[56] V. Hooke's Posthumous Works.
[57] Hooke's Mycrographia, p. 62.
CHAPTER XXII.
TASTE AND IMAGINATION.
Figurative language seems to have confounded the ideas of most writers upon metaphysics. Imagination, Memory, and Reason, have been long introduced to our acquaintance as allegorical personages, and we have insensibly learned to consider them as real beings. The "viewless regions" of the soul, have been portioned out amongst these ideal sovereigns; but disputes have, nevertheless, sometimes arisen concerning the boundaries of intellectual provinces. Amongst the disputed territories, those of Imagination have been most frequently the seat of war; her empire has been subject to continual revolution; her dominions have been, by potent invaders, divided and subdivided. Fancy,[59] Memory,[60] Ideal presence,[61] and Conception,[62] have shared her spoils.
By poets, imagination has been addressed as the great parent of genius, as the arbiter, if not the creator, of our pleasures; by philosophers, her name has been sometimes pronounced with horror; to her fatal delusions, they have ascribed all the crimes and miseries of mankind. Yet, even philosophers have not always agreed in their opinions: whilst some have treated Imagination with contempt, as the irreconcileable enemy of Reason, by others[63] she has been considered with more respect, as Reason's inseparable friend; as the friend who collects and prepares all the arguments upon which Reason decides; as the injured, misrepresented power who is often forced to supply her adversaries with eloquence, who is often called upon to preside at her own trial, and to pronounce her own condemnation.
Imagination is "the power," we are told, of "forming images:" the word image, however, does not, strictly speaking, express any thing more than a representation of an object of sight; but the power of imagination extends to objects of all the senses.
"I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay.
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away."
Imagination hears the voice, as well as sees the hand; by an easy license of metaphor, what was originally used to express the operation of our senses, is extended to them all. We do not precisely say, that Imagination, forms images of past sounds, or tastes, or smells; but we say that she forms ideas of them; and ideas, we are told, are mental images. It has been suggested by Dr. Darwin, that all these analogies between images and thoughts have, probably, originated in our observing the little pictures painted on the retina of the eye.