Imagination 

 Imperfection 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



324 



newly adorned with plants. This poetical 

 passage in the Journal of Columbus, or 

 rather in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, 

 written from Haiti in October, 1498, pre- 

 sents a peculiar psychological interest. It 

 teaches us anew that the creative fancy of 

 the poet manifests itself in the discoverer 

 of a world no less than in every other form 

 of human greatness. HUMBOLDT Views of 

 Nature, p. 155. (Bell, 1896.) 



1580. IMAGINATION PRODUCING 

 FAINTNESS "A clergyman told me that 

 some time ago suspicions were entertained 

 in his parish of a woman who was supposed 

 to have poisoned her newly-born infant. The 

 coffin was exhumed, and the procurator- 

 fiscal, who attended with the medical men 

 to examine the body, declared that he al- 

 ready perceived the odor of decomposition, 

 which made him feel faint, and in conse- 

 quence he withdrew. But on opening the 

 coffin it was found to be empty, and it was 

 afterwards ascertained that no child had 

 been born, and consequently no murder com- 

 mitted." BENNET quoted by CARPENTER 

 in Nature and Man, bk. i, ch. 4, p. 158. 

 (A., 1900.) 



1581. IMAGINATION STIMULATED 

 BY STUDY OF NATURE Sublimity of a 

 Tropical Night. If I might be allowed to 

 abandon myself to the recollections of my 

 own distant travels I would instance, among 

 the most striking scenes of Nature, the calm 

 sublimity of a tropical night when the stars, 

 not sparkling as in our northern skies, shed 

 their soft and planetary light over the 

 gently heaving ocean, or I would recall the 

 deep valleys of the Cordilleras, where the 

 tall and slender palms pierce the leafy veil 

 around them, and waving on high their 

 feathery and arrow-like branches, form, as 

 it were, " a forest above a forest " ; or I 

 would describe the summit of the peak of 

 Teneriffe when a horizontal layer of clouds, 

 dazzling in whiteness, has separated the cone 

 of cinders from the plain below, and sud- 

 denly the ascending current pierces the 

 cloudy veil, so that the eye of the traveler 

 may range from the brink of the crater, 

 along the vine-clad slopes of Orotava, to the 

 orange-gardens and banana-groves that 

 skirt the shore. In scenes like these it is 

 not the peaceful charm uniformly spread 

 over the face of Nature that moves the 

 heart, but rather the peculiar physiognomy 

 and conformation of the land, the features 

 of the landscape, the ever-varying outline 

 of the clouds, and their blending with the 

 horizon of the sea, whether it lies spread 

 before us like a smooth and shining mir- 

 ror or is dimly seen through the morning 

 mist. All that the senses can but imperfect- 

 ly comprehend, all that is most awful in 

 such romantic scenes of Nature, may become 

 a source of enjoyment to man, by opening a 

 wide field to the creative powers of his 

 imagination. Impressions change with the 

 varying movements of the mind, and we 



are led by a happy illusion to believe that 

 we receive from the external world that 

 with which we have ourselves invested it. 

 HUMBOLDT Cosmos, vol. i, int., p. 26. (H., 

 1897.) 



1582. IMITATION A CONTROLLING 



HUMAN IMPULSE Civilisation Founded up- 

 on It. The instinct of imitating gestures 

 develops earlier than that of imitating 

 sounds [and] usually falls well inside the 

 limits of the first year. Later come all the 

 various imitative games in which childhood 

 revels, playing " horse," " soldiers," etc., 

 etc. And from this time onward man is 

 essentially the imitative animal. His whole 

 educability and in fact the whole history of 

 civilization depend on this trait, which his 

 strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and 

 acquisitiveness reenforce. " Humani nihil a 

 me alienum puto " is the motto of each indi- 

 vidual of the species, and makes him, when- 

 ever another individual shows a power or 

 superiority of any kind, restless until he 

 can exhibit it himself. . . . And there 

 is the imitative tendency which shows itself 

 in large masses of men, and produces panics 

 and orgies and frenzies of violence, and 

 which only the rarest individuals can act- 

 ively withstand. This sort of imitativeness 

 is possessed by man in common with other 

 gregarious animals, and is an instinct in 

 the fullest sense of the term, being a blind 

 impulse to act as soon as a certain percep- 

 tion occurs. It is particularly hard not to 

 imitate gaping, laughing, or looking and 

 running in a certain direction if we see 

 others doing so. Certain mesmerized sub- 

 jects must automatically imitate whatever 

 motion their operator makes before their 

 eyes. A successful piece of mimicry gives 

 to both bystanders and mimic a peculiar 

 kind of esthetic pleasure. JAMES Psychol- 

 ogy, vol. ii, ch. 24, p. 408. (H. H. & Co., 

 1899.) 



1583. IMITATION INSTINCTIVE AND 



UNIVERSAL The Chief Element in the Learn- 

 ing of Language. From the first days of 

 life we are surrounded by our fellow men 

 and imitate their actions. And these mim- 

 etic movements are instinctive in charac- 

 ter. As soon as the child's consciousness is 

 aroused from its first sleepy passivity, it be- 

 gins to perceive the expressions of others' 

 emotions, and to respond to them by similar 

 emotions with corresponding impulses. The 

 continued imitation by which a child comes 

 to learn the language that is spoken round 

 it is impulsive, not voluntary. WUNDT Psy- 

 chology, lect. 27, 8 1, p. 396. (Son. & Co., 

 1896.) 



1584. IMITATION SECURES THE 

 CONTINUITY OF RACIAL LIFE Social He- 

 redity. Man has always been recognized as 

 the imitative animal par excellence. And 

 there is hardly a book on psychology, how- 

 ever old, which has not devoted at least one 

 paragraph to this fact. . . . Each of us 

 is in fact what he is almost exclusively 



