The Soul of the Far East [57]
may exist around other suns. In those bright particular stars--which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark canopy of the sky to let the glory beyond shine through--we are finding conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them in their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions may exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace facts. There may be
"Some Xanadu where Kublai can a stately pleasure dome decree,"
and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited, or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with what we know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now, which we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the local. It does not mark the limits of the possible.
That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between the search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the one science and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute imagination to art, we are by no means so ready to appreciate its connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather than art that demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not involve the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is quite compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side we may instance painting. Now painting begins its career in the humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first so slight was its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was conventionally implied by a few scratches bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing. Gradually, owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved. Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of imagination. Not that imagination of a higher order has not been called into play, although even now pictures are often happy adaptations rather than creations proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others, unfortunately for themselves and still more for the public, have not. For that the art may attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much distinction for its professors, without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident enough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the other.
Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average layman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics. Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a few so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the results of experience. It is none the less imaginative because its discoveries always accord subsequently with fact, since man was not aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's prophetic
"Some Xanadu where Kublai can a stately pleasure dome decree,"
and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited, or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with what we know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now, which we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the local. It does not mark the limits of the possible.
That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between the search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the one science and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute imagination to art, we are by no means so ready to appreciate its connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather than art that demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not involve the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is quite compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side we may instance painting. Now painting begins its career in the humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first so slight was its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was conventionally implied by a few scratches bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing. Gradually, owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved. Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of imagination. Not that imagination of a higher order has not been called into play, although even now pictures are often happy adaptations rather than creations proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others, unfortunately for themselves and still more for the public, have not. For that the art may attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much distinction for its professors, without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident enough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the other.
Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average layman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics. Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a few so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the results of experience. It is none the less imaginative because its discoveries always accord subsequently with fact, since man was not aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's prophetic