Again, a mental image or phantasm, visual or auditory, is improperly called an imagination, if there is nothing more than the reproduction of a single sense-quality. Imaginations represent not abstract sensations, but perceptions. To see an armed knight is not merely to have a visual impression of him, but to perceive a living, solid, heavy object definitely in space; and imagination reproduces the whole of this, and otherwise would be quite uninteresting. What would the tournament in Ivanhoe amount to if the knights were only phantoms?
Further, imagination, merely as a reproduction of perception, is not distinguished from memory; but, in use, the two are always contrasted. Memories are recognised (in their complete form) as returning to us from earlier experience, both their component pictures and the order of them, and they are relatively stable; imaginations are felt to be more or less novel, and can easily be modified. Probably all the elements of an imagination might have occurred in a memory; but the arrangement of these elements is often so different from any actual experience as to baffle every attempt to redistribute them amongst their sources. Hence, in normal cases, our attitudes toward a memory and toward an imagination are entirely different. If a seeming memory prove false, we say it was only an imagination.
But, once more, a good many men never have images or phantasmata (except words), or very few or faint ones, or only when falling asleep, and so on. Yet they are not wanting in imagination; words or other signs serve them instead of images to carry all meanings (the important matter); they enter into the spirit of poetry and literary fiction: so that imagination may be active without images. And the fact seems to be that the effectiveness of mental processes depends very little upon phantasmata, but upon something much deeper in the mind; and that there exist in men all degrees of concrete representative power, from those who picture everything they think of with vivid and definite detail, down, through many stages of decreasing realisation, to those who have only faint or fragmentary “images,” or even none at all: without its being possible to say (at present) that one type of mind is better or worse than another; though they may be adapted to different tasks.
Expectation and reasoning, which are closely allied (for every definite expectation is a sort of inference), are often carried on in pictures—“picture thinking”—and this also is called imagination. Tyndall’s brilliant address on The Scientific Uses of the Imagination is well known. It greatly helps some men in thinking to form pictures of what they think about, such as a machine or an anatomical specimen, as if they had the thing before them; or even of an atom, which no man ever has before him, and which cannot be imagined by reproducing the precept, but only by constructing a picture from much grosser materials according to concepts. The picture thus formed necessarily falls short in some ways of the thing thought or meant, and can only be prevented from misleading us by guarding it with definitions or rules or abstract ideas; and this shows that the effectiveness of thought, the deeper process mentioned above, is a concatenation or evolution of meanings or general ideas, and that it is, in part, by illustrating these that pictures are useful: they also serve to fix attention, as words do.
Thus reasoning may express itself by imagination. On the other hand, imagination is more frequently contrasted with reason, as dealing in fiction, not reality. Our confusion is shown thus: to call an historian imaginative is depreciatory; yet it is as bad to say he is wanting in imagination. In the latter case, we mean that he fails adequately to conceive the events he treats of; in the former, that he embellishes or distorts them with unverifiable representations.
Again, the term “imagination” is sometimes confined to intellectual processes in the fine arts: dramas, novels, etc., are works of imagination. Now dramas and novels all proceed upon one method, namely: they begin by stating or insinuating an hypothesis concerning certain persons in a given situation, and then deducing (that is reasoning out) the consequences, occasionally helping the plot by further assumptions: at least that is how it appears, though probably the main incident of the plot is thought of first, and then an hypothesis is framed that conveniently leads up to it. And if the reasoning is feeble, and if the subsidiary assumptions are too numerous or too facile, we say the work is flimsy or improbable—allowing for the genre; for a romance is not expected to be as probable as a modern novel. Gulliver’s Travels afford the most perfect example of this method; for each voyage begins with a frank absurdity—men six inches or sixty feet high, a flying island, rational horses; but this being granted, the sequel makes tolerable logic. Well, many scientific investigations seem to follow exactly the same method—begin with an hypothesis, deduce the consequences, and occasionally help out the argument with further hypotheses (though that is not all): and here again the conclusion is usually thought of first, and the hypothesis invented to explain it. If it be said that the scientist believes his hypothesis to be true, whilst the romancer does not, it may be replied that the scientist sometimes expressly warns us that his assumption is only a “working hypothesis,” which may not be true (though he thinks it may be), whereas early epic poets and minstrels often regarded their work as by no means without a foundation in fact.
Imagination and reasoning, then, are closely allied or interwoven, and the contrasting of them depends entirely upon this, that there is a sense in which imagination is not a presentation of truth or matter-of-fact, whether it is believed to be or not; and a sense in which reasoning is devoted solely to the discovery of truth concerning facts, and to that end is protected by a methodology, carefully comparing its premises, carefully verifying its conclusions; whereas the imagination that is contrasted with reasoning knows nothing of a methodology nor of verification. Even the modern novelist, a great part of whose hypothesis is usually true—the present state of society, facts of history or geography, etc.,—does not pretend to present a truth of fact. It belongs to his art to play at reasoning; he has learnt to play the game very well; but it remains play: he aims at and attains not truth but verisimilitude. And when we look back on the history of fiction we see (on the whole) the verisimilitude growing, age by age, slighter and fainter; till in early romance and poetry it is disturbed and broken and destroyed by stories about monsters, impossible heroes, magicians and gods, believed at one time to be true, and just the same as stories still believed by barbarians and savages, but which we believe no longer.
It is such stories as these last, including all superstitions, that I especially call “imagination-beliefs.” The term includes all false beliefs, but with the rest I am not directly concerned. How are imagination-beliefs possible?
§ 3. Belief
Belief is here used to denote the attitude of mind in which perceptions are regarded as real, judgments as true of matters-of-fact, actions and events as about to have certain results. It is a serious and respectful attitude; for matter-of-fact compels us to adjust our behaviour to it, whether we have power to alter it or not. Hume describes belief as having a certain “force, vivacity, solidity, firmness, steadiness; influence and importance in governing our actions”;[85] and these terms are quite just, but most of them are synonyms; and the whole dictionary will not make anybody understand what belief is who has never felt it. However, there is no such person.