s," by a co-operation of feelings and of
wills; the work of one conscious individual must become the work of a
social consciousness.

That form of imagination, creating and organizing social groups,
manifests itself in various degrees according to the tendency and power
of creators.

There are the founders of small societies, religious in form--the
Essenes, the earliest Christian communities, the monastic orders of the
Orient and Occident, the great Catholic or Mohammedan congregations, the
semi-lay, semi-religious sects like the Moravian Brotherhood, the
Shakers, Mormons, etc. Less complete because it does not cover the
individual altogether in all the acts of life is the creation of secret
associations, professional unions, learned societies, etc. The founder
conceives an ideal of complete living or one limited to a given end, and
puts it into practice, having for material men grouped of their free
choice, or by cooptation.

There is invention operating on great masses--social or political
invention strictly so called--ordinarily not proposed but imposed,
which, however, despite its coercive power, is subject to requirements
even more numerous than mechanical, industrial, or commercial invention.
It has to struggle against natural forces, but most of all against human
forces--inherited habits, customs, traditions. It must make terms with
dominant passions and ideas, finding its justification, like all other
creation, only in success.

Without entering into the details of this inevitable determination,
which would require useless repetition, we may sum up the role of the
constructive imagination in social matters by saying that it has
undergone a regression--i.e., that its area of development has been
little by little narrowed; not that inventive genius, reduced to pure
construction in images, has suffered an eclipse, but on its part it has
had to make increasingly greater room for experiment, rational elements,
calculation, inductions and deductions that permit foresight--for
practical necessities.

If we omit the spontaneous, instinctive, semi-conscious invention of the
earliest ages, that was sufficient for primitive societies, and keep to
creations that were the result of reflection and of great pretension, we
can roughly distinguish three successive periods:

(1) A very long idealistic phase (Antiquity, Renaissance) when triumphed
the pure imagination, and the play of the free fancy that spends itself
in s