ny
characteristic facts relating to it; and the kind of images will depend
very much on the general disposition, or particular mood, of the mind
affected by the object: the painter, the poet, and the moralist will
have different images suggested by the presence of the windmill or its
symbol. There are indeed sluggish minds so incapable of self-evolved
activity, and so dependent on the immediate suggestions of Sense, as to
be almost destitute of the power of forming distinct images beyond the
immediate circle of sensuous associations; and these are rightly named
unimaginative minds; but in all minds of energetic activity, groups and
clusters of images, many of them representing remote relations,
spontaneously present themselves in conjunction with objects or their
symbols. It should, however, be borne in mind that Imagination can only
recall what Sense has previously impressed. No man imagines any detail
of which he has not previously had direct or indirect experience.
Objects as fictitious as mermaids and hippogriffs are made up from the
gatherings of Sense.

"Made up from the gatherings of Sense" is a phrase which may seem to
imply some peculiar plastic power such as is claimed exclusively for
artists: a power not of simple recollection, but of recollection and
recombination. Yet this power belongs also to philosophers. To combine
the half of a woman with the half of a fish,--to imagine the union as
an existing organism,--is not really a different process from that of
combining the experience of a chemical action with an electric action,
and seeing that the two are one existing fact. When the poet hears the
storm-cloud muttering, and sees the moonlight sleeping on the bank, he
transfers his experience of human phenomena to the cloud and the
moonlight: he personifies, draws Nature within the circle of emotion,
and is called a poet. When the philosopher sees electricity in the
storm-cloud, and sees the sunlight stimulating vegetable growth, he
transfers his experience of physical phenomena to these objects, and
draws within the circle of Law phenomena which hitherto have been
unclassified. Obviously the imagination has been as active in the one
case as in the other; the DIFFERENTIA lying in the purposes of the two,
and in the general constltution of the two minds.

It has been noted that there is less strain on the imagination of the
poet; but even his greater freedom is not altogether disengaged from
the necessity of