Reason And Imagination Essay, Research Paper
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action which
are called Reason and Imagination, the former may be considered as mind
contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced;
and the latter as mind, acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its
own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each
containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. ?2 The one is the
to poiein, or the principle of synthesis and has for its objects those forms
which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the
to-logizein or principle of analysis and its action regards the relations of
things, simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity
but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results.
?3 Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; Imagination [[is]] the
perception of the value of those quantities, both seperately and as a whole. ?4
Reason respects the differences, and Imagination the similitudes of things. ?5
Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the
spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
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?6 Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the
Imagination:” and Poetry is connate with the origin of man. ?7 Man is an
instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven,
like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an ?olian lyre; which move
it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody. ?8 But there is a principle within
the human being and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise
than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal
adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite
them. ?9 It is as if the lyre could accomodate its chords to the motions of that
which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician
can accomodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. ?10 A child at play by itself
will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone
and every gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the
pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of
that impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died
away, so the child seeks by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration
{{Sig. 1v}} of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. ?11 In
relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are, what
Poetry is to higher objects. ?12 The savage (for the savage is to ages what the
child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects
in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or
pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects
and of his apprehension of them. ?13 Man in society, with all his passions and
his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an
additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions, and
language, gesture and the imitative arts become at once the representation and
the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and
the harmony. ?14 The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its
elements society results, begin to develope themselves from the moment that two
human beings co-exist; the future is contained within the present as the plant
within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependance
become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which
the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social;
and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth
in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. ?15 Hence men, even in the
infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct
from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them[[,]]. all
expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. ?16 But let
us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an enquiry into
the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which
the imagination is expressed upon its forms.
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?17 In the youth of the world men dance and sing and imitate natural objects,
observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. ?18
And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order in the
motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of
language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. ?19 For there is
a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic
representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and
a purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this
order has been called taste, by modern writers. ?20 Every man, in the infancy of
art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from
which this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently
marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances
where the {{Sig. 2r}} predominance of this faculty of approximation to the
beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest
pleasure and its cause) is very great. ?21 Those in whom it exists in excess are
poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from
the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their
own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication
from that community. ?22 Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is it
marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their
apprehension, until the words which re present them become through time signs
for portions and classes of thoughts, instead of pictures of integral thoughts;
and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which
have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of
human intercourse. ?23 These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord
Bacon to be “the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of
the world * –” and he considers the faculty which receives them as the
storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. ?24 In the infancy of society
every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be
a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which
exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and
secondly between perception and expression. ?25 Every original language near to
its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of
lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and
are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of Poetry.
* De Augment. Scient. Cap. I Lib 3.
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?26 But Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are
not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and
statuary and painting; they are the institutors of laws |&| the founders of
civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw
into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial
apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.
?27 Hence all original religions are allegorical or susceptible of allegory, and
like Janus have a double face of false and true. ?28 Poets, according to the
circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared were called in the
earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets: a poet essentially
comprises and unites both these characters. ?29 For he not only beholds
intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present,
and his thoughts are the forms of {{Sig. 2v}} the flower and the fruit of latest
time. ?30 Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word,
or that they can fortell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of
events: such is the pretence of superstition which would make poetry an
attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. ?31 A Poet
participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his
conceptions time and place and number are not. ?32 The grammatical forms which
express the moods of time, and the difference of persons and the distinction of
place are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as
poetry, and the choruses of ?schylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s Paradise
would afford more than any other writings examples of this fact, if the limits
of this paper did not forbid citation. ?33 The creations of sculpture, painting
and music are illustrations still more decisive.
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?34 Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action are all the
instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of
speech which considers the effects as a synonime of the cause. ?35 But poetry in
a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially
metrical language which are created by that imperial faculty whose throne is
curtained within the invisible nature of man. ?36 And this springs from the
nature itself of language which is a more direct representation of the actions
and the passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and
delicate combinations than colour, form or motion, and is more plastic and
obedient to the controul of that faculty of which it is the creation. ?37 For
language is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and has relation to thoughts
alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art have relations
among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression.
?38 The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which
enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. ?39 Hence the
fame of sculptors, painters and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the
great masters of these arts, may yield in no degree to that of those who have
employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that
of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of equal skill
will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. ?40 The fame of
legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone
seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense: but it can scarcely be a
question whether if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross
opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to
them in their higher character of poets {{Sig. 3r}} any excess will remain.
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?41 We have thus circumscribed the word Poetry within the limits of that art
which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty
itself. ?42 It is necessary however to make the circle still narrower, and to
determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language; for the
popular division into prose and verse, is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
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?43 Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards
that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations, has
always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of
thoughts. ?44 Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform
and harmonious recurrence of sound without which it were not poetry, and which
is scarcely less indispensible to the communication of its influence, than the
words themselves without reference to that peculiar order. ?45 Hence the vanity
of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might
discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from
one language into another the creations of a poet. ?46 The plant must spring
again from its seed or it will bear no flower — and this is the burthen of the
curse of Babel.
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?47 An observation of the regular mode of the occurrence of this harmony, in the
language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre,
or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. ?48 Yet it is
by no means essential that a poet should accomodate his language to this
traditional form, so that the harmony which is its spirit, be observed. ?49 The
practise is indeed convenient and popular and to be preferred, especially in
such composition as includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably
innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his
peculiar versification. ?50 The distinction between poets and prose-writers is a
vulgar error. ?51 The distinction between philosophers and poets has been
anticipated. ?52 Plato was essentially a poet — the truth and splendour of his
imagery and the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible
to conceive. ?53 He {{Sig. 3v}} rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic and
lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of
shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which
would include under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. ?54
Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods but with little success. ?55
Lord Bacon was a poet. * His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm which
satisfies the sense no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy
satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the
circumference of the readers’ mind and pours itself forth together with it into
the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. ?56 — All the
Authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are
inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by
images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are
harmonious and rhythmical and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being
the echo of the eternal music. ?57 Nor are those supreme poets, who have
employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their
subjects, less incapable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than
those who have omitted that form. ?58 Shakespear, Dante and Milton (to confine
ourselves to modern writers.) are philosophers of the very loftiest powers.
* See the Filium Labyrinthi, and the Essay of Death particularly.
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?59 A Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. ?60 There
is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of
detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place,
circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according
to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the
creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. ?61 The one is partial,
and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of
events which can never again recur; the other is universal and contains within
itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the
possible varieties of {{Sig. 4r}} human nature. ?62 Time, which destroys the
beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stript of the poetry which
should invest them, augments that of Poetry and forever developes new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. ?63 Hence
epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of
it. ?64 A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts
that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that
which is distorted.
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?65 The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a
whole being a poem. ?66 A single sentence may be considered as a whole though it
may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word
even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought. ?67 And thus all the great