"Made up from the gatherings of Sense" is a phrase which may seem to
imply some peculiar plastic power such as is claimed exclusively for
artists: a power not of simple recollection, but of recollection and
recombination. Yet this power belongs also to philosophers. To combine
the half of a woman with the half of a fish,--to imagine the union as
an existing organism,--is not really a different process from that of
combining the experience of a chemical action with an electric action,
and seeing that the two are one existing fact. When the poet hears the
storm-cloud muttering, and sees the moonlight sleeping on the bank, he
transfers his experience of human phenomena to the cloud and the
moonlight: he personifies, draws Nature within the circle of emotion,
and is called a poet. When the philosopher sees electricity in the
storm-cloud, and sees the sunlight stimulating vegetable growth, he
transfers his experience of physical phenomena to these objects, and
draws within the circle of Law phenomena which hitherto have been
unclassified. Obviously the imagination has been as active in the one
case as in the other; the DIFFERENTIA lying in the purposes of the two,
and in the general constltution of the two minds.
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