[77] The foregoing analysis of the Imagination brings to view some of the important points of distinction between it and the other faculties; for example, the circumstance that the trains and constructions of the Imagination are their own ends, and not a means to farther ends, as in the constructions of science and of the industrial arts. All creative originality is not imagination; the steam-engine was not a product of this faculty.
The main features that distinguish the Imagination seem to be these three:—
1. It is a faculty of the CONCRETE, like Perception and Memory, and not of the Abstract, as the scientific faculties. When we imagine a thing, we picture it to the mind, as far as we are able, in its full concrete reality. Our imagination of a scene in the tropics is of the character of an actual perception; it embraces, or should embrace, whatever would strike the view of any one surveying the reality.
2. Imagination rises above Perception and Memory, in being a CONSTRUCTIVE faculty. It alters, re-arranges, puts together the materials of perception and memory to satisfy certain demands of the mind. In this respect, it is more than Conception, which as viewed by the author, is also a faculty of the concrete, but introduces no novelty of combination. Conception may involve a great constructive effort, as when we try to picture to ourselves a poet’s creation by the help of his language; nevertheless, the term imagination loses its characteristic force, and leaves an important meaning without a name, if applied to this conceiving or realizing effort. The imaginative stretch belongs to the poet or artist; the power of conceiving is what the reader of a poem brings into exercise.
3. Imagination is swayed by some PRESENT EMOTION. This is another way of expressing the author’s view that it is an end in itself. If we were to use the general word “feeling,” we should encounter the difficulty of separating imagination 246 from common industry, which is all intended to gain pleasures or ward off pains.
The brief designation “present emotion” approximates to, but does not fully bring out, the precise operation of the feelings in the constructions of Imagination. When, actuated by the love of the marvellous, any one invents a fabulous story, or highly exaggerates a real occurrence, the process is a typical instance of the imaginative workings.
The Fine Arts are the domain of Imagination; the one goes far to specify the other. If the coincidence were exact, Imagination would be defined by a definition of the Æsthetic emotions. Now, although any original construction, selected and put together to gratify an Æsthetic emotion, is a work of Imagination, yet imagination is not exhausted by fine art. The picture that an angry man draws of his enemy would be called an effort of imagination, but not a work of fine art. All our emotions,—Wonder, Fear, Love, Anger, Vanity—determine the constructions of the intellect, when called into active exercise; and for these constructions we have no other name but imagination, whether they may, or may not give pleasure as works of art.
Perhaps this exceptional region may be marked out by a statement of the perverting influence, or bias, of the feelings in matters of truth and falsehood, or in works of utility. When the true and the useful, instead of being determined by their own ends, or their proper criteria, are swayed by extraneous emotions—giving birth to mythical or fictitious creations—we have the corrupting substitution of Imagination for Reason in men’s judgments and opinions.
Thus, Fear is a potent spur to Imagination; its creations may not be æsthetically agreeable, and therefore may not come under the definition of Fine Art; yet they are fairly to be described as perverting the judgment of true and false.—B.