when we do this, when we begin, in fact, to depart from, and go beyond the actual, that we exercise the imagination. Difference illustrated by an Example. The difference between simple description, and the creations of the conceptive faculty, may be shown by reference to a single example: "The twilight hours, like birds, flew by, As lightly and as free; Ten thousand stars were in the sky, Ten thousand in the sea; For every wave, with dimpled cheek That leaped upon the air, Had caught a star in its embrace, And held it trembling there." The quiet stillness of the evening, the reflection of the stars in the sea, are the two simple ideas which enter into this beautiful stanza. They would have been faithfully and fully expressed, so far as regards all the perfections of exact description, by the simple propositions which follow: "The evening hours passed swiftly and silently; many stars appeared in the sky, and each was reflected in the sea." The poet is not content with this description. The swiftness and silentness of those passing hours remind him of the flight of birds along the sky. The resemblance strikes him as beautiful. He embodies it in his description. It is an ideal conception. He goes further. He sees in the water, not the reflection merely of the stars, but the stars them selves, as many in the sea as in the sky. Here is a departure from the truth, from the actual, an advance into the region of the ideal. Imagination, thus set free, takes still further liberties: attributes to the inanimate wave the dimpled cheek of beauty, ascribes its restlessness not to the laws of gravitation, but to the force of a strictly human passion, un ler the influence of which it leaps into the air toward the object of its affection, seizes it, and holds it, trembling, in its embrace § XI.-HISTORICAL SKETCH. VARIOUS DEFINITION AND THEORIES OF IMAGINATION Y DIFFERENT WRITERS. Definition of Dr. Reid.- Reid makes it nearly synony. mous with simple apprehension. "I take imagination, in its most proper sense, to signify a lively conception of objects of sight," the conception of things as they appear to the eye. Addison employs the term with the same limitation, that is, as confined to objects of sight. Of Stewart.-Stewart regards this as incorrect, holds that imagination is not confined to visible or even sensible objects. He regards it as a complex, not a simple power, including simple apprehension, abstraction, judgment, or taste, and association of ideas; its province being to select, from different objects, a variety of qualities and circumstances, and combine and arrange them so as to form a new creation of its own. Of Brown. Brown differs not essentially from the view of Stewart. He also makes imagination a complex operation, involving conception, abstraction, judgment, associa tion. He distinguishes between the spontaneous and the voluntary operation of the imaginative power; in the former case, there is no voluntary effort of selection, combination, etc., but images arise independently of any desire or choice of ours, by the laws of suggestion; and this he holds to be the most frequent operation of the faculty. In the case of voluntary imagination, which is attended with desire, this desire is the prominent thing, and serves to keep the conception of the subject before the mind, in consequence of which, a variety of associated conceptions follow, by the laws of suggestion, in regular train. Of these suggested conceptions and images, some, we approve, others, we da not; the former, by virtue of our approval, become more lively and permanent, while the latter pass away. Thus, without any direct effort or power of the will to combine and separate these various conceptions, they shape themselves according to our approval and desire, in obedience to the ordinary laws of suggestion. Of Smith. Sydney Smith regards imagination in much the same light-a faculty in which association plays the prin cipal part, assisted by judgment, taste, etc., amounting, in fact, to much the same thing that we call invention; the process by which a poet constructs a drama, or a machinist a steam-engine, being essentially the same. Of Wayland and Upham. - Wayland, in common with most of the authors already cited, makes imagination a complex faculty, involving abstraction, and association; "the power by which, from simple conceptions already existing in the mind, we form complex wholes or images." Some form of abstraction necessarily precedes the exercise of this power. The different elements of a conception must be first mentally severed before we can reunite them in a new conception. "It is this power of reuniting the several elements of a conception at will, that is, properly, imagination. Imagination may then be designated the power of combination." Upham takes the same view. The same view, essentially, is also given by Amandè Jacques, a French writer of distinction. View of Tissot. Tissot, as also many of the German philosophers, gives imagination the double province of recalling sensible intuitions, objects of sight, such as we have known them, and also of conceiving objects altogether dif ferently disposed from our original perceptions of them, varied from the reality. The former they ca!! imagination reproductive, the latter, creative. That form of the imagi nation which is purely spontaneous, in distinction from the voluntary, they term fancy. Of Coleridge and Mahan. Coleridge, followed by Ma han, regards imagination as the power which recombines the several elements of thought into conceptions, which conform not to mere existences, but to certain fundamental ideas in the mind itself, ideas of the beautiful, sublime, etc. These Definitions agree in what.—These definitions, it will be perceived, with scarcely an exception make imagination to be a complex faculty, and regard it as merely the power of combining, in new forms, the various elements of thought already in the mind. The correctness of each of these ideas las been already discussed. |