MEANING OF THE FACULTY OF JUDGMENT.

597

to bear. By identifying and assimilating the scattered materials, general properties and general truths are obtained, and these may be pushed deductively into new applications; in all which, a powerful reach of Similarity is the main requisite; and this may be owned by men totally destitute of the active qualities necessary for observation and experiment.

22. The present topic furnishes a good opportunity for singling out, for more special notice, the quality of mind. known by the name of Judgment. I have already included a clear perception of the end to be served, as essential to a high order of constructive ingenuity, simply because without this, though there may be a great profusion of devices and suggestions bearing upon the required combination, the fitting result is really not arrived at. Some combination short of the exigencies of the case is acquiesced in.

The various regions of practice differ much in respect of the explicitness of the signs of success. In some things there is no doubt at all; we all know when we have made a good dinner, when our clothing is warm, or when a wound has healed. The miller knows when there is water enough for his mill, and the trader knows when he has found out a good market. The end in those cases is so clear and manifest, that no one is deluded into the notion of having compassed it, if such be not the fact. But in more complex affairs, where perfect success is unattainable, there is room for doubts as to the degree actually arrived at. Thus in public administration we look only for doing good in a considerable majority of instances, and it is often easy to take a minority for a majority. So in acting upon human beings, as in the arts of teaching, advising, directing, persuading, we may suffer ourselves to fall into a very lax judgment of what we have actually achieved, and may thus rest satisfied with easy exertions and flimsily-put-together advices. A sound judgment, meaning a clear and precise perception of what is really effected by the contrivances employed, is to be looked upon as the first requisite of the practical man. He may be meagre in

intellectual resources, he may be slow in getting forward and putting together the appropriate devices, but if his perception of the end is unfaltering and strong, he will do no mischief and practise no quackery. He may have to wait long in order to bring together the apposite machinery, but when he has done so to the satisfaction of his own thorough judgment, the success will be above dispute. Judgment is in general more important than fertility; because a man, by consulting others and studying what has been already done, may usually obtain suggestions enough, but if his judgment of the end is loose, the highest exuberance of intellect is only

a snare.

The adapting of one's views and plans to the opinions of others is an interesting case of constructiveness, and would illustrate all the difficulties that ever belong to the operation. A more abundant intellectual suggestiveness is requisite, according as the conditions of the combination are multiplied; we must transform our plan into a new one containing the essentials of success, with the addition that it must conform to the plan of some other person. There is in that case a considerable amount of moral effort, as well as of intellectual adaptation; the giving way to other men's views being by no means indifferent to our own feelings.

The subject of Speech in general would present some aspects of the constructive mechanism not hitherto dwelt upon in our exposition. A fluent speaker constructing verbal combinations adapted to all the exigencies of meaning, grammar, taste, and cadence, as fast as the voice can utter them, is an object interesting to study in the present connexion. The Italian Improvisatori furnish a still higher example. The sufficiently rapid action of the associating forces is here of prime importance. Real power is not usually identified with a specific pace of mental movement; a slow action may be as effective as a quick; but in this particular instance, the ready revival of all the associations that concur in the common stream is the main element of

success.

IMAGINATION INVOLVES EMOTION.

599

FINE ART CONSTRUCTIONS.-IMAGINATION.

23. The grand peculiarity of the case now to be considered is the presence of an emotional element in the combinations. In the constructions of science and of practice, a certain end is to be served the attainment of truth, or the working out of a practical result; and the mind has to choose means suitable to those ends, according to the rigorous laws of nature's working. A builder has to erect a structure that will defy wind and frost, and accommodate a certain number of human beings. Nothing must enter into his plan that is not calculated to effect these purposes. The construction is considered a pure effort of intellect, because it is by intellect that we comprehend the laws and properties of stone, wood, and iron, and choose out and combine such materials as will serve for warmth and shelter. We should not properly call this operation 'imaginative,' although there is a constructive process gone through; simply because no feeling or emotion enters in as an element, excepting the one feeling of answering a practical end. Volition there is in abundance, but not emotion as understood in the constructive processes of the imagination.

When, however, any practical construction, such as a building, in addition to the uses of shelter and accommodation, is intended to strike the refined sensibilities that we term the feeling of the beautiful, the grand, the picturesque, a turn must be given to the plan so as to involve this other end. Here we have emotion viewed in a certain narrow sense, as exclusive of direct utility for the wants and necessities of life. We possess feelings of warmth, of repletion, of repose; but these are not consulted in fine art. The securing such pleasures as these, and the warding off the opposite pains, and all pains connected with our physical organs, are among the ends of practical art. When these practical ends are secured, there are other feelings and sentiments belonging to human nature that can be touched in a way to increase the sum of human happiness. These are variously called the

pleasures of Taste, the æsthetic sensibilities, the emotions of Fine Art; and combinations shaped with the view of gratifying them are called artistic, æsthetic, or imaginative compositions. In all such compositions, an element of refined emotion is the regulating power, the all in all of the creative effort.* 24. In adducing examples of combinations controlled by

*The following passage will aid us in working out the distinction between the constructions of imagination and the constructions of science and practice:

'The trains of one class differ from those of another, the trains of the merchant for example, from those of the lawyer, not in this, that the ideas follow one another by any other law, in the mind of the one, and the mind of the other; they follow by the same laws exactly; and are equally composed of ideas, mixed indeed with sensations, in the minds of both. The difference consists in this, that the ideas which flow in their minds, and compose their trains, are ideas of different things. The ideas of the lawyer are ideas of the legal provisions, forms, and distinctions, and of the actions, bodily and mental, about which he is conversant. The ideas of the merchant are equally ideas of the objects and operations, about which he is concerned, and the ends towards which his actions are directed; but the objects and operations themselves are remarkably different. The trains of poets, also, do not differ from the trains of other men, but perfectly agree with them in this, that they are composed of ideas, and that those ideas succeed one another, according to the same laws, in their, and in other minds. They are ideas, however, of very different things. The ideas of the poet are ideas of all that is most lovely and striking in the visible appearance of nature, and of all that is most interesting in the actions and affections of human beings. It thus, however, appears most manifestly, that the trains of poets differ from those of other men in no other way, than those of other men differ from one another; that they differ from them by this only, that the ideas of which they are composed, are ideas of different things. There is also nothing surprising in this, that, being trains of pleasurable ideas, they should have attracted a peculiar degree of attention; and in an early age, when poetry was the only literature, should have been thought worthy of a more particular naming, than the trains of any other class. These reasons seem to account for a sort of appropriation of the name Imagination to the trains of the poet. An additional reason may be seen in another circumstance, which also affords an interesting illustration of a law of association already propounded; namely, the obseuration of the antecedent part of a train, which leads to a subsequent, more interesting than itself. In the case of the lawyer, the train leads to a decision favourable to the side which he advocates. The train has nothing pleasurable in itself. The pleasure is all derived from the end. The same is the case with the merchant. His trains are directed to a particular end. And it is the end alone which gives a

THE CONTRASTS WITH IMAGINATION.

601

an emotional element, I shall not confine myself to the narrowest class of artistic feelings, the feelings of Taste properly so called; the fact being that, even in the creations of the artist, all the strong emotions may come in to swell the current of interest, excepting only a few of the more exclusively animal feelings. Rage, terror, tenderness, egotism,

value to the train. The end of the metaphysical, and the end of the mathematical inquirer is the discovery of truth; their trains are directed to that object; and are, or are not, a source of pleasure, as that end is, or is not, attained. But the case is perfectly different with the poet. His train is its own end. It is all delightful, or the purpose is frustrate. From the established laws of association, this consequence unavoidably followed; that, in the case of the trains of those other classes, the interest of which was concentrated in the end, attention was withdrawn from the train by being fixed on the end, that, in the case of the poet, on the other hand, the train itself being the only object, and that pleasurable, the attention was wholly fixed upon the train; that hence the train of the poet was provided with a name; that, in the cases of the trains of other men, where the end only was interesting, it was thought enough that the end itself should be named, the train was neglected.

'In conformity with this observation, we find that wherever there is a train which leads to nothing beyond itself, and has any pretension to the character of pleasurable (the various kinds of reverie, for example) it is allowed the name of Imagination. Thus we say that Rousseau indulged his imagination, when, as he himself describes it, lying on his back, in his boat, on the little lake of Vienne, he delivered himself up for hours to trains, of which, he says, the pleasure surpassed every other enjoyment.

'Professor Dugald Stewart has given to the word Imagination a technical meaning, without, as it appears to me, any corresponding advantage. He confines it to the cases in which the mind forms new combinations; or, as he calls them, creations; that is, to cases in which the ideas which compose the train do not come together in the same combinations in which sensations had ever been received. But this is no specific difference. This happens in every train of any considerable length, whether directed to any end, or not so directed. It is implied in every wish of the child to fly, or to jump over the house; in a large proportion of all his playful expressions, as puss in boots, a hog in armour, a monkey preaching, and so on. It is manifested in perfection in every dream. It is well known that, for the discovery of truths in philosophy, there is a demand for new trains of thought, multitudes of which pass in review before the mind, are contemplated, and rejected, before the happy combination is attained, in which the discovery is involved. If imagination consists in bringing trains before the mind involving a number of new combinations, imagination is probably more the occupation of the philosopher than of the poet.'-MILL's Analysis, vol. i. p. 181.