With regard to the working of Imagination and other so-called faculties, Philosophers, I rather think, have cut and carved our mental nature with too keen a knife. They have “murdered to dissect.” Our books lay it down, for instance, as an axiom, that a definite act of the pure understanding must needs precede every movement of the affections, that we must form a distinct conception of a thing as pleasant before we can desire it, that we must first judge a character to be noble, before admiration of it can be awakened. I am not sure that this is the true account of the matter, am not convinced that the understanding unmixed with feeling, the pure intelligence untouched by sentiment, must first decide before the affections can be moved. Is it so clear that in all cases we can separate knowledge from affection? Is there not a large field of truth—namely, moral truths, in which we cannot do so—into which the affections must actively enter before any judgment can be formed? For, as has been said,[1] “The affections themselves are a kind of understanding; we cannot understand without them. Affection is a part of insight; it is required to understand the facts of the case. The moral affections, _e. g._, are the very instruments by which we intellectually apprehend good and high human character. All admiration is affection—the admiration of virtue, the admiration of nature. Affection itself then is a kind of intelligence, and we cannot separate the feeling in our nature from the reason. Feeling is necessary for comprehension, and we cannot know what embrace particular instance of goodness is, we cannot embrace the true conception of goodness in general, without it.” If this be true of moral apprehension, if in this intelligence and affection are so coincident, so interpenetrate each other, that we cannot say which is first, which last, where the one ends, the other begins, the same truth holds good in imaginative apprehension. Here, too, there is not first a cut-and-dry intellectual act, and then a succeeding emotion. From the first, in every act of the imagination, these two elements are present simultaneously; though it is true that in time the emotional element tends to grow stronger than the intellectual, sometimes even overpowers it. Imagination in its essence seems to be, from the first, intellect and feeling blended and interpenetrating each other. Thus it would seem that purely intellectual acts belong to the surface and outside of our nature,—as you pass onward to the depths, the more vital places of the soul, the intellectual, the emotional, and the moral elements are all equally at work,—and this in virtue of their greater reality, their more essential truth, their nearer contact with the centre of things. To this region belong all acts of high imagination—the region intermediate between pure understanding and moral affection, partaking of both elements, looking equally both ways.