The examples I have chosen should suffice to show how my distinction
between two main types of imagination--the ethical type that gives
high seriousness to creative writing and the Arcadian or dalliant
type that does not raise it above the recreative level--works out in
practice. Some such distinction is necessary if we are to understand
the imagination in its relation to the human law. But in order to
grasp the present situation firmly we need also to consider the
imagination in its relation to the natural law. I have just said that
most men have escaped from the imaginative anarchy of the emotional
romanticist through science. Now the man of science at his best is
like the humanist at his best, at once highly imaginative and highly
critical. By this coöperation of imagination and intellect they are
both enabled to concentrate effectively on the facts, though on facts
of a very different order. The imagination reaches out and perceives
likenesses and analogies whereas the power in man that separates
and discriminates and traces causes and effects tests in turn these
likenesses and analogies as to their reality: for we can scarcely
repeat too often that though the imagination gives unity it does not
give reality. If we were all Aristotles or even Goethes we might
concentrate imaginatively on both laws, and so be both scientific and
humanistic: but as a matter of fact the ordinary man’s capacity for
concentration is limited. After a spell of concentration on either law
he aspires to what Aristotle calls “relief from tension.” Now the very
conditions of modern life require an almost tyrannical concentration
on the natural law. The problems that have been engaging more and more
the attention of the Occident since the rise of the great Baconian
movement have been the problems of power and speed and utility. The
enormous mass of machinery that has been accumulated in the pursuit of
these ends requires the closest attention and concentration if it is
to be worked efficiently. At the same time the man of the West is not
willing to admit that he is growing in power alone, he likes to think
that he is growing also in wisdom. Only by keeping this situation in
mind can we hope to understand how emotional romanticism has been
able to develop into a vast system of sham spirituality. I have said
that the Rousseauist wants unity without reality. If we are to move
towards reality, the imagination must be controlled by the power
of discrimination and the Rousseauist has repudiated this power as
“false and secondary.” But a unity that lacks reality can scarcely be
accounted wise. The Baconian, however, accepts this unity gladly. He
has spent so much energy in working according to the natural law that
he has no energy left for work according to the human law. By turning
to the Rousseauist he can get the “relief from tension” that he needs
and at the same time enjoy the illusion of receiving a vast spiritual
illumination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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