morning nor evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the
twilight and the dawn of the souls of men--together with the spectre
sitting in the shadow of the niche above them;[67] all these, and all
else that I could name of his forming, have borne, and in themselves
retain and exercise the same inexplicable power--inexplicable because
proceeding from an imaginative perception almost superhuman, which goes
whither we cannot follow, and is where we cannot come; throwing naked
the final, deepest root of the being of man, whereby he grows out of the
invisible, and holds on his God home.[68]

Sec. 29. Recapitulation. The perfect function of the imagination is the
intuitive perception of ultimate truth.

Now, in all these instances, let it be observed, for it is to that end
alone that I have been arguing all along, that the virtue of the
imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze, (not by
reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power,) a
more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things. I repeat
that it matters not whether the reader is willing call this faculty
imagination or no, I do not care about the name; but I would be
understood when I speak of imagination hereafter, to mean this, the true
foundation of all art which exercises eternal authority over men's
minds; (all other imagination than this is either secondary and
contemplative, or utterly spurious;) the base of whose authority and
being is its perpetual thirst of truth and purpose to be true. It has no
food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is forever
looking under masks, and burning up mists; no fairness of form, no
majesty of seeming will satisfy it; the first condition of its
existence is incapability of being deceived; and though it sometimes
dwells upon and substantiates the fictions of fancy, yet its own
operation is to trace to their farthest limit the true laws and
likelihoods even of the fictitious creation. This has been well
explained by Fuseli, in his allusion to the Centaur of Zeuxis; and there
is not perhaps a greater exertion of imaginative power than may be
manifested in following out to their farthest limits the necessary
consequences of such arbitrary combination; but let not the jests of the
fancy be confounded with that after serious work of the imagination
which gives them all the nervous verity and substance of which they are
capable. Let not the mons