On Certain Present Phenomena of the Imagination [pp. 159-168]

ON CERTAIN PHENOMENA OF THE IMA GINA TION.
ON CER TAIN PRESENT PHENOMENA OF THE
IMA GINA TION. *
F I attach its due meaning to the name of
your institution, and if the most important
periodicals of the time are a fair test of the interests of the mind of England, I need not apologize for addressing you this evening on a speculative subject, rather than on one of those scientific or literary topics which usually engage your
attention in this hall.
When I first thought of such things, some
fifty years ago, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had
gained a great ascendancy over the intelligence
of the younger generation by his interpretation
of the more recent German philosophy, illuminated by his own fine imagination and eloquent
diction. The Scotch philosophers, who hitherto
had had almost a monopoly of philosophical education, were fast losing their authority. A
transcendental color was imparted to literature,
to poetry, to theology, and even to present politics; Wordsworth superseded Byron; Paley and
Pearson became unsound and plausible advocates; the artists of Diisseldorf inaugurated the
pre-Raphaelite school, and hurled contempt on
the masterpieces of Continental art; Jacob Bcehme was raised to the level of Francis Bacon, and
Immanuel Kant was disregarded as too intelligible. But a counter-influence soon set in, when
Thomas Carlyle touched so deeply, with the hand
rather of the prophet than of the professor, the
springs of the moral nature of his countrymen,
and metaphysics fell into disrepute as inconsistent with a serious apprehension of the veracities of life, and a wise submission to the inevitable conditions of existence: the realism which,
under the methods of the eighteenth century, had
been regarded as ministering solely to the animal
portion of man, and as degrading him from all
higher responsibilities, became under this teaching a system as completely spiritual as ever Calvin had devised, and as terribly judicial as ever
Knox had preached.
The reaction from this absorption of the mind
in a world of absolute fact and positive duty
came not, as might have been expected, from
the idealists whose imagination rebelled, or from
the gentler natures whose humanities were unsatisfied, but from the apostles of utility and the
servants of science. It is to such men as John
Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin that we mainly
a Delivered before the Leeds Philosophical Society,
December I7, 1878.
owe the present satisfactory condition of speculation in this country, in which subjects affecting
the most difficult processes of thought, and the
most solemn possibilities of human destiny, are
not put aside as intangible because abstruse,
or as unmentionable because emotional, and in
which a spirit of toleration prevails among earnest men which implies neither indifference nor
scorn.
I can therefore speak to you without fear of
offense or misapprehension, without any notion
on your part that I wish to underrate any feeling
or standard of belief; and if I either raise or
lower your present estimate of the quality of imagination, do not forget that in the great operations of the mental world into which every man
enters at his birth, as surely as he steps upon the
earth he is about to inhabit, there is no question
of proportion, but that the simplest sensuous
perception is as wonderful as the highest development of genius.
The phenomena to which I am about to allude are compatible with every theory, from that
of the purely physiological effect of the material
universe on the human brain, to the complete
identity of the objective and subjective imagination, as the sole condition of existence, expounded
with much ability in the recent work of Professor
Frohschammer, of Munich, "Die Phantasie als
Grundprincip des Weltprocesses." I have to deal
with the images as I find them received by the
mind through the senses, and retained by that
process of connection which we may call Memory. The cessation of that connection is the most
ordinary form of the condition which we designate as Insanity, which, however, does not exclude the retention of certain past images which
may occupy the whole range of thought, and
confuse and neutralize the others as they arrive.
Now, as the imagination is above all things a
constructive power, we might expect to find, as
indeed we do find by experience, that insanity is
rarely imaginative; that even when preserving a
relation to the faculties of intelligence and for
the forms of art, it seldom produces anything
admirable in itself, or beyond the effects of singularity and oddity of construction. Much the
same may be said of the act of dreaming, whether in ordinary sleep, or in the less frequent conditions of hallucination and somnambulism, in
its natural form, or artificially produced by mesmerism or hypnotism. An ingenious writer has
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