CHAPTER III
This chapter, like the first, will be difficult for some students. They may profitably read, in connection with it, Professor Winchester's chapter on "Imagination" in his Literary Criticism, Neilson's discussion of "Imagination" in his Essentials of Poetry, the first four chapters of Fairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth's Preface to his volume of Poems of 1815. See also Stedman's chapter on "Imagination" in his Nature and Elements of Poetry.
Under section 2, some readers may be interested in Sir William Rowan Hamilton's account of his famous discovery of the quaternion analysis, one of the greatest of all discoveries in pure mathematics:
"Quaternions started into life, or light, full grown, on Monday, the 16th of October, 1843, as I was walking with Lady Hamilton to Dublin, and came up to Brougham Bridge, which my boys have since called the Quaternion Bridge. That is to say, I then and there felt the galvanic circuit of thought close, and the sparks which fell from it were the fundamental equations between i, j, k; exactly such as I have used them ever since. I pulled out on the spot a pocket-book, which still exists, and made an entry on which, at the very moment, I felt that it might be worth my while to expend the labor of at least ten (or it might be fifteen) years to come. But then it is fair to say that this was because I felt a problem to have been at that moment solved—an intellectual want relieved—which had haunted me for at least ifteen years before_. Less than an hour elapsed before I had asked and obtained leave of the Council of the Royal Irish Academy, of which Society I was, at that time, the President—to read at the next General Meeting a Paper on Quaternions; which I accordingly did, on November 13, 1843."
The following quotation from Lascelles-Abercrombie's study of Thomas Hardy presents in brief compass the essential problem dealt with in this chapter. It is closely written, and should be read more than once.
"Man's intercourse with the world is necessarily formative. His experience of things outside his consciousness is in the manner of a chemistry, wherein some energy of his nature is mated with the energy brought in on his nerves from externals, the two combining into something which exists only in, or perhaps we should say closely around, man's consciousness. Thus what man knows of the world is what has been formed by the mixture of his own nature with the streaming in of the external world. This formative energy of his, reducing the in-coming world into some constant manner of appearance which may be appreciable by consciousness, is most conveniently to be described, it seems, as an unaltering imaginative desire: desire which accepts as its material, and fashions itself forth upon, the many random powers sent by the world to invade man's mind. That there is this formative energy in man may easily be seen by thinking of certain dreams; those dreams, namely, in which some disturbance outside the sleeping brain (such as a sound of knocking or a bodily discomfort) is completely formed into vivid trains of imagery, and in that form only is presented to the dreamer's consciousness. This, however, merely shows the presence of the active desire to shape sensation into what consciousness can accept; the dream is like an experiment done in the isolation of a laboratory; there are so many conflicting factors when we are awake that the events of sleep must only serve as a symbol or diagram of the intercourse of mind with that which is not mind—intercourse which only takes place in a region where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the irradiations of the world. Perception itself is a formative act; and all the construction of sensation into some orderly, coherent idea of the world is a further activity of the central imaginative desire. Art is created, and art is enjoyed, because in it man may himself completely express and exercise those inmost desires which in ordinary experience are by no means to be completely expressed. Life has at last been perfectly formed and measured to man's requirements; and in art man knows himself truly the master of his existence. It is this sense of mastery which gives man that raised and delighted consciousness of self which art provokes."