n original construction. The
mystic imagination is a transformation of the mythic imagination, the
myth changing into symbols. It cannot escape the necessity of this. On
the other hand, the affective states cannot longer remain vague,
diffuse, purely internal; they must become fixed in time and space, and
condensed into images forming a personality, legend, event, or rite.
Thus, Buddha represents the tendencies towards pity and resignation,
summing up the aspirations for final rest. On the other hand, abstract
ideas, pure concepts, being repugnant to the mystic's nature, it is also
necessary that they take on images through which they may be seen--e.g.,
the relations between God and man, in the various forms of
communion; the idea of divine protection in incarnations, mediators,
etc. But the images made use of are not dry and colorless like words
that by long use have lost all direct representative value and are
merely marks or tags. Being symbolic, i.e., concrete, they are, as we
have seen, direct substitutes for reality, and they differ as much from
words as sketching and drawing differ from our alphabetical signs, which
are, however, their derivatives or abbreviations.

It must, however, be noted that if "the mystic fact is a naive effort to
apprehend the absolute, a mode of symbolic, not dialectic, thinking,
that lives on symbols and finds in them the only fitting
expression,"[106] it seems that this imaginative phase has been to some
minds only an internal form, for they have attempted to go beyond it
through ecstacy, aspiring to grasp the ultimate principle as a pure
unity, without image and without form,[107] which metaphysical realism
hopes to attain by other methods and by a different route. However
interesting they may be for psychology, these attempts, luring one on
further and further, by their seeming or real elimination of every
symbolic element, become foreign to our subject, and we cannot consider
them at greater length here.

(3) "History shows that philosophy has done nothing but transform ideas
of mystic production, substituting for the form of images and
undemonstrated statements the form of assertions of a rational
system."[108] This declaration of a metaphysician saves us from dwelling
on the subject long.

When we seek the difference between religious and metaphysical or
philosophical symbolism, we find it in the nature of the constitutive
elements. Turned in the direction of religion, mystic s