More complicated than in ordinary speaking and thinking are the phenomena where the sequence of thought-processes stretches over vast creations of the mind. Very likely the whole of the idea hovers in the mind of the artist, who has received an inspiration for a work of art, or of the philosopher, who's filled with the conception of a complicated system of thought, before either of them carries it out. This anticipation can only be considered an indefinite total feeling, which points the direction for the continuation of the thoughts, and which becomes clearer itself during this continuation. At the same time, in such complicated cases the distracting influences increase in power continually, and accordingly continually alter the quality of the feeling-tone that hovers over the whole. So it sometimes happens that the resulting product becomes in its execution quite different from what it was in its first conception, and it sometimes may happen that such changes occur several times in the course of the process. In all such cases this is generally caused by new associations, which arise from single elements of the total thought, and which, if they do not fit into the regular course, often assimilate with the total thought in a similar manner, or crowd it out altogether. In combinations of creations of thought these secondary influences ultimately increase so much that the regular steady course becomes an exception, and the preponderance of these transforming forces becomes the rule. Although in most cases these phenomena defy objective control, yet there are examples enough in which they can be clearly seen, at least their broad outlines. So Goethe's _Faust_ shows clearly traces of a repeated change in the idea of the whole, and the supposition is forced upon us that the author in his later conceptions had forgotten his first ones. In _Wilhelm Meister_ it almost seems as if he purposely had given as much free scope as possible to the play of associations caused by the plot. These may be extreme cases, and yet there is hardly in the province of science or art any creation of thought which in its execution remains free from any such intervening influences, which have their source partly in new impressions and partly in the thought-compounds caused by the execution or the elaboration of the same in the mind. The two psychical processes, that here interact, have been brought by psychologists under the concepts of "understanding" and "imagination." Where a regular arrangement of the thought-compounds, bound up with a tendency to form them abstractly, is uppermost, it is the custom to assign this to the understanding. Where consciousness is more inclined to the free play of associations and of newly excited thought-forms, and at the same time to a more concrete form of thinking, it is customary to speak of the activity of the imagination. But really we are here not dealing with faculties of thought that can in any