_Correctness of this View questioned._--That many who enjoy the creations of the poet and the splendid fictions of the dramatist and novelist, are themselves incapable of producing like creations, is doubtless true. The same is true in other departments of the creative art. Many persons enjoy a fine painting or statue, good music, or a noble architectural design, who cannot themselves produce these works of art. This does not prove them deficient, however, in imagination, for the inability may be owing to other causes, as want of training; nor, on the other hand, does the simple enjoyment of ideal creations involve a different kind of imagination from that exercised in creating. Imagination is, as it seems to me, always active, never passive. Where it exists, and whenever it is called into exercise, it acts, and its action is, in some sense, creative. It conceives the ideal, that which, as conceived, does not exist, or at least is not known to the senses as existing. It matters not in what way these ideal conceptions are suggested, whether by the signs of language written or spoken, or by those characters which the painter, the sculptor, or the architect presents, each in his own way, and with his own material, or by one's own previous conceptions. _Every_ ideal conception is suggested by _something_ antecedent to itself. All active imagination is, in other words, passive, in the sense here intended, and all passive imagination, so called, is in reality active, so far as it is, properly speaking, imagination at all. The difference between the faculty that produces and that which merely enjoys, is a difference of _degree_ rather than of kind. The one is an imagination peculiarly active; the other slightly so; or, more properly, the one mind has _much_, the other _little_ imagination. _Philosophic Imagination._--The term _philosophic_ imagination, in distinction from _poetic_, is employed by the same distinguished writer to denote the faculty, possessed by some minds of a high order, of discovering new truths in science; of so classifying and arranging known facts as to bring to light the laws which govern them, or, by a happy conjecture, assigning to phenomena hitherto unexplained, a theory which will account for them. Whether the faculty now intended is properly imagination, admits of question. Its field is that of conjecture, supposition, theory, invention. It involves the exercise of judgment and reason. It seeks after truth. It is a process of discovering what is. Imagination deals with the ideal only--inquires not for the true. § IV.--IMAGINATION A SIMPLE FACULTY.