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Updated: May 12, 2025
It is not here a question of criticism, of praise, or even of appreciation, but merely of a consideration of it as a psychological fact likely to instruct us in regard to the nature of the diffluent imagination.
We shall see that its opposite, diffluent imagination, is that which depends least upon that factor, or is most free from it. Among these naturally objective elements the plastic imagination chooses the most objective, which fact gives its creations an air of reality and life.
By the nature of its favorite images, by its preference for vague associations and uncertain relations, it presents all the characteristics of diffluent imagination; but the latter covers a much broader field: it is the genus of which the other is a species.
We have already pointed out very different kinds of representations concrete images, material pertaining to plastic and mechanical imagination; the emotional abstractions of the diffluent imagination; affective images, the type of which is found in musicians; symbolic images, familiar in mystics. It may seem improper to add another class to this list, but it is not a meaningless subtlety.
At the best, it can be regarded only as a hasty deduction from the first superficial notices of the objects that surround us, sufficient, perhaps, for the purpose of ordinary discrimination, but far too indeterminate and diffluent to be taken unexamined by the philosophic inquirer.
The diffluent imagination is another general form, but one that is completely opposed to the foregoing. It consists of vaguely-outlined, indistinct images that are evoked and joined according to the least rigorous modes of association. It presents, then, two things for our consideration the nature of the images and of their associations.
There is of course a typical difference between the "plastic" imagination, dealing with clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the arts of form like sculpture and architecture, and that "diffluent" imagination which prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective and emotional, and of which modern music like Debussy's is a good example.
In addition, it must be recognized that were we to make a complete review of all the forms of esthetic creation, we should frequently be embarrassed to classify them, because there are among them, as in the case of characters, mixed or composite forms. Here, for example, are two kinds seemingly belonging to the diffluent imagination which, however, do not permit it to completely include them.
Let us rapidly pass over some very frequent, very well-known manifestations of the diffluent imagination those obliterated forms in which it does not reach complete development and cannot give the full measure of its power. Revery and related states. This is perhaps the purest specimen of the kind, but it remains embryonic. The romantic turn of mind.
Analysis, indeed, discovers a certain class of ill-understood images, which I call emotional abstractions, and which are the proper material for the diffluent imagination. These images are reduced to certain qualities or attributes of things, taking the place of the whole, and chosen from among the others for various reasons, the origin of which is affective.
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