Imagination

IMAGINATION

Imagination. - Whilst common-sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify. Or is this belief a metaphysical whim of modern times, and quite too refined ? On the contrary, it is as old as the human mind. Our best definition of poetry is one of the oldest sentences, and claims to come down to us from the Chaldean Zoroaster, who wrote it thus : "Poets are standing transporters, whose employment consists in speaking to the Father and to matter ; in producing apparent imitations of unapparent natures, and inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world " ; in other words, the world exists for thought : it is to make appear things which hide : mountains, crystals, plants, animals, are seen ; that which makes them is not seen : these, then, are " apparent copies of unapparent natures." Bacon expressed the same sense in his definition, " Poetry accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the mind"; and Swedenborg, when he said, " There is nothing existing in human thought, even though relating to the most mysterious tenet of faith, but has combined with it a natural and sensuous image." And again : " Names, countries, nations, and the like are not at all known to those who are in heaven ; they have no idea of such things, but of the realities signified thereby." A symbol always stimulates the intellect ; therefore is poetry ever the best reading. The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another, in a celestial, nature.