l manner but one suitable for our subject,
according to the degree of precision or fluidity.

Neglecting intermediate forms, we may, indeed, divide them into two
groups; some are clear in outline, are consistent, relatively logical,
resembling a definite historical relation; others are vague, multiform,
incoherent, contradictory; their characters change into one another, the
tales are mixed and are imperceptible in the whole.

The former types are the work of the plastic imagination. Such are, if
we eliminate oriental influences, most of the myths belonging to Greece
when, on emerging from the earliest period, they attained their definite
constitution. It has been held that the plastic character of these
religious conceptions is an effect of esthetic development: statues,
bas-reliefs, poetry, and even painting, have made definite the
attributes of the gods and their history. Without denying this influence
we must nevertheless understand that it is only auxiliary. To those who
would challenge this opinion let us recall that the Hindoos have had
gigantic poems, have covered their temples with numberless sculptures,
and yet their fluid mythology is the opposite of the Greek. Among the
peoples who have incarnated their divinities in no statue, in no human
or animal form, we find the Germans and the Celts. But the mythology of
the former is clear, well kept within large lines; that of the latter is
fleeting and inconsistent--the despair of scholars.[84]

It is, then, certain that myths of the plastic kind are the fruits of an
innate quality of mind, of a mode of feeling and of translating, at a
given moment in its history, the preponderating characters of a race; in
short, of a form of imagination and ultimately of a special cerebral
structure.

4. The most complete manifestation of the plastic imagination is met
with in mechanical invention and what is allied thereto, in consequence
of the need of very exact representations of qualities and relations.
But this is a specialized form, and, as its importance has been too
often misunderstood, it deserves a separate study. (See Chapter V,
_infra_.)

III

Such are the principal traits of this type of imagination: clearness of
outline, both of the whole and of the details. It is not identical with
the form called realistic--it is more comprehensive; it is a genus of
which "realism" is a species. Moreover, the latter expression being
reserved by custom for esthetic creatio