The
term is intended to convey at once the double phase, under one aspect of
which the reason controls imagination, and under the other aspect the
imagination formulates the reason; it is meant to free the idea, on the
one hand, from that suggestion of abstraction implied by the reason, and
to disembarrass it, on the other, of any connection with the irrational
fancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily both concrete,
correspondent to the realities of experience, and truthful, subject to
the laws of the universe; it cannot contain the impossible, it cannot
amalgamate the actual with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie and
retain its own nature. The use of this rational imagination is not
confined to the world of art. It is only by its aid that we build up the
horizons of our earthly life and fill them with objects and events
beyond the reach of our senses. To it we are indebted for our knowledge
of the greater part of others' lives, for our idea of the earth's
surface and the doings of foreign nations, of all past history and its
scene, and the events of primaeval nature which were even before man
was.
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