(3) Another characteristic of mystic imagination is the nature and the great degree of belief accompanying it. We already know[102] that when an image enters consciousness, even in the form of a recollection, of a purely passive reproduction, it appears at first, and for a moment, just as real as a percept. Much more so, in the case of imaginative constructions. But this illusion has degrees, and with mystics it attains its maximum. In the scientific and practical world, the work of the imagination is accompanied by only a conditional and provisional belief. The construction in images must justify its existence, in the case of the scientist, by explaining; and in the case of the man of affairs, by being embodied in an invention that is useful and answers its purpose. In the esthetic field, creation is accompanied by a momentary belief. Fancy, remarks Groos, is necessarily joined to appearance. Its special character does not consist merely in freedom in images; what distinguishes it from association and from memory is this--that what is merely representative is taken for the reality. The creative artist has a conscious illusion (_bewusste Selbsttaeuschung_): _the esthetic pleasure is an oscillation between the appearance and the reality_.[103] Mystic imagination presupposes an unconditioned and permanent belief. Mystics are believers in the true sense--they have faith. This character is peculiar to them, and has its origin in the intensity of the affective state that excites and supports this form of invention. Intuition becomes an object of knowledge only when clothed in images. There has been much dispute as to the objective value of those symbolic forms that are the working material of the mystic imagination. This contest does not concern us here; but we may make the positive statement that the constructive imagination has never obtained such a frequently hallucinatory form as in the mystics. Visions, touch-illusions, external voices, inner and "wordless" voices, which we now regard as psycho-motor hallucinations--all that we meet every moment in their works, until they become commonplace. But as to the nature of these psychic states there are only two solutions possible--one, naturalistic, that we shall indicate; the other, supernatural, which most theologians hold, and which regards these phenomena as valid and true revelation. In either case, the mystic imagination seems to us naturally tending toward objectification. It tends outwardly, by a spontaneous movement that places it on the same level as reality. Whichever conclusion we adopt, no imaginative type has the same great gift of energy and permanence in belief. II Mystic imagination, working along the lines peculiar to it, produces cosmological, religious, and metaphysical constructions, a summary exposition of which will help us understand its true nature.