icted to esthetics--it should
comprehend everything artificial. Esthetes, doubtless, hold that their
imagination has for them a loftier quality--a disputed question that
psychology need not discuss; for it, the essential mechanism is the same
in the two cases: a great mechanic is a poet in his own way, because he
makes instruments imitating life. "Those constructions that at other
times are the marvel of the ignorant crowd deserve the admiration of the
reflecting:--Something of the power that has organized matter seems to
have passed into combinations in which nature is imitated or surpassed.
Our machines, so varied in form and in function, are the representatives
of a new kingdom intermediate between senseless and animate forms,
having the passivity of the former and the activity of the latter, and
exploiting everything for our sake. They are counterfeits of animate
beings, capable of giving inert substances a regular functioning. Their
skeleton of iron, organs of steel, muscles of leather, soul of fire,
panting or smoking breath, rhythm of movement--sometimes even the shrill
or plaintive cries expressing effort or simulating pain:--all that
contributes to give them a fantastic likeness to life--a specter and
dream of inorganic life."[130]

FOOTNOTES:

[119] See above, Part One, chapter II.

[120] For a complete and recent study of the question, see A.
Lehmann, _Aberglaube und Zauberei von den aeltesten Zeiten bis in die
Gegenwart_, 1898.

[121] Lang, _op. cit._, I, 96. There will be found many other facts
of this kind.

[122] If this book were not merely an essay, we should have had to
study language as an instrument of the practical life in its
relations to the creative imagination, especially the function of
analogy, in the extension and transformation of the meanings of
words. Works on linguistics are full of evidence on this point. One
could do better still by attending exclusively to the vernacular, to
slang, which shows us creative force in action. "Slang," says one
philologist, "has the property of figuring, expressing, and
picturing language.... With it, however low its origin, one could
reconstruct a people or a society." Its principal, not only, means,
are metaphor and allegory. It lends itself equally to methods that
degrade or ennoble existing words, but with a very marked preference
for the worse or degrading meanings.

[123] Ample information on this point will be found in the work of
Espinas, _