Science and also philosophy
formulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is,
clothes truth in a tale. Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the
mind projects a world of its own, whose principle of being is that it
reembodies general or abstract truth and presents it concretely to the
eye of the mind, and in some arts gives it physical form. So, to draw an
example from science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination the
planet Uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universal
qualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doing
he created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his
imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality
in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. This creation of the
concrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reason
working in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed
is sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of the mind,
in distinction from the scientific intellect which merely knows.
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