Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a
fire already kindled in another." This is very true, and it sets
clearly forth the fact that naked description, addressed to the calm
understanding, has a different subject-matter from description
addressed to the feelings, and the symbols by which it is made
intelligible must likewise differ. But this in no way impugns the
principle of Vision. Intelligible symbols (clear images) are as
necessary in the one case as in the other.
IV.
By reducing imagination to the power of forming images, and by
insisting that no image can be formed except out of the elements
furnished by experience, I do not mean to confound imagination with
memory; indeed, the frequent occurrence of great strength of memory
with comparative feebleness of imagination, would suffice to warn us
against such a conclusion.
Its specific character, that which marks it off from simple memory, is
its tendency to selection, abstraction, and recombination. Memory, as
passive, simply recalls previous experiences of objects and emotions;
from these, imagination, as an active faculty, selects the elements
which vividly symbolise the objects or emotions, and either by a
process of abstraction allows these to do duty for the whole, or else
by a process of recombination creates new objects and new relations in
which the objects stand to us or to each other (INVENTION), and the
result is an image of great vividness, which has perhaps no
corresponding reality in the external world.
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