ructive imagination
takes a slightly different position which we may characterize thus:
legend is to myth what illusion is to hallucination.

The psychological mechanism is the same in both cases. Illusion and
legend are partial imaginations, hallucination and myth are total
imaginations. Illusion may vary in all shades between exact perception
and hallucination; legend can run all the way from exact history to pure
myth. The difference between illusion and hallucination is sometimes
imperceptible; the same is sometimes true of legend and myth. Sensory
illusion is produced by an addition of images changing perception;
legend is also produced by an addition of images changing the historic
personage or event. The only difference, then, is in the material used;
in one case, a datum of sense, a natural phenomenon; in the other, a
fact of history, a human event.

The psychological genesis of legends being thus established in general,
what, according to the facts, are the unconscious processes that the
imagination employs for creating them? We may distinguish two principal
ones.

The first process is a fusion or combination. The myth precedes the
fact; the historical personage or event enters into the mould of a
pre-existing myth. "It is necessary that the mythic form be fashioned
before one may pour into it, in a more or less fluid state, the historic
metal." Imagination had created a solar mythology long before it could
be incarnated by the Greeks in Hercules and his exploits. "There was
historically a Roland, perhaps even an Arthur, but the greater part of
the great deeds that the poetry of the Middle Ages attributes to them
had been accomplished long before by mythological heroes whose very
names had been forgotten."[64] At one time the man is completely hidden
by the myth and becomes absolutely legendary; again, he assumes only an
aureole that transfigures him. This is exactly what occurs in the
simpler phenomenon of sensory illusion: now the real (the perception) is
swamped by the images, is transformed, and the objective element reduced
to almost nothing; at another time, the objective element remains
master, but with numerous deformations.

The second process is idealization, which can act conjointly with the
other. Popular imagination incarnates in a real man its ideal of
heroism, of loyalty, of love, of piety, or of cowardice, cruelty,
wickedness, and other abnormalities. The process is more complex. It
presupp