Classic Poem

On the imagination, or esemplastic power


O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigu'd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery: last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd,
To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
To intellectual!--give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive.

"Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent,
verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam,
quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere."

"Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto
et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et
effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis
rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim
appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem
intelligibiliter explicari."
Sebomai noeron
Kruphian taxin
Chorei TI MESON
Ou katachuthen.


Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes,
said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe.
We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the
construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the
transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary
forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will
cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their
representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher
contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to
the mind from its birth to its maturity.

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this
master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction
of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he
has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by
metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it,
as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles
of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the
metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge,
which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not
furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the
unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of
the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success
than attended the essay of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another
use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual
application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the
discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects.
Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the
questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed
by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and
the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he
well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are
absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The
former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection
of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--Aliquid
cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in
motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a
motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the
same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the
result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of
mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative,
and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that,
which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a
man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the
same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative
capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to
the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear
that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite
and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must
neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental
philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which
counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in
consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all
direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all
possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that
these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike
indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or
product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those
forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the
circumstance of their direction. When we have formed a scheme or outline
of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results,
by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to
elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively
this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting
forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration
gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own
self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution
itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for
whom it is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic
no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest
perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind.

The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on
their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them
is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as
something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite,
and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be
this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must
be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this conception
is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an
inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both.

* * * * * *

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received
the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had
ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility
preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted
me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good
sense, but with less tact and feeling.

"Dear C.

"You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination,
both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I
think it will make on the Public, i.e. that part of the public, who,
from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction
to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of
your readers.

"As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my
understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so new
to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed
to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your premises
sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your
conclusions, I should still have been in that state of mind, which in
your note in Chap. IV you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis
to that in which a man is, when he makes a bull. In your own words, I
should have felt as if I had been standing on my head.

"The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better
represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy
modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed,
and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty
moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often
in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then
suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows
of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic
symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work
images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked
upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all
I had been in the habit of connecting with those names. Those whom I had
been taught to venerate as almost super-human in magnitude of intellect,
I found perched in little fret-work niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while
the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar
with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed
substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were
deepened into substances:

If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either!

"Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted
from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr.
Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered:

------An Orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted!

"Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book
on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced:
and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to
descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my
own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am
required to see.

"So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in
advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present
work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or
communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as
I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too
much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links,
from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may
recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps
of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least
one that I am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your readers
will have both right and reason to complain of you. This Chapter, which
cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages,
will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every
reader who, like myself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for
the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as
I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of
imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could from your
title-page, to wit, "My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as
introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or
even conjectured, a long treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same
relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will
be well, if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition
in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is
historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to
many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic
power would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish
this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop
Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning
with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace.
I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have
devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in
its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both
its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who
feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have
themselves only to blame.

"I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives,
and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present
publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the
preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from
your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as
stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion
of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable
creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order
to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and
hard reading are merits, you have deserved it.

"Your affectionate, etc."


In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete
conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with
stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that
future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find
at the close of the second volume.

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all
human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will,
yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,
and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this
process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to
idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as
objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities
and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory
emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with,
and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express
by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must
receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.