hing affirmed or denied--there are tendencies and other
affective factors (desire, fear, love, etc.) giving the image its
intensity, and assuring it success in the struggle against other states
of consciousness. There are active faculties that we sometimes designate
by the name "will," understanding by the term, as James says, not only
deliberate volition, but all the factors of belief (hope, fear,
passions, prejudices, sectarian feeling, and so forth),[43] and this has
justly given rise to the truthful saying that the test of belief is
action.[44] This explains how in love, religion, in the moral life, in
politics, and elsewhere, belief can withstand the logical assaults of
the rationalizing intelligence--its power is found everywhere. It lasts
as long as the mind waits and consents; but, as soon as these affective
and active dispositions disappear in life's experience, faith falls with
them, leaving in its place a formless content, an empty and dead
representation.

After this, is it necessary to remark that belief depends peculiarly on
the motor elements of our organization and not on the intellectual? As
there is no imagination without belief, nor belief without imagination,
we return by another route to the thesis supported in the first part of
this essay, that creative activity depends on the motor nature of
images.

Insofar as concerns the special case of the child, the first of the two
moments (the affirming) that the image undergoes in consciousness is all
in all for him, the second (the rectifying) is nothing: there is
hypertrophy of one, atrophy of the other. For the adult the contrary is
true--in many cases, indeed, in consequence of experience and habit, the
first moment, wherein the image should be affirmed as a reality, is only
virtual, is literally atrophied. We must, however, remark that this
applies only partially to the ignorant and even less to the savage.

We might, nevertheless, ask ourselves if the child's belief in his
phantoms is complete, entire, absolute, unreserved. Is the stick that he
bestrides perfectly identified with a horse? Was Sully's child, that
showed its doll a series of engravings to choose from, completely
deceived? It seems that we must rather admit an intermittence, an
alteration between affirmation and negation. On the one hand, the
skeptical attitude of those who laugh at it displeases the child, who is
like a devout believer whose faith is being broken down. On the other