few who, in any age, have come up to that character. BISHOP BERKELEY: To Pope. The imagination may be said, in its widest sense, to be synonymous with invention, denoting that faculty of the mind by which it either "bodies forth the form of things unknown," or produces original thoughts or new combinations of ideas from materials stored up in the memory. The fancy may be considered that peculiar habit of association which presents to our choice all the different materials that are subservient to the efforts of the imagination. BRANDE. Besides the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures, which are presented by the sense; the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination; and to this belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like. But it must be observed that this power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything absolutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses. Now the imagination is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impression, must have the same power pretty equally over all men. For since the imagination is only the representation of the senses, it can only be pleased or displeased with the images, from the same principle on which the sense is pleased or displeased with the realities; and consequently there must be just as close an agreement in the imaginations as in the senses of men. A little attention will convince us that this must of necessity be the case. On Taste, 1756. BURKE: Imaging is, in itself, the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm, or extraordinary emotion of soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet prints. DRYDEN. To confine the imagination is as facile a performance as the Goteham's design of hedging in the cuckoo. GLANVILL. The most improved spirits are frequently caught in the entanglements of a tenacious imagination. GLANVILL. It is a certain rule that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved there is no place for the imagination. The mind of man being naturally limited, it is impossible that all its faculties can operate at once; and the more any one predominates, the less room there is for the others to exert their vigour. For this reason a greater degree of simplicity is required in all compositions where men, actions, and passions are painted, than in such as consist of reflections and observations. And as the former species of writing is the more engaging and beautiful, one may safely upon this account give the preference to the extreme of simplicity above that of refinement. HUME: Essays. It is the divine attribute of the imagination that it is irrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic power can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of a dungeon. WASHINGTON IRVING. Whatever makes the past or the future predominate over the present, exalts us in the scale DR. S. JOHNSON. of thinking beings. If we will stand boggling at imaginary evils, let us never blame a horse for starting at a shadow. L'ESTRANGE. Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more, they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems. They give us vague phrases On the Sublime and Beautiful: Introd. instead of images, and personified qualities instead of men. They may be better able to analyze human nature than their predecessors. But analysis is not the business of the poet. His office is to portray, not to dissect. He may believe in a moral sense, like Shaftesbury; he may refer all human actions to self-interest, like Helvetius; or he may never think about the matter at all. His creed on such subjects will no more influence his poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a painter may have conceived respecting the lachrymal glands, or the circulation of the blood, will affect the tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be found in the Fable of the Bees. Mandeville have created an Iago? Imagination, although a faculty of quite subordinate rank to intellect, is of infinite value for enlarging the field for the action of the intellect. It is a conducting and facilitating medium for intellect to expand itself through, where it may feel itself in a genial, vital element, instead of JOHN FOSTER: a vacuum. Life and Thoughts by W. W. Everts, 266. The imagination, which is of simple perception, doth never of itself, and directly, mislead us, yet it is the almost fatal means of our deception. GLANVILL. But could Well as he knew how to resolve characters into their elements, would he have been able to combine those elements in such a manner as to make up a man, a real, living, individual man? LORD MACAULAY: Milton, Aug. 1825. In a barbarous age the imagination exercises a despotic power. So strong is the perception of what is unreal that it often overpowers all the passions of the mind and all the sensations of the body. At first, indeed, the phantasm remains undivulged, a hidden treasure, a wordless poetry, an invisible painting, a silent music, a dream of which the pains and pleasures exist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which the heart only knoweth, a joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery by which ideas are to be conveyed from one person to another is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lower state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the night, the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes and the winds into doleful voices. The belief which springs from it is more absolute and undoubting than any which can be derived from evidence. It resembles the faith which we repose in our own sensations. Thus, the Arab, when covered with wounds, saw nothing but the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckoning Houri. The Northern warrior laughed in the pangs of death when he thought of the mead of Valhalla. The first works of the imagination are, as we have said, poor and rude, not from the want of genius, but from the want of materials. Phidias could have done nothing with an old tree and a fish-bone, or Homer with the language of New Holland. LORD MACAULAY: John Dryden, Jan. 1828. Imagination is that faculty which arouses the passions by the impression of exterior objects; it is influenced by these objects, and consequently it is in affinity with them; it is contagious; its fear or courage flies from imagination to imagination: the same in love, hate, joy, or grief; hence I conclude it to be a most subtle atmosphere. LORD JOHN RUSSELL. Nor let it be supposed that terrors of imagination belong to childhood alone. The reprobate heart, which has discarded all love of God, cannot so easily rid itself of the fear of the devil; and even when it succeeds in that also, it will then create a hell for itself. We have heard of unbelievers who thought it probable that they should be awake in their graves: and this was the opinion for which they had exchanged a Christian's hope of immortality! SOUTHEY. The business of conception is to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived. But we have, moreover, a power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones together, so as to form new wholes of our own creation. I shall employ the word imagination to express this power, and I apprehend that this is the proper which gives birth to the productions of the poet sense of the word, if imagination be the power and the painter. The operations of imagination are by no means confined to the materials which conception furnishes, but may be equally employed about all the subjects of our knowledge. DUGALD STEWART. The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Hence the ardour of the selfish to better their fortunes, and to add to their personal accomplishments; and hence the zeal of the patriot and philosopher to advance the virtue and the happiness of the human race. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes. DUGALD STEWART. Wherever men are assembled in societies, and are not swallowed up in sloth or most debasing passion, there the great elements of our nature are in action; and much as in this day, to look upon the face of life, it appears to be removed from all poetry, we cannot but believe that, in the very heart of our most civilized life-in our cities, in each great metropolis of commerce, in the midst of the most active concentration of all those relations of being which seem most at war with imagination-there the materials which imagination seeks in human life are yet to be found. It were much to be wished, therefore, for the sake both of our literature and of our life, that imagination would again be content to dwell with life; that we had less of poetry, and more of strengthand that imagination were again to be found, as it used to be, one of the elements of life itself, -a strong principle of our nature, living in the midst of our affections and passions, blending with, kindling, invigorating, and exalting them all. PROFESSOR JOHN WILSON. When the imagination frames a comparison, if it does not strike on the first presentation, a sense of the truth of the likeness, from the moment it is perceived, grows—and continues to grow-upon the mind; the resemblance depending less upon outline of form and feature than upon expression and effect,-less upon casual and outstanding, than upon inherent, internal properties; moreover, the images invariably modify each other. The law under which the processes of fancy are carried on is as capricious as the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, 342 IMAGINATION.-IMITATION.-IMMORALITY. or pathetic, as the objects happen to be oppositely produced, or fortunately combined. Fancy is given to quicken and beguile the temporal part of our nature; imagination to incite and to support the eternal. Yet it is not the less true that fancy, as she is an active, is also, under her own laws, and in her own spirit, a creative, faculty. In what manner fancy ambitiously aims at a rivalship with imagination, and imagination stoops to work with the materials of fancy, might be illustrated from the compositions of all eloquent writers, whether in prose or verse. It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives. It is one of the strongest links of society; it is a species of mutual compliance, which all men yield to each other, without constraint to themselves, and which is extremely flattering to all. Herein it is that painting and many other agreeable arts have laid one of the principal foundations of their power. And since, by its influence on our manners and our passions, it is of such great consequence, shall here venture to lay down a rule which may inform us with a good degree of certainty when we are to attribute the power of the arts to imitation, or to our pleasure in the skill of the imitator merely, and when to sympathy, or some other cause in conjunction with it: when the object represented in poetry or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then I may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of imitation, and to no cause operating in the thing itself. BURKE: I On the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756. Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature. DRYDEN. In the way of imitation, the translator not only varies from the words and sense, but forsakes them as he sees occasion; and, taking only some general hints from the original, runs diversions upon the groundwork. DRYDEN. Men of dissolute lives cry down religion because they would not be under the restraints of it. TILLOTSON. IMMORTALITY. But among these and other excellent arguments for the immortality of the soul, there is one drawn from the perpetual progress of the soul to its perfection without a possibility of ever arriving at it; which is a hint that I do not remember to have seen opened and improved by others who have written on this subject, though it seems to me to carry a great weight with it. How can it enter into the thoughts of man, that the soul, which is capable of such immense perfections, and of receiving new improvements to all eternity, shall fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created? Are such abilities made for no purpose? ADDISON: Spectator, No. 111. What man can think of himself as called out and separated from nothing, of his being made a conscious, a reasonable, and a happy creature, in short, of being taken in as a sharer of existence, and a kind of partner in eternity, without being swallowed up in wonder, in praise, in adoration! It is indeed a thought too big for the mind of man, and rather to be entertained in the secrecy of devotion, and in the silence of the soul, than to be expressed by words. The Supreme Being has not given us powers or faculties sufficient to extol and magnify such unutterable goodness. It is, however, some comfort to us that we shall be always doing what we shall never be able to do; and that a work which cannot be finished will, however, be the work of eternity. ADDISON: Spectator, No. 590. There is none of us but would be thought, throughout the whole course of his life, to aspire after immortality. ATTERBURY. What is made to be immortal, nature cannot, nor will the voice of God, destroy. Those bodies that we behold to perish were in their created natures immortal, and liable unto death only accidentally, and upon forfeit; and therefore they owe not that natural homage unto death as other bodies do, but may be restored to immortality with a lesser miracle, and, by a bare and easy revocation of course, return immortal. SIR T. BROWNE : Religio Medici, I., xlviii., edit. 1642. There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy itself, and the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted as not to suffer even from the power of itself: all others have a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death makes a folly of posthumous memory. God, who can only destroy our souls, and hath assumed our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly promised no duration; wherein there is so much of chance that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration, and to hold long subsistence seems but a scape in oblivion. But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature. SIR T. BROWNE: Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, ch. v. When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future; when I behold such a number of arts ies thence arising; I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal. and sciences, and such a multitude of discover CICERO: De Senectute, cap. 21. But if I err in believing that the souls of men are immortal, I willingly err; nor while I live would I wish to have this delightful error extorted from me; and if after death I shall feel nothing, as some minute philosophers think, I am not afraid lest dead philosophers should laugh at me for the error. CICERO: De Senect., cap. ult., ed. Verburgii, x. 375, 8vo. inert scaly mass, does not appear to be fitting The caterpillar, on being converted into an itself for an inhabitant of the air, and can have no consciousness of the brilliancy of its future being. We are masters of the earth, but perknown being. The fly that we crush with our haps we are the slaves of some great and unfinger or feed with our viands has no knowledge of man, and no consciousness of his superiority. We suppose that we are acquainted with matter and all its elements; yet we cannot even guess at the cause of electricity, or explain the laws of the formation of the stones that fall from meteors. There may be beings, thinking beings, near or surrounding us, which we do not perceive, which we cannot imagine. We know very little; but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality, the individual im. mortality, of the better part of man. SIR H. DAVY. Even in a moral point of view, I think the analogies derived from the transformation of insects admit of some beautiful applications, which have not been neglected by pious entomologists. The three states-of the caterpillar, larva, and butterfly-have, since the time of the Greek poets, been applied to typify the human being,-its terrestrial form, apparent death and ultimate celestial destination; and it seems more extraordinary that a sordid and crawling worm should become a beautiful and active fly-that an inhabitant of the dark and fetid dunghill should in an instant entirely change its form, rise into the blue air, and enjoy the sunbeams— than that a being whose pursuits here have been after an undying name, and whose purest happi ness has been derived from the acquisition of intellectual power and finite knowledge, should rise hereafter into a state of being where immortality is no longer a name, and ascend to the source of Unbounded Power and Infinite Wisdom. SIR H. DAVY. Although the arguments now adduced in support of the immortality of man were less powerful than they really are, they ought to make a deep impression on the mind of every reflecting person, and determine the line of conduct which he ought to pursue. If they were only probable, -if they possessed no greater degree of weight than simply to overbalance the opposite arguments, still, it would be every man's interest to act on the supposition that a future world has a real existence. . . . For if an eternal world has a real existence, we not only embrace an error in rejecting this idea, but, by acting in conform ity with our erroneous conceptions, run the risk of exposing ourselves to the most dreadful and appalling consequences. Whereas, if there be no future state, the belief of it, accompanied with a corresponding conduct, can produce no bad effect either upon our own minds or those of others. On the contrary, it would prove a pleasing illusion during our passage through a world of physical and moral evil, and would revive the downcast spirit when overwhelmed with the disappointments and sorrows which are unavoidable in our present condition. DR. T. DICK: Philos. of a Future State, Part I., Sect. xi. Upon this short question, “Is man immortal, or is he not?" depends all that is valuable in science, in morals, and in theology, and all that most interesting to man as a social being and as a rational and accountable intelligence. If he is destined to an eternal existence, an immense importance must attach to all his present affections, actions, and pursuits; and it must be a matter of infinite moment that they be directed in such a channel as will tend to carry him forward in safety to the felicities of a future world. But if his whole existence be circumscribed within the circle of a few fleeting years, man appears an enigma, an inexplicable phenomenon in the universe, human life a mystery, the world a scene of confusion, virtue a mere phantom, the Creator a capricious being, and his plans and arrangements an inextricable maze. DR. T. DICK: Philosophy of a Future State, Introd. When I reflect that God has given to inferior animals no instincts nor faculties that are not immediately subservient to the ends and purposes of their beings, I cannot but conclude that the reason and faculties of man were bestowed upon the same principle, and are connected with his superior nature. When I find him, therefore, endowed with powers to carry as it were the line and rule to the most distant worlds, I consider it as conclusive evidence of a future and more exalted destination, because I cannot believe that the Creator of the universe would depart from all the analogies of the lower creation in the formation of his highest crea. ture, by gifting him with a capacity not only utterly useless, but destructive of his contentment and happiness, if his existence were to terminate in the grave. LORD-CHANCELLOR ERSKINE: Armata. The annunciation of life and immortality by the gospel, did it contain no other truth, were sufficient to cast all the discoveries of science into shade, and to reduce the highest improvements of reason to the comparative nothingness which the flight of a moment bears to eternity. By this discovery the prospects of human nature are infinitely widened, the creature of yesterday becomes the child of eternity; and as felicity is not the less valuable in the eye of reason because it is remote, nor the misery which is certain less to be deprecated because it is not immediately felt, the care of our future interests becomes our chief, and, properly speaking, our only, concern. All besides will shortly become nothing; and therefore, whenever it comes into competition with these, it is as the small dust of the balance. ROBERT HALL: Funeral Sermon for the Princess Charlotte. How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die; that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever! DR. S. JOHNSON. And can we then think that the most natural and most necessary desire of all has nothing to answer it? that nature should teach us above all things to desire immortality, which is not to be had? especially when it is the most noble and generous desire of human nature, that which most of all becomes a reasonable creature to desire, nay, that which is the governing principle of all our actions, and must give laws to all our other passions, desires, and appetites. What a strange creature has God made man, if he deceive him in the most fundamental and most universal principle of action; which makes his whole life nothing else but one continued cheat and imposture! WILLIAM SHERLOCK: Discourse of the Immortality of the Soul, etc. tivated with attention, not only for what we call If the soul be immortal, it requires to be culthe time of life, but for that which is to follow, point may be attended with endless consequences. -I mean eternity; and the least neglect in this If death were the final dissolution of being, the wicked would be great gainers by it, by being delivered at once from their bodies, their souls, and their vices; but, as the soul is immortal, it has no other means of being freed from its evils, nor any safety for it, but in becoming very good and very wise; for it carries nothing with it but its bad or good deeds, its virtues and vices, which are commonly the consequences of the education it has received, and the causes of eternal happiness or misery. SOCRATES: Plato, Phæd. |
