acknowledged "freaks" at the brink of
insanity, who are but the extreme form of the unstable, and who, after
having wasted haphazard much useless imagination, end in an insane
asylum or worse still.

Let us consider these three groups together. Let us eliminate the
intellectual and moral qualities characteristic of each group, which
establish notable differences between them, and let us consider only
their inventive capacity as applied to practical life. One character
common to all is mobility--the tendency to change. It is a matter of
current observation that men of lively imagination are changeable.
Common opinion, which is also the opinion of moralists and of most
psychologists, attributes this mobility, this instability, to the
imagination. This, in my opinion, is just upside down. _It is not
because they have an active imagination that they are changeable, but it
is because they are changeable that their imagination is active._ We
thus return to the _motor_ basis of all creative work. Each new or
merely modified disposition becomes a center of attraction and pull.
Doubtless the inner push is a necessary condition, but it is not
sufficient. If there were not within them a sufficient number of
concrete, abstract, or semi-abstract representations, susceptible of
various combinations, nothing would happen; but the origin of invention
and of its frequent or constant changes of direction lies in the
emotional and motor constitution, not in the quantity or quality of
representations. I shall not dwell longer on a subject already
treated,[119] but it was proper to show, in passing, that common opinion
starts from an erroneous conception of the primary conditions of
invention--whether great or small, speculative or practical.

In the immense empire of the practical imagination, superstitious
beliefs form a goodly province.

What is superstition? By what positive signs do we recognize it? An
exact definition and a sure criterion are impossible. It is a flitting
notion that depends on the times, places, and nature of minds. Has it
not often been said that the religion of one is superstition to another,
and _vice versa_? This, too, is only a single instance from among many
others; for the common opinion that restricts superstition within the
bounds of religious faith is an incomplete view. There are peculiar
beliefs, foreign to every dogma and every religious feeling, from which
the most radical freethinker is not exempt;