VI
My dear ——,
You suspect that I am "pushing the claims of the Imagination so far as to deprive the Reason or Understanding[1] of its rights;" and you ask me whether I dispute the universal belief that the former is an "illusive faculty." As for your suspicion, I will endeavour to show that it is groundless. As for your question, I admit that the Imagination is "illusive," but I must add that it also leads us to truth. It constructs the hypotheses, as well as the illusions, which, when tested by experience, guide us towards Knowledge.
Imagination is the "imaging" faculty of the mind. It does not, strictly speaking, create, any more than an artist, strictly speaking, creates. But as an artist combines lines, colours, shades, sounds, and thoughts, each one of which by itself is familiar to everybody, in such new combinations as to produce effects that impress us all as original and unprecedented, so does the Imagination out of old fragments make new existences and unities.
Attention impresses upon us the present; Memory recalls the past; but the Imagination is never content simply to reproduce the past or present. It sums up the
- ↑ "Reason" is used, in these letters, in a sense for which Coleridge (I believe) preferred to use "Understanding." But as long as we have a verb "reason," commonly used of mathematical, logical, and ordinary processes of arguing, so long it will be inexpedient, in a popular treatise, to use the word in any but its popular sense. Perhaps some might give the name of "higher Reason" to what I call Imagination.
