nd esthetic creations,
philosophical and scientific hypotheses. While the "outline" imagination
remains an internal phenomenon, existing only in and for a single
individual, the fixed form is projected outwards, made something else.
The former has no reality other than the momentary belief accompanying
it; the latter exists by itself, for its creator and for others; the
work is accepted, rejected, examined, criticised. Fiction rests on the
same level as reality. Do not people discuss seriously the objective
value of certain myths, and of metaphysical theories? the action of a
novel or drama as though it were a matter of real events? the character
of the _dramatis personae_ as though they were living flesh and blood?

The fixed imagination moves in an elastic frame. The material elements
circumscribing it and composing it have a certain fluidity; they are
language, writing, musical sounds, colors, forms, lines. Furthermore, we
know that its creations, in spite of the spontaneous adherence of the
mind accepting them, are the work of a free will; they could have been
otherwise--they preserve an indelible imprint of contingency and
subjectivity.

(c) This last mark is rubbed out without disappearing (for a thing
imagined is always a personal thing) in the objectified form that
comprises successful practical inventions--whether mechanical,
industrial, commercial, military, social, or political. These have no
longer an arbitrary, borrowed reality; they have their place in the
totality of physical and social phenomena. They resemble creations of
nature, subject like them to fixed conditions of existence and to a
limited determinism. We shall not dwell longer on this last character,
so often pointed out.

In order the better to comprehend the distinction between the three
forms of imagination let us borrow for a moment the terminology of
spiritualism or of the common dualism--merely as a means of explaining
the matter clearly. The "outline" imagination is a soul without a body,
a pure spirit, without determination in space. The "fixed" imagination
is a soul or spirit surrounded by an almost immaterial sheath, like
angels or demons, genii, shadows, the "double" of savages, the
_peresprit_ of spiritualists, etc. The _objectified_ imagination is soul
and body, a complete organization after the pattern of living people;
the ideal is incarnated, but it must undergo transformation, reductions
and adaptations, in order that it may