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."