Philosophic Imagination.-The term philosophic imagination, in distinction from poetic, is employed by the same dis. tinguished 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.

Common Theory. The view which has been very generally entertained of the faculty now under consideration, both in this country, and by the Scotch philosophers, resolves it partially or wholly into other powers of the mind, as abstraction, association, judgment, taste. In this view, it is no longer a simple faculty, if indeed it can with propriety be called a faculty at all, inasmuch as the effects ascribed to it can be accounted for by the agency of the other powers now named.

A different View. It seems to me that imagination, while doubtless it presupposes and involves the exercise of the suggestive and associative principle, of the analytic or divi sive principle by which compounds are broken up into their distinct elements, and also, to some extent, of judgment, or the principle which perceives relations, is, nevertheless, itself a power distinct from each of these, and from all of them in combination. Memory presupposes perception, or something to be reproduced and remembered. It is not, therefore, to be regarded as a complex faculty, comprising the perceplive power as one of its factors. The power to combine, in

like manner, presupposes the previous separation of elements capable of being reunited, but is not to be resolved into that power which produces such separation. It involves some exercise of judgment along with its own proper and distinctive activity, but is not to be confounded with, or resolved into the power of perceiving relations.

The faculty of ideal conception is really a power of the mind, and it is a simple power, a thing of itself, although it may involve and presuppose the activity of other faculties along with its own. Abstraction, association, judgment, taste- none of them singly, nor all of them combined, are what we mean by it.

Theory of Brown. - Dr. Brown resolves the faculty now in question into simple suggestion, accompanied, in the case of voluntary imagination, with desire, and with judgment. There is nothing in the process different from what occurs in any case of the suggestion of one thought by another, he would say. We think of a mountain, we think of gold, and some analogy, or common property of the two, serves to suggest the complex conception, mountain of gold. Even where the process is not purely spontaneous, but accompanied with desire on our part, it is still essentially the same process. We think of something, and this suggests other related conceptions, some of which we approve as fit for our purpose, others we reject as unfit. Here is simple suggestion accompanied with desire and judgment; and these are all the factors that enter into the process. "We may term this state, or series of states, imagination or fancy, and the term may be convenient for its brevity. But in using it we must not forget that the term, however brief and simple, is still the name of a state that is complex, or of a succession of states, that the phenomena comprehended under it being the same in nature, are not rendered, by the use of a mere word, different from those to which we have already given peculiar names expressive of them as they exist separately; and that it is to the classes of these elementary phenomena,

therefore, that we must refer the whole process of imagina tion in our philosophic analysis."

Strictures on this Theory. This view, it will be perceived, in reality sweeps the faculty of imagination entirely from the field. To this I cannot yield my assent. Is not this state, or affection of the mind, as Dr. Brown calls it quite a distinct thing from other mental states and affeo tions? Has it not a character sui generis? Is not th operation, the thing done, a different thing from what is done in other cases, and by other faculties; and has not the mind the power of doing this new and different thing; and is not that power of doing a given thing what we mean in any case by a faculty of the mind? Is there not an element in this process under consideration which is not involved in other mental processes, viz.: the ideal element; the conception, not of the actual and the real, as in the case of the other faculties, but of the purely ideal? And if the mind has the faculty of forming a class of conceptions so entirely distinct from the others, why not give that faculty a name, and its own proper name, and allow it a place, its own proper place, among the mental powers?

§ V.-IMAGINATION NOT MERELY THE POWER OF COMBINATION.

The prevalent View. -This question is closely connected with that just discussed. The usual definitions make the faculty under consideration a mere process of combining and arranging ideas previously in the mind, so as to form new compounds. You have certain conceptions. These you combine one with another, as a child puts together blocks that lie before him, to suit himself, now this upper most, now that, and the result is a work of imagination. It is the mere arrangement of previous conceptions, and not itself a power of producing or conceiving any thing. And even this arrangement of former conceptions is itself a spontaneous casual process, according to Dr. Brown, not properly a power of the mind.

Makes Imagination little else than Invention. -According to this view, imagination is hardly to be distinguished from mere invention in the mechanic arts, which is the result of some new combination of previously existing materials. The construction of a steam-pump with a new kind of valve, is as really a work of imagination, as Paradise Lost. The man who contrives a carding-machine, and the man who conceives the Transfiguration, the Apollo Belvidere, or th Iliad, are exercising both the same faculty-merely combining in new forms the previous possessions of the mind.

This View inadequate. This is a very meagre and inadequate view, as it seems to me, of the faculty of imagination. It fixes the attention upon, and elevates into the importance of a definition, a circumstance in itself unimportant, while it overlooks the essential characteristic of the faculty to be defined. The creative activity of the mind is lost sight of in attending to the materials on which it works.

The Distinctive Element of Imagination overlooked.— Imagination I take to be the power of conceiving the ideal. The elements which enter into and compose that ideal conception, are, indeed, elements previously existing, not themselves the mind's creations; but the conception itself is the mind's own creation, and this creative activity, this power of conceiving the purely ideal, is the very essence of that which we are seeking to define. True, the separate conceptions which enter into the composition of Paradise Lost -trees, flowers, rivers, mountains, angels, deities were already in the poet's mind before he began to meditate the sublime epic. They were but the material on which he wrought. Has he then created nothing, conceived nothing? Have we truly and adequately described that immortal poem when we say that it is a mere combination of trees, rivers, hills, and angels, in certain proportions and relations not previously attempted?

Illustration drawn from the Arts. The artist makes use

of colors previously existing when he would produce a paint. ing, and of marble already in the block, when he would chisel a statue or a temple. In reality he only combines. Yet it would be but a poor definition of any one of these sublime arts to say that painting, sculpture, architecture, is merely the putting together of previous materials to form new wholes. We object to such a definition, not because it af firms what is not true, but because it does not affirm the chief and most important truth; not because of what it states, but because of what it omits to state. These are creative arts. They give us indeed not new substances, but new forms, new products, new ideas. So is imagination a creative faculty. The individual elements may not be new, but the grand product and result is new, a creation of the mind's own. And this is of more consequence than the fact that the elementary conceptions were already in the mind. The one is the essential characteristic, the other a comparatively unimportant circumstance; the one describes the thing itself, the other the mere modus operands of the thing.

Illustration drawn from the Creation of the material World. What is creation in its higher and more proper sense, as applied to the formation, by divine power, of the world in which we dwell? There was a moment, in the eternity of the past, when the omnipotent builder divided the light from the darkness, and the evening and the morning were the first day. The elements may have existed be foreheat, air, earth, water, the various material and dif fused substance of the world about to be - but latent, onfused, chaotic those elements, not called forth and ap pointed each to its own proper sphere. Light slumbers amid the chaotic elements unseen. He speaks the word, and it comes forth from its hiding-place, and stands revealed in its own beauty and splendor. Has God made nothing, in so doing? Has he conceived nothing, created nothing? And when the work goes on, ard is at length complete. and the