in their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions
may exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace
facts. There may be
"Some Xanadu where Kublai can
a stately pleasure dome decree,"
and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For
if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further
to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's
distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of
imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation
in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not
inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely,
that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For
otherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention.
Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring of
psychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the
action regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own,
inherited, or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with
what we know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now,
which we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the
local. It does not mark the limits of the possible.
That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is
evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We
are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between
the search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the
one science and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute
imagination to art, we are by no means so ready to appreciate its
connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the
subject, it is science rather than art that demands imagination of her
votaries. Not that art may not involve the quality to a high degree, but
that a high degree of art is quite compatible with a very small amount
of imagination. On the one side we may instance painting. Now painting
begins its career in the humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor
copyist at that. At first so slight was its skill that the rudest
symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was conventionally implied by a
few scratches bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing.
Gradually, owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved.
Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from another;
a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of imagination. Not that
imagination of a higher order has not been called into play, although
even now pictures are often happy adaptations rather than creations
proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others, unfortunately for
themselves and still more for the public, have not. For that the art may
attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much distinction for
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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