It is, then, certain that myths of the plastic kind are the fruits of an innate quality of mind, of a mode of feeling and of translating, at a given moment in its history, the preponderating characters of a race; in short, of a form of imagination and ultimately of a special cerebral structure. 4. The most complete manifestation of the plastic imagination is met with in mechanical invention and what is allied thereto, in consequence of the need of very exact representations of qualities and relations. But this is a specialized form, and, as its importance has been too often misunderstood, it deserves a separate study. (See Chapter V, _infra_.) III Such are the principal traits of this type of imagination: clearness of outline, both of the whole and of the details. It is not identical with the form called realistic--it is more comprehensive; it is a genus of which "realism" is a species. Moreover, the latter expression being reserved by custom for esthetic creation, I purposely digress in order to dwell on this point: that the esthetic imagination has no essential character belonging exclusively to it, and that it differs from other forms (scientific, mechanical, etc.) only in its materials and in its end, not in its primary nature. On the whole, the plastic imagination could be summed up in the expression, _clearness in complexity_. It always preserves the mark of its original source--i.e., in the creator and those disposed to enjoy and understand him it tends to approach the clearness of perception. Would it be improper to consider as a variety of the genus a mode of representation that could be expressed as _clearness in simplicity_? It is the dry and rational imagination. Without depreciating it we may say that it is rather a condition of imaginative poverty. We hold with Fouillee that the average Frenchman furnishes a good example of it. "The Frenchman," says he, "does not usually have a very strong imagination. His internal vision has neither the hallucinative intensity nor the exuberant fancy of the German and Anglo-Saxon mind; it is an intellectual and distant view rather than a sensitive resurrection or an immediate contact with, and possession of, the things themselves. Inclined to deduce and construct, our intellect excels less in representing to itself real things than in discovering relations between possible or necessary things. In other words, it is a logical and combining imagination that takes pleasure in what has been termed the abstract view of life. The Chateaubriands, Hugos, Flauberts, Zolas, are exceptional with us. We reason more than we imagine."[85]