THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 15 
we make an image. It may be an image of plain fact or it may be 
an image of fairyland. What determines the kind of image we have 
is the abstract conception that lies back of it. If I understand all 
that is known of matter and the laws of its motions, I will have little 
difficulty in imagining atoms and their modes of motion, though no 
one has ever seen an atom. If I understand the laws of machinery I 
will have little difficulty in imagining a practicable machine that may 
be unlike any other in existence. According as my conceptions are 
complete so will my image be definite. This transition from con- 
ception to image is constantly made. Our conceptions are ever 
passing into images, and on the other hand the images presented to 
us are constantly being rationalized into abstract conceptions. 
These are two of the principal processes of mind; they are not 
separated in experience, but flow into one another. 
I hold, then, that imagination is simply image-making, that we 
make images of our abstract conceptions; and that the distinct- 
ness of the image depends on the completeness of the conception. 
This image-making is a natural process. In this natural psycholog- 
ical process we find the source of art. Every perfected thought tends 
to express itself in someconcrete form, first in imagination, and then 
afterwards, at our discretion, in a more permanent form in matter. 
This expression in matter, provided the conception of which it is the 
expression be of a certain kind, is a work of art. ‘The ultimate 
basis of criticism of a work of art is the conception of the principles 
of the subject in the mind of the artist, and will not be found in 
anything that may be called imagination. I would like to emphasize 
this as I shall return to it again. 
If the perfected conception in the mind of the artist be a concep- 
tion of the ideal in the female form, we will have the Venus of Milo 
as its expression. If that perfected conception be one of French 
peasants with heads bowed, while, ‘‘ with sound stupendous, throb- 
bing,” there “tolls the great passing bell that calls to prayer for souls 
departed,” we will have “The Angelus” as its expression. If that 
cenception be of the quality we call poetic, it will express itself in 
poetry. If that perfected conception be one of human life we will 
have a novel or a drama. 
Lord Lytton says “What Nature is to God, Art should be to 
man.” Art is man’s creation, it is the materializing of what he 
_knows, in the same way that this universe is the visible and tangible 
