How may we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone--whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief--that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism--and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic--there are two distinct forms of existence. One, subjective, having no reality except in consciousness, for the one experiencing it, its reality being due only to belief, to that first affirmation of the mind so often described. The other, objective, existing in consciousness and outside of it, being real not only for me but for all those whose constitution is similar or analogous to mine. This much borne in mind, let us compare the last two degrees of the development of the imaginative life. For the imaginer of the third stage, the two forms of existence are not confounded. He distinguishes _two_ worlds, preferring one and making the best of the other, but believing in both. He is conscious of passing from one to the other. There is an alternation. The observation of Fere, although extreme, is a proof of this. At the fourth stage, in the insane, imaginative labor--the only kind with which we are concerned--is so systematized that the distinction between the two kinds of existence has disappeared. All the phantoms of his brain are invested with objective reality. Occurrences without, even the most extraordinary, do not reach one in this stage, or else are interpreted in accordance with the diseased fancy. There is no longer any alternation.[154] By way of summary we may say: The creative imagination consists of the property that images have of gathering in new combinations, through the effect of a spontaneity whose nature we have attempted to describe. It always tends to realize itself in degrees that vary from mere momentary belief to complete objectivity. Throughout its multiple manifestations, it remains identical with itself in its basic nature, in its constitutive elements. The diversity of its deeds depends on the end desired, the conditions required for its attainment, materials employed which, as we have seen, under the collective name "representations" are very unlike one another, not only as regards their sensuous origin (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) but also as regards their psychologic nature (concrete, symbolic, affective, emotional-abstract images; generic and schematic images, concepts--each group itself having shades or degrees).