e of
passion, touch and move us more than those which far more clearly and
distinctly express the subject-matter." Burke here fails to see that
the tones, looks, and gestures are the intelligible symbols of
passion--the "images' in the true sense just as words are the
intelligible symbols of ideas. The subject-matter is as clearly
expressed by the one as by the other; for if the description of a Lion
be conveyed in the symbols of admiration or of terror, the
subject-matter is THEN a Lion passionately and not zoologically
considered. And this Burke himself was led to admit, for he adds, "We
yield to sympathy what we refuse to description. The truth is, all
verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact,
conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that
it could scarcely have the smallest eflfect if the speaker did not call
in to his aid those modes of speech that work a strong and lively
feeling in himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a
fire already kindled in another." This is very true, and it sets
clearly forth the fact that naked description, addressed to the calm
understanding, has a different subject-matter from description
addressed to the feelings, and the symbols by which it is made
intelligible must likewise differ. But this in no way impugns the
principle of Vision. Intelligible symbols (clear images) are as
necessary in the one case as in the other.

IV.

By reducing imagination to the power of forming images, and by
insisting that no image can be formed except out of the elements
furnished by experience, I do not mean to confound imagination with
memory; indeed, the frequent occurrence of great strength of memory
with comparative feebleness of imagination, would suffice to warn us
against such a conclusion.

Its specific character, that which marks it off from simple memory, is
its tendency to selection, abstraction, and recombination. Memory, as
passive, simply recalls previous experiences of objects and emotions;
from these, imagination, as an active faculty, selects the elements
which vividly symbolise the objects or emotions, and either by a
process of abstraction allows these to do duty for the whole, or else
by a process of recombination creates new objects and new relations in
which the objects stand to us or to each other (INVENTION), and the
result is an image of great vividness, which has perhaps no
corresponding reality in the e