course of centuries, art--and especially literary
creation--becomes, as we have already said, a decadent and rationalized
mythology. This form of invention consists neither of idealizing the
external world, nor reproducing it with the minuteness of realism, but
_remaking_ the universe to suit oneself, without taking into account
natural laws, and despising the impossible: it is a liberated realism.
Often, in an environment of pure fancy, where only caprice reigns, the
characters appear clear, well-fashioned, living. The "wonder" class
belongs, then, to the vague as well as to the plastic imagination; more
or less to one or to the other, according to the temperament of the
creator.

(b) The fantastic class develops under the same conditions. Its chiefs
(Hoffmann, Poe, _et al._) are classed by critics as realists. They are
such by virtue of their vision, intensified to hallucination, the
precision in details, the rigorous logic of characters and events: they
rationalize the improbable.[91] On the other hand, the environment is
strange, shrouded in mystery: men and things move in an unreal
atmosphere, where one feels rather than perceives. It is thus proper to
remark that this class easily glides into the deeply sad, the horrible,
terrifying, nightmare-producing, "satanic literature;" Goya's paintings
of robbers and thieves being garroted; Wiertz, a genius bizarre to the
point of extravagance, who paints only suicides or the heads of
guillotined criminals.

Religious conceptions could also furnish a fine lot of examples: Dante's
_Inferno_, the twenty-eight hells of Buddhism, which are perhaps the
masterpieces of this class, etc. But all this belongs to another
division of our subject, one that I have expressly eliminated from this
essay--the pathology of the creative imagination.

III

There yet remains for us to study two important varieties that I connect
with the diffluent imagination.

NUMERICAL IMAGINATION

Under this head I designate the imagination that takes pleasure in the
unlimited--in infinity of time and space--under the form of number. It
seems at first that these two terms--imagination and number--must be
mutually exclusive. Every number is precise, rigorously determined,
since we can always reduce it to a relation with unity; it owes nothing
to fancy. But the _series_ of numbers is unlimited in two directions:
starting from any term in the series, we may go on ever increasingly or
ever decreasingl