he outskirts of the
forest, an imaginary summer residence surrounded by a garden. By
successive additions the pavilion became a chateau; the garden, a park;
servants, horses, water-fixtures came to ornament the domain. The
furnishings of the inside had been modified at the same time. A wife had
come to give life to the picture; two children had been born. Nothing
was wanting to this household, only the being true.... One day he was
in his imaginary salon at Chaville, occupied in watching an upholsterer
who was changing the arrangement of the tapestry. He was so absorbed in
the matter that he did not notice a man coming toward him, and at the
question, 'M......, if you please--?' he answered, without thinking, 'He
is at Chaville.' This reply, given in public, aroused in him a real
terror. 'I believe that I was foolish,' he said. Coming to himself, he
declared that he was ready to do anything to get rid of his ideas."

Here the imaginative type is at its maximum, at the brink of insanity
without being over it. Associations and combinations of images form the
entire content of consciousness, which remains impervious to impressions
from without. Its world becomes _the_ world. The parasitic life
undermines and corrodes the other in order to become established in its
place--it grows, its parts adhere more closely, it forms a compact
mass--the imaginary systematization is complete.

(4) The fourth stage is an exaggeration of the foregoing. The
_completely_ systematized and permanent imaginative life excludes the
other. This is the extreme form, the beginning of insanity, which is
outside our subject, from which pathology has been excluded.

Imagination in the insane would deserve a special study, that would be
lengthy, because there is no form of imagination that insanity has not
adopted. In no period have insane creations been lacking in the
practical, religious, or mystic life, in poetry, the fine arts, and in
the sciences; in industrial, commercial, mechanical, military projects,
and in plans for social and political reform. We should, then, be
abundantly supplied with facts.[153]

It would be difficult, for, if in ordinary life we are often perplexed
to decide whether a man is sane or not, how much more then, when it is a
question of an inventor, of an act of the creative faculty, i.e., of a
venture into the unknown! How many innovators have been regarded as
insane, or as at least unbalanced, visionary! We cannot even i