It must, however, be noted that if "the mystic fact is a naive effort to apprehend the absolute, a mode of symbolic, not dialectic, thinking, that lives on symbols and finds in them the only fitting expression,"[106] it seems that this imaginative phase has been to some minds only an internal form, for they have attempted to go beyond it through ecstacy, aspiring to grasp the ultimate principle as a pure unity, without image and without form,[107] which metaphysical realism hopes to attain by other methods and by a different route. However interesting they may be for psychology, these attempts, luring one on further and further, by their seeming or real elimination of every symbolic element, become foreign to our subject, and we cannot consider them at greater length here. (3) "History shows that philosophy has done nothing but transform ideas of mystic production, substituting for the form of images and undemonstrated statements the form of assertions of a rational system."[108] This declaration of a metaphysician saves us from dwelling on the subject long. When we seek the difference between religious and metaphysical or philosophical symbolism, we find it in the nature of the constitutive elements. Turned in the direction of religion, mystic symbolism presupposes two principal elements--imagination and feeling; turned in a metaphysical direction, it presupposes imagination and a very small rational element. This substitution involves appreciable deviation from the primitive type. The construction is of greater logical regularity. Besides, and this is the important characteristic, the subject-matter--though still resembling symbolic images--tends to become concepts: such are vivified abstractions, allegorical beings, hereditary entities of spirits and of gods. In short, metaphysical mysticism is a transition-form towards metaphysical rationalism, although these two tendencies have always been inimical in the history of philosophy, just as in the history of religion.