Underestimation of the importance of the arts is nearly always due to ignorance of the workings of the mind. Experiences such as these, into which we willingly and whole-heartedly enter, or into which we may be enticed and inveigled, present peculiar opportunities for betrayal. They are the most formative of experiences, because in them the development and systematisation of our impulses goes to the furthest lengths. In ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our response; the range and complexity of the impulse-systems involved is less; the need for action, the comparative uncertainty and vagueness of the situation, the intrusion of accidental irrelevancies, inconvenient temporal spacing—the action being too slow or too fast—all these obscure the issue and prevent the full development of the experience. We have to jump to some rough and ready solution. But in the ‘imaginative experience’ these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and interinanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life. As a chemist’s balance to a grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative moment to the mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical affairs. The comparison will bear pressing. The results, for good or evil, of the untrammelled response are not lost to us in our usual trafficking. [76] Even Coleridge was not exempt from this failing. Cf. his comments on Gloster. [77] Essay on Casanova, in _Affirmations_, p. 115. [78] _Affirmations_, p. 115. CHAPTER XXXII The Imagination Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together; To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded. _The Phœnix and the Turtle._ At least six distinct senses of the word ‘imagination’ are still current in critical discussion. It is convenient to separate them before passing on to consider the one which is most important. (i) The production of vivid images, usually visual images, already sufficiently discussed, is the commonest and the least interesting thing which is referred to by imagination.