This faculty or habit consists essentially in combining ideas
(particular or general), or objects and ideas, so as to form systems
different from those occurring in actual experience. The whole has
never been perceived, though all its elements have been perceived.
Any association of ideas may be called imaginary if it occurs in an
order different from the order of experience. But the term Imagination
is properly confined to novel combinations deliberately and
consciously formed to serve some utility. It is thus distinguished
from Reverie, in which no choice or control enters into the
recollection.
We control our ideal associations by means of comparison, which is
therefore what distinguishes imagination from reverie. For instance,
if I see a vase from which the handle has been broken off, I can
imagine the handle restored, but to do this I must be able to compare
the broken vase with a similar whole vase, or with the general idea
'whole vase.' The combination I form is novel, for I have never
seen this particular vase in a whole state; if I had I should not be
imagining it but recollecting it.
There are two principal distinctions to be noticed in imagination; one
relates to the mode of forming the imaginary idea, the other to its
use.
In the above case we form the whole by mechanical extension or
addition. The process is as simple as nailing one piece of wood to
another. But suppose the broken vase is of porcelain and the whole one
of bronze, the restoration can still be made, but it is no mechanical
junction of two previous ideas. It is a fusion of the material
supplied by one idea with a form supplied by another. On the same
principle a vase may be wholly designed from hints supplied by a score
or more of vases, differing in material, in size, colour, decoration,
and so forth. In these cases the new idea may be said to be totally
different throughout its length from any other and from any object.
Yet it is a combination of previous ideas. We do not create any
absolutely new idea. This may be called imagination by _transfusion_.
The elements may be so well mixed that it is impossible to trace each
back to its origin.
Transfusion may be further complicated by recompounding ideas already
compound. This occurs, as we shall see, in forming the 'external
world' of materialists and realists.
The two uses to which imaginary ideas are put are the Artistic and the
Rational.
We have seen (X) that emotions may be excited by objects or ideas.
Hence, agreeable emotions may be excited by suggesting the objects
associated with the original agreeable feelings; and novel emotions
may be excited by novel combinations of the ideas of experienced
objects that have been signs of feelings. From this possibility has
arisen that extensive province of activity called ART, which consists
in imagining novel combinations of things capable of exciting novel
and pleasurable emotions (not feelings), and in finding means of
suggesting such ideas to others. Some of these combinations are so
subtle, and the emotions they excite so exquisite, that we value the
artistic work at a great price, and rank the man who imagined it among
the benefactors of his species.
REASON, or the Rational Imagination, does not appeal directly to the
emotions. It serves the uses of life by enabling us to imagine what we
have not yet experienced but may have to experience, and the quality
aimed at is accuracy of intellectual ideation, not emotional pleasure.
It is found by experience that an intellect well furnished with ideas
may learn to combine them into pictures or preconceptions of the
future, and the indirect utility of this accomplishment is very great.
If it does not, like art, give immediate sentimental pleasure,
it often enables us so to control events that we are brought into
conditions affording more lasting satisfaction than many expensive
works of art. Reason, then, is the imaginative faculty applied to the
purpose of acquiring ideas of experience that has not yet taken place,
and it is good in proportion to the similarity of the idea to the
anticipated or unknown experience.
Although imagination is more important than generalisation, it has
received little attention from metaphysicians. Their treatment of it
is not uniform, but it generally exhibits two fundamental defects.
They consider it an independent or ultimate faculty, that is, one
incapable of resolution into anything more simple. We have seen that
it is an application of comparison, and comparison depends on the
coincidence of particular ideas.
Then they regard imagination only in its artistic uses, not
perceiving that it is also the basis of reason. Reason they treat
as generalisation--a vice that pervades all their systems. They put
reason and art in essential opposition, whereas the difference between
them is only specific--a difference of use.
Some metaphysicians confound imagination with mere recollection. 'It
is,' says one of them, 'the faculty representative of the phenomena
both of the external and internal worlds.' But there is a great
difference between the representation of what we have experienced
actually, and the representation of a future and perhaps impossible
event: the latter only is imaginative. 'There is no train of ideas,'
says another, 'to which the term imagination may not be applied.' If a
man at the end of the day calls to mind all the events of the day in
a train of ideas, that is recollection, and would be very
inappropriately termed imagination. According to a third, imagination
has for its object the concrete as opposed to abstractions and
generalities. This also is inexact. A traveller may describe in
general the qualities of a foreign country or tribe of men, and we
shall imagine that generality without a concrete picture. The power of
imagining generalities and abstractions necessarily follows from the
power of forming them in the first instance.