uberance leads us into pathology.

The explanation of the various phases of this development is reducible
to a well-known psychologic law--the natural antagonism between
sensation and image, between phenomena of peripheral origin and
phenomena of central origin; or, in a more general form, between the
outer and inner life. I shall not dwell long on this point, which Taine
has so admirably treated.[149] He has shown in detail how the image is
a spontaneously arising sensation, one that is, however, aborted by the
opposing shock of real sensation, which is its reducer, producing on it
an arresting action and maintaining it in the condition of an internal,
subjective fact. Thus, during the waking hours, the frequency and
intensity of impressions from without press the images back to the
second level; but during sleep, when the external world is as it were
suppressed, their hallucinatory tendency is no longer kept in check, and
the world of dreams is momentarily the reality.

The psychology of the imaginer reduces itself to a progressively
increasing interchange of roles. Images become stronger and stronger
states; perceptions, more and more feeble. In this movement opposite to
nature I note four steps, each of which corresponds to particular
conditions: (1) The quantity of images; (2) quantity and intensity; (3)
quantity, intensity and duration; (4) complete systematization.

(1) In the first place the predominance of imagination is marked only by
the quantity of representations invading consciousness; they teem, break
apart, become associated, combine easily and in various ways. All the
imaginative persons who have given us their experiences either orally or
in writing agree in regard to the extreme ease of the formation of
associations, not in repeating past expedience, but in sketching little
romances.[150] From among many examples I choose one. One of my
correspondents writes that if at church, theatre, on a street, or in a
railway station, his attention is attracted to a person--man or
woman--he immediately makes up, from the appearance, carriage and
attractiveness his or her present or past, manner of life,
occupation--representing to himself the part of the city he or she must
dwell in, the apartments, furniture, etc.--a construction most often
erroneous; I have many proofs of it. Surely this disposition is normal;
it departs from the average only by an excess of imagination that is
replaced in others by an excess