COLOUR. 
495 
power over the mind. Shelley goes nearer to the root of the matter 
in his doctrine that the great secret of morals is love, and that 
love is, or at any rate springs from, the exercise of the imagina- 
tion. If this be granted, it is clear that to strengthen and stimu- 
late the imagination is at all events to increase the possibility of 
goodness. The only point in which Shelley's argument appears to 
fail, or in which rather it needs to be completed, is that supposing 
the imagination to be, as he says, the great instrument of moral 
good, it is also the great instrument of moral evil, and everything 
must therefore depend upon the direction given to it. But what 
are we to say then of poetry by which the imagination is stimu- 
lated to mischievous exercise 1 Simply that it is immoral poetry, 
or that it is not poetry at all 1 Mr. Ruskin seems to imply the 
latter. He defines poetry as " the suggestion by the imagination 
of noble grounds for the noble emotions." Is it not, however, the 
art itself, or the operation of the art rather than its results, that 
must furnish the true basis of a definition 1 Shelley defines it in 
one place as the " communicating and receiving intense and im- 
passioned conceptions respecting man and nature." Here all con- 
sideration of the moral purpose and effect of poetry is set aside, 
not as unimportant, but as not essential. I do not think, how- 
ever, that Shelley's definition is complete. It would apply not 
only to impassioned prose, but to painting and sculpture, and 
perhaps to others of the arts. I would propose, therefore, to 
limit the definition, and would describe poetical genius as the 
power of receiving and communicating, in language measured by 
fixed or ascertainable rules, intense and impassioned conceptions 
concerning man and nature. 
COLOUR 
ABSTRACT OF MR. C. OXLAND'S PAPER. 
(Read March 2nd, 1876.) 
Reasons were given for the more general and thorough study of 
colour as a science. Colours were described as purely sensations 
produced by the action of light on the nervous tissue of the 
retina, and not an inherent quality of the surface of objects. 
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