Chapter V

THE PRACTICAL AND MECHANICAL IMAGINATION.

Indetermination of this imaginative form.--Inferior forms:
the industrious, the unstable, the eccentric. Why people of
lively imagination are changeable.--Superstitious beliefs.
Origin of this form of imagination--its mental mechanism and
its elements.--The higher form--mechanical imagination.--Man
has expended at least as much imagination there as in
esthetic creation.--Why the contrary view
prevails.--Resemblances between these two forms of
imagination.--Identity of development. Detail
observation--four phases.--General characters. This form, at
its best, supposes inspiration; periods of preparation, of
maturity, and of decline.--Special characters: invention
occurs in layers. Principal steps of its development.--It
depends strictly on physical conditions.--A phase of pure
imagination--mechanical romances. Examples.--Identical
nature of the imagination of the mechanic and that of the
artist. 256

CHAPTER VI.

THE COMMERCIAL IMAGINATION.

Its internal and external conditions.--Two classes of
creators--the cautious, the daring.--The initial moment of
invention.--The importance of the intuitive
mind.--Hypotheses in regard to its psychologic nature.--Its
development: the creation of increasingly more simple
processes of substitution.--Characters in common with the
forms of creation already studied.--Characters peculiar to
it--the combining imagination of the tactician; it is a form
of war.--Creative intoxication.--Exclusive use of schematic
representations.--Remarks on the various types of
images.--The creators of great financial systems.--Brief
remarks on the military imagination. 281

CHAPTER VII.

THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION.

Successive appearances of ideal conceptions.--Creators in
ethics and in the social realm.--Chimerical forms. Social
novelists.--Ch. Fourrier, type of the great
imaginer.--Practical invention--the collective
ideal.--Imaginative regression. 299