elf in its basic nature, in its
constitutive elements. The diversity of its deeds depends on the end
desired, the conditions required for its attainment, materials employed
which, as we have seen, under the collective name "representations" are
very unlike one another, not only as regards their sensuous origin
(visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) but also as regards their psychologic
nature (concrete, symbolic, affective, emotional-abstract images;
generic and schematic images, concepts--each group itself having shades
or degrees).

This constructive activity, applying itself to everything and radiating
in all directions, is in its early, typical form a mythic creation. It
is an invincible need of man to reflect and reproduce his own nature in
the world surrounding him. The first application of his mind is thinking
by analogy, which vivifies everything after the human model and attempts
to know everything according to arbitrary resemblances. Myth-making
activity, which we have studied in the child and in primitive man, is
the embryonic form whence arise by a slow evolution religious
creations--gross or refined; esthetic development, which is a fallen,
impoverished mythology; the fantastic conceptions of the world that may
little by little become scientific conceptions, with, however, an
irreducible residuum of hypotheses. Alongside of these creations, all
bordering upon what we have called the fixed form, there are practical,
objective creations. As for the latter, we could not trace them to the
same mythic source except by dialectic subtleties which we renounce. The
former arise from an internal efflorescence; the latter from urgent
life-needs; they appear later and are a bifurcation of the early trunk:
but the same sap flows in both branches.

The constructive imagination penetrates every part of our life, whether
individual or collective, speculative and practical, in all its
forms--IT IS EVERYWHERE.

FOOTNOTES:

[146] See above, Part I, chapter II.

[147] It is a postulate of contemporary physiology that all the
neurones taken together cannot spontaneously, that is, of
themselves, give rise to any movement--they receive from without,
and expend their energy outwards. Nevertheless, between the two
moments that, in reflex and instinctive actions, seem continuous, a
third interposes, which, for the higher psychic acts, may be of long
duration. Thus, reasonings in logical form and reflection regarding
a decision to