Men are ruled by imagination: imagination makes them into men, capable
of madness and of immense labours. We work dreaming. Consider what
dreams must have dominated the builders of the Pyramids--dreams
geometrical, dreams funereal, dreams of resurrection, dreams of
outdoing the pyramid of some other Pharaoh! What dreams occupy that
fat man in the street, toddling by under his shabby hat and bedraggled
rain-coat? Perhaps he is in love; perhaps he is a Catholic, and
imagines that early this morning he has partaken of the body and
blood of Christ; perhaps he is a revolutionist, with the millennium
in his heart and a bomb in his pocket. The spirit bloweth where it
listeth; the wind of inspiration carries our dreams before it and
constantly refashions them like clouds. Nothing could be madder, more
irresponsible, more dangerous than this guidance of men by dreams. What
saves us is the fact that our imaginations, groundless and chimerical
as they may seem, are secretly suggested and controlled by shrewd old
instincts of our animal nature, and by continual contact with things.
The shock of sense, breaking in upon us with a fresh irresistible
image, checks wayward imagination and sends it rebounding in a new
direction, perhaps more relevant to what is happening in the world
outside.
When I speak of being governed by imagination, of course I am indulging
in a figure of speech, in an ellipsis; in reality we are governed by
that perpetual latent process within us by which imagination itself is
created. Actual imaginings--the cloud-like thoughts drifting by--are
not masters over themselves nor over anything else. They are like
the sound of chimes in the night; they know nothing of whence they
came, how they will fall out, or how long they will ring. There is a
mechanism in the church tower; there was a theme in the composer's
head; there is a beadle who has been winding the thing up. The sound
wafted to us, muffled by distance and a thousand obstacles, is but the
last lost emanation of this magical bell-ringing. Yet in our dream
it is all in all; it is what first entertains and absorbs the mind.
Imagination, when it chimes within us, apparently of itself, is no less
elaborately grounded; it is a last symptom, a rolling echo, by which we
detect and name the obscure operation that occasions it; and not this
echo in its aesthetic impotence, but the whole operation whose last
witness it is, receives in science the name of imagination, and may be
truly said to rule the human world.
This extension of names is inevitable although unfortunate, because
language and perception are poetical before they become scientific,
if they ever do; as Aristotle observes that the word anger is used
indifferently for two different things: dialectically, or as I call
it, imaginatively, for the desire for revenge, but physically for a
boiling of the humours. And utterly different as these two things are
in quality, no great inconvenience results from giving them the same
name, because historically they are parts of the same event. Nature
has many dimensions at once, and whenever we see anything happen, much
else is happening there which we cannot see. Whilst dreams entertain
us, the balance of our character is shifting beneath: we are growing
while we sleep. The young think in one way, the drunken in another, and
the dead not at all; and I imagine--for I have imagination myself--that
they do not die because they stop thinking, but they stop thinking
because they die. How much veering and luffing before they make that
port I The brain of man, William James used to say, has a hair-trigger
organization. His life is terribly experimental. He is perilously
dependent on the oscillations of a living needle, imagination, that
never points to the true north.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled
by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the
text. The world is one of these books. The reciprocal interference of
magnetic fields (which I understand is the latest conception of matter)
may compose a marvellous moving pattern; but the chief interest to
us of matter lies in its fertility in producing minds and presenting
recognizable phenomena to the senses; and the chief interest of any
scientific notion of its intrinsic nature lies in the fact that, if not
literally true, it may liberate us from more misleading conceptions.
Did we have nothing but electrical physics to think of, the nightmare
would soon become intolerable. But a hint of that kind, like a hasty
glance into the crater of a volcano, sends a wholesome shudder through
our nerves; we realize how thin is the crust we build on, how mythical
and remote from the minute and gigantic scale of nature are the bright
images we seem to move among, all cut out and fitted to our human
stature. Yet these bright images are our natural companions, and if
we do not worship them idolatrously nor petrify them into substances,
forgetting the nimble use of them in mental discourse, which is
where they belong, they need not be more misleading to us, even for
scientific purposes, than are words or any other symbols.
It is fortunate that the material world, whatever may be its intrinsic
structure or substance, falls to our apprehension into such charming
units. There is the blue vault of heaven, there are the twinkling
constellations, there are the mountains, trees, and rivers, and above
all those fascinating unstable unities which we call animals and
persons; magnetic fields I am quite ready to believe them, for such in
a vast vague way I feel them to be, but individual bodies they will
remain to my sensuous imagination, and dramatic personages to my moral
sense. They, too, are animate: they, too, compose a running commentary
on things and on one another, adding their salacious footnotes to
the dull black letter of the world. Many of them are hardly aware of
their own wit; knowing they are but commentators, they are intent on
fidelity and unconscious of invention. Yet against their will they
gloss everything, willy-nilly we are all scholiasts together. Heaven
forbid that I should depreciate this prodigious tome of nature, or
question in one jot or tittle the absolute authority of its Author;
but it is like an encyclopaedia in an infinite number of volumes, or
a directory with the addresses of everybody that ever lived. We may
dip into it on occasion in search of some pertinent fact, but it is
not a book to read; its wealth is infinite, but so is its monotony; it
is not composed in our style nor in our language, we could not have
written one line of it. Yet the briefest text invites reflection, and
we may spin a little homily out of it in the vernacular for our own
edification.
In the _Mahabharata_, a learned friend tells me, a young champion
armed for the combat and about to rush forward between the two armies
drawn up in battle array, stops for a moment to receive a word of
counsel from his spiritual adviser--and that word occupies the next
eighteen books of the epic; after which the battle is allowed to
proceed. These Indian poets had spiritual minds, they measured things
by their importance to the spirit, not to the eye. They despised
verisimilitude and aesthetic proportion; they despised existence, the
beauties of which they felt exquisitely nevertheless, and to which
their imagination made such stupendous additions. I honour their
courage in bidding the sun stand still, not that they might thoroughly
vanquish an earthly enemy, but that they might wholly clarify their own
soul. For this better purpose the sun need not stand still materially.
For the spirit, time is an elastic thing. Fancy is quick and brings
the widest vistas to a focus in a single instant. After the longest
interval of oblivion and death, it can light up the same image in all
the greenness of youth; and if cut short, as it were at Pompeii, in the
midst of a word, it can, ages after, without feeling the break, add the
last syllable. Imagination changes the scale of everything, and makes
a thousand patterns of the woof of nature, without disturbing a single
thread. Or rather--since it is nature itself that imagines--it turns
to music what was only strain; as if the universal vibration, suddenly
ashamed of having been so long silent and useless, had burst into tears
and laughter at its own folly, and in so doing had become wise.
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