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. (a) The "wonder" class (fairy-tales, the Thousand and One Nights, romances of chivalry, Ariosto's poem, etc.) is a survival of the mythic epoch, when the imagination is given free play without control or check; whereas, in the course of centuries, art--and especially literary creation--becomes, as we have already said, a decadent and rationalized mythology. This form of invention consists neither of idealizing the external world, nor reproducing it with the minuteness of realism, but _remaking_ the universe to suit oneself, without taking into account natural laws, and despising the impossible: it is a liberated realism. Often, in an environment of pure fancy, where only caprice reigns, the characters appear clear, well-fashioned, living. The "wonder" class belongs, then, to the vague as well as to the plastic imagination; more or less to one or to the other, according to the temperament of the creator. (b) The fantastic class develops under the same conditions. Its chiefs (Hoffmann, Poe, _et al._) are classed by critics as realists. They are such by virtue of their vision, intensified to hallucination, the precision in details, the rigorous logic of characters and events: they rationalize the improbable.[91] On the other hand, the environment is strange, shrouded in mystery: men and things move in an unreal atmosphere, where one feels rather than perceives. It is thus proper to remark that this class easily glides into the deeply sad, the horrible, terrifying, nightmare-producing, "satanic literature;" Goya's paintings of robbers and thieves being garroted; Wiertz, a genius bizarre to the point of extravagance, who paints only suicides or the heads of guillotined criminals. Religious conceptions could also furnish a fine lot of examples: Dante's _Inferno_, the twenty-eight hells of Buddhism, which are perhaps the masterpieces of this class, etc. But all this belongs to another division of our subject, one that I have expressly eliminated from this essay--the pathology of the creative imagination. III There yet remains for us to study two important varieties that I connect with the diffluent imagination. NUMERICAL IMAGINATION