(1) The all-embracing cosmological form is the conception of the world by a purely imaginative being. It is rare, abnormal, and is nowadays met with only in a few artists, dreamers, or morbidly esthetic persons, as a kind of survival and temporary form. Thus, Victor Hugo sees in each letter of the alphabet the pictured imitation of one of the objects essential to human knowledge: "_A_ is the head, the gable, the cross-beam, the arch, _arx_; _D_ is the back, _dos_; _E_ is the basement, the console, etc., so that man's house and its architecture, man's body and its structure, and then justice, music, the church, war, harvesting, geometry, mountains, etc.--all that is comprised in the alphabet through the mystic virtue of form."[104] Even more radical is Gerard de Nerval (who, moreover, was frequently subject to hallucinations): "At certain times everything takes on for me a new aspect--secret voices come out of plant, tree, animals, from the humblest insects, to caution and encourage me. Formless and lifeless objects have mysterious turns the meaning of which I understand." To others, contemporaries, "the real world is a fairy land." The middle ages--a period of lively imagination and slight rational culture--overflowed in this direction. "Many thought that on this earth everything is a sign, a figure, and that the visible is worth nothing except insofar as it covers up the invisible." Plants, animals--there is nothing that does not become subject for interpretation; all the members of the body are emblems; the head is Christ, the hairs are the saints, the legs are the apostles, the eye is contemplation, etc. There are extant special books in which all that is seriously explained. Who does not know the symbolism of the cathedrals, and the vagaries to which it has given rise? The towers are prayer, the columns the apostles, the stones and the mortar the assembly of the faithful; the windows are the organs of sense, the buttresses and abutments are the divine assistance; and so on to the minutest detail. In our day of intense intellectual development, it is not given to many to return sincerely to a mental condition that recalls that of the earliest times. Even if we come near it, we still find a difference. Primitive man puts life, consciousness, activity, into everything; symbolism does likewise, but it does not believe in an autonomous, distinct, particular soul inherent in each thing. The absence of abstraction and generalization, characteristic of humanity in its early beginnings, when it peoples the world with myriads of animate beings, has disappeared. Every source of activity revealed by symbols appears as a fragmentary manifestation; it descends from a single primary, personal or impersonal, spring. At the root of this imaginative construction there is always either theism or pantheism.