e forms, which I
shall call _sketched_, _fixed_, _objectified_, according as it remains
an internal fancy, or takes on a material but contingent and unstable
form, or is subjected to the conditions of a rigorous internal or
external determinism.

(a) The _sketched_ form is primordial, original, the simplest of all; it
is a nascent moment or first attempt. It appears first of all in
dreaming--an embryonic, unstable and uncoordinated manifestation of the
creative imagination--a transition-stage between passive reproduction
and organized construction. A step higher is revery, whose flitting
images, associated by chance, without personal intervention, are
nevertheless vivid enough to exclude from consciousness every impression
of the external world--so much so that the day-dreamer re-enters it only
with a shock of surprise. More coherent are the imaginary constructions
known as "castles in Spain"--the works of a wish considered
unrealizable, fancies of love, ambition, power and wealth, the goal of
which seems to be forever beyond our reach. Lastly, still higher, come
all the plans for the future conceived vaguely and as barely
possible--foreseeing the end of a sickness, of a business enterprise, of
a political event, etc.

This vague and "outline" imagination, penetrating our entire life, has
its peculiar characters--the unifying principle is _nil_ or ephemeral,
which fact always reduces it to the dream as a type; it does not
externalize itself, does not change into acts, a consequence of its
basically chimerical nature or of weakness of will, which reduces it to
a strictly internal and individual existence. It is needless to say that
this kind of imagination is a permanent and definite form with the
dreamers living in a world of ceaselessly reappearing images, having no
power to organize them, to change them into a work of art, a theory, or
a useful invention.

The "sketched" form is or remains an elementary, primitive, automatic
form. Conformably to the general law ruling the development of
mind--passage from indefinite to definite, from the incoherent to the
coherent, from spontaneity to reflection, from the reflex to the
voluntary period--the imagination comes out of its swaddling-clothes,
is changed--through the intervention of a teleological act that assigns
it an end; through the union of rational elements that subdue it for an
adaptation. Then appear the other two forms.

(b) The _fixed_ form comprises mythic a