A principal process consists of employing usual words and changing their ordinary acceptation, or rather, associating them in such a way that they lose their precise meaning, and appear vague and mysterious: these are the words "written in the depths." The writers do not name--they leave it for us to infer. "They banish commonplaces through lack of precision, and leave to things only the power of moving." A rose is not described by the particular sensations that it causes, but by the general condition that it excites. Another method is the employment of new words or words that have fallen into disuse. Ordinary words retain, in spite of everything, somewhat of their customary meaning, associations and thoughts condensed in them through long habit; words forgotten during four or five centuries escape this condition--they are coins without fixed value. Lastly, a still more radical method is the attempt to give to words an exclusively emotional valuation. Unconsciously or as the result of reflection some symbolists have come to this extreme trial, which the logic of events imposed upon them. Ordinarily, thought expresses itself in words; feeling, in gestures, cries, interjections, change of tone: it finds its complete and classic expression in music. The symbolists want to transfer the role of sound to words, to make of them the instrument for translating and suggesting emotion through sound alone: words have to act not as signs but as sounds: they are "musical notes in the service of an impassioned psychology." All this, indeed, concerns only imagination expressing itself in words; but we know that the symbolic school has applied itself to the plastic arts, to treat them in its own way. The difference, however, is in the vesture that the esthetic ideal assumes. The pre-Raphaelites have attempted, by effacing forms, outlines, semblances, colors, "to cause things to appear as mere sources of emotion," in a word, to _paint_ emotions. To sum up--In this form of the diffluent imagination the emotional factor exercises supreme authority. May the type of imagination, the chief manifestations of which we have just enumerated, be considered as identical with the idealistic imagination? This question is similar to that asked in the preceding chapter, and permits the same answer. In idealistic art, doubtless, the material element furnished in perception (form, color, touch, effort) is minimized, subtilized, sublimated, refined, so as to approach as nearly as possible to a purely internal state. 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. Thus, it would be erroneous to regard the fantastic imagination as idealistic; it has no claim to the term: on the contrary, it believes itself adapted for practical work and acts in that direction.