he exclaimed, 'They're talking together!'" One of Sully's correspondents says: "I had the habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures ... but even to stones and manufactured articles. I used to feel how dull it must be for the pebbles in the causeway to lie still and only see what was round about. When I walked out with a basket for putting flowers in, I used sometimes to pick up a pebble or two and carry them out to have a change." Let us stop a moment in order to try to determine the nature of this strange mental state, all the more as we shall meet it again in primitive man, and since it presents the creative imagination at its beginning. a. The first element is a fixed idea, or rather, an image, or group of images, that takes possession of consciousness to the exclusion of everything else:--it is the analogue of the state of suggestion in the hypnotized subject, with this sole difference--that the suggestion does not come from without, from another, but from the child itself--it is auto-suggestion. The stick that the child holds between his legs becomes for him an imaginary steed. The poverty of his mental development makes all the easier this contraction of the field of his consciousness, which assures the supremacy of the image. b. This has as its basis a reality that it includes. This is an important detail to note, because this reality, however tiny, gives objectivity to the imaginary creation and incorporates it with the external world. The mechanism is like that which produces illusion, but with a stable character excluding correction. The child transforms a bit of wood or paper into another self, because he perceives only the phantom he has created; that is, the images, not the material exciting them, haunt his brain. c. Lastly, this creative power investing the image with all its attributes of real existence is derived from a fundamental fact--the state of belief, i.e., adherence of the mind founded on purely subjective conditions. It does not come within my province to treat incidentally such a large question. Neglected by the older physiology, whose faculty-method inclined it toward this omission, belief or faith has recently become the object of numerous studies.[41] I necessarily limit myself to remarking that but for this psychic state, the nature of the imagination is totally incomprehensible. The peculiarity of the imagination is the production of a reality of human origin, and it succeeds therein only because of the faith accompanying the image.