14 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 
as we are spell-bound by his beautiful verse, any more than we can 
think that the little skylark about which he wrote: 
‘‘ That from heaven or near it, 
Poureth its full heart 
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art,” 
sang only to please the poet who gazed after it and cried, 
““Teach me half the gladness 
That thy brain must know, 
Such harmonious madness 
From my lips would flow 
The world should listen then as I am listening now”? 
No; I cannot believe that artistic production of any kind can 
be explained by referring it to a desire to give either pleasure or in- 
struction to our fellowmen. Art is not something done for the sake 
of its effects on others ; it is something natural, we might almost say 
instinctive ; and so we must look deeper for the explanation, we 
must find it in some fundamental psychological fact. That psy- 
chological fact is, that every perfected thought tends to express 
itself in some concrete form, either in imagination, or outwardly, in 
matter. 
It is in the highest degree necessary, in this connection, that 
we should have a correct understanding of what imagination really 
is. It isa mistaken idea that imagination is identical in meaning 
with the fantastic or the exaggerated. It is true that in popular 
usage it often has such a meaning, and this is particularly true of the 
conjugate adjective ‘imaginary.’ To say that a work is a work of 
imagination is taken as predicating of that work a certain quality 
of unreality and unnaturalness ; and the word seems nearly always 
to hold for us more or less of such signification. To confine the 
word imagination to this meaning is to mistake the true nature of the 
faculty ; it is.to define a generic word by a specific example. 
Imagination is the faculty exercised in Dante’s Inferno, but it is also 
the faculty exercised by the scientist when he represents to himself 
the motions of the atoms and ultimates in a molecule of matter. It 
is the faculty by which the mechanic sees, before he has shaped a 
bit of material or has put a line to paper, in fullness of proportion 
and intricacy of detail, his wonderful invention. It is the faculty 
that is used every day in the most strictly scientific and in the most 
prosaic affairs of life, as well as in the wildest flights of the poets. 
What isimagination? Itis image-making power. When we imagine 
