At bottom the ideal is an individual concept. If objection is offered that an ideal common to a large mass of men is a fact of common experience (e.g., idealists and realists in the fine arts, and even more so religious, moral, social and political concepts, etc.), the answer is easy: There are families of minds. They have a common ideal because, in certain matters, they have the same way of feeling and thinking. It is not a transcendental idea that unites them; but this result occurs because from their common aspirations the collective ideal becomes disengaged; it is, in scholastic terminology, a _universale post rem_. The ideal conception is the first moment of the creative act, which is not yet battling with the conditions of the actual. It is only the internal vision of an individual mind that has not yet been projected externally with a form and body. We know how the passage from the internal to the external life has given rise among inventors to deceptions and complaints. Such was the imaginative construction that could not, unchanged, enter into its mould and become a reality. Let us now examine the various forms of this coagulating[32] principle in advancing from the lowest to the highest, from the unity vaguely anticipated to the absolute and tyrannical masterful unity. Following a method that seems to me best adapted for these ill-explained questions I shall single out only the principal forms, which I have reduced to three--the unstable, the organic or middle, and the extreme or semi-morbid unity. (1) The unstable form has its starting point directly and immediately in the reproductive imagination without creation. It assembles its elements somewhat by chance and stitches together the bits of our life; it ends only in beginnings, in attempts. The unity-principle is a momentary disposition, vacillating and changing without cessation according to the external impressions or modifications of our vital conditions and of our humor. By way of example let us recall the state of the day-dreamer building castles in the air; the delirious constructions of the insane, the inventions of the child following all the fluctuations of chance, of its caprice; the half-coherent dreams that seem to the dreamer to contain a creative germ. In consequence of the extreme frailty of the synthetic principle the creative imagination does not succeed in accomplishing its task and remains in a condition intermediate between simple association of ideas and creation proper.