull and poor, presupposes a latent mysticism, because it
supposes an Unknown beyond the reach of sense, there are religions very
slightly mystical in fact--those of savages, strictly utilitarian; among
barbarians, the martial cults of the Germans and the Aztecs; among
civilized races, Rome and Greece.[105] However, even though the mystic
imagination is not confined to the bounds of religious thought, history
shows us that there it attains its completest expansion.

To be brief, and to keep strictly within our subject, let us note that
in the completely developed great religions there has arisen opposition
between the rationalists and the imaginative expounders, between the
dogmatists and the mystics. The former, rational architects, build by
means of abstract ideas, logical relations and methods, by deduction and
induction; the others, imaginative builders, care little for this
learned magnificence--they excel in vivid creations because the moving
energy with them is in their feelings, "in their hearts;" because they
speak a language made up of concrete images, and consequently their
wholly symbolic speech is at the same time a