a kind of
many-coloured 'etching' on the brain. Hartley has dexterously handled
this hypothesis. The charm of his 'theory of vibrations' is the vivid
image it presents to the fancy. How large an element in a speculative
talent is the command of these happy images! Coleridge, by a finer
effort of the same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all
sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in Hartley's
glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all association as
effected by a power within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek
name.[39] In an act of perception there is the matter which sense
presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also a form or mould, such as
space, unity, causation, suggested from within. In these forms we
arrest and frame the many attributes of sense. It is like that simple
chemical phenomenon where two colourless fluids uniting reflect a full
colour. Neither matter nor form can be perceived asunder; they unite
into the many-coloured image of life. This theory has not been able to
bear a loyal induction. Even if it were true, how little it would tell
us; how it attenuates fact! There, again, the charm is all in the
clear image; the image of the artist combining a few elementary
colours, curves, sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of
association, of concentrating many elements of sense in an object of
perception, is refined and deepened into the creative acts of
imagination.

[39] Esemplastic.

We of the modern ages have become so familiarized with the greater
works of art that we are little sensitive of the act of creation in
them; they do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only
sometimes in productions which realize immediately a profound emotion
and enforce a change in taste, such as _Werther_ or _Emile_, we are
actual witnesses of the moulding of an unforeseen type by some new
principle of association. By imagination, the distinction between
which and fancy is so thrust upon his readers, Coleridge means a
vigorous act of association, which, by simplifying and restraining
their natural expression to an artificial order, refines and perfects
the types of human passion. It represents the excitements of the
human kind, but reflected in a new manner, 'excitement itself
imitating order.' 'Originally the offspring of passion,' he somewhere
says, 'but now the adopted children of power.' So far there is nothing
new or distinctive; every one who can receive from a poem or p