the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the revolution, and that the errours which I propose to attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a plausible and indefinite nomenclature. But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics, who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This alas! is an irremediable disease, for nomenclature" namely that of Kant; which he attributes to their having been long accustomed to the statements of Leibnitz, who had communicated his philosophical principles fragmentarily, in letters to friends, or to distinguished and great Lords, ever with much forbearance toward prevailing opinions, and on that account with less of sharpness and precision than is suitable to scientific explanation; or to their having grown stiff in the school-language and method of Wolf. S. C.] 40 ["Finally, the last of all, through the impotent sham philosophy of some waterish authors, or the pandect wisdom of aphoristic eclectics, had lost all sense and taste, not perhaps for a determined system, but for philosophy in general, before Kant had published a syllable of his philosophy." Transl. (Abhandlungen Phil. Schrift. p. 204.) S. C.] it brings with it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men rolls in vollies long after the report from the original blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert."1 I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and its organs of sense, are the following sentences. "These (the human faculties) I would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the ear, the touch, &c.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce, or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means of principles a priori42; the 41 Franc. Baconis de Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM. [Aphorisms LXXVII. and LXXXVIII. S. C.] 42 This phrase, a priori, is in common, most grossly misunderstood, and an absurdity burdened on it, which it does not deserve! By knowledge a priori, we do not mean, that we can will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkühr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." 43 To this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy." 44 I reply, that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's subject required or permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such rea know any thing previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but that having once known it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have pre-existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By experience only I know, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience. 43 [Literary Remains. I. pp. 326-7.] 44 [Preface to the Poetical Works. Vol. I. p. xxxiv.] ders! I will conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit." 45 CHAPTER XIII. On the imagination, or esemplastic power. O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root To intellectual !-give both life and sense, "Sane si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent, verissime dicerentur in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam, quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere. 5 Jer. Taylor's Via pacis. [Sunday. The First Decad. 8. S. C.] 1 Par. Lost. Book V. 1. 469. "Hinc igitur, præter pure mathematica et phantasiæ subjecta, collegi quædam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et massæ materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an έvreλɛxɛiav an vim appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem intelligibiliter explicari." 2 Σέβομαι νοερῶν 2 Leibnitz. Op. T. II. P. II. p. 53.—T. III. p. 321. [The first sentence of this quotation is from the treatise of Leibnitz De Ipsa Natura, sive de Vi insita Actionibusque creaturarum, § 8. ed. Erdmann. P.I. p. 157.:-the second is from his Specimen Dynamicum, pro admirandis Naturæ legibus circa corporum Vires, et mutuas Actiones detegendis et ad suas causas revocandis. Ex Actis Erudit. Lips. ann. 1695. In the second extract Mr. C. has substituted the word phantasia for imaginationi, and, in the beginning of the last sentence rerum for formam. He quoted from the edition of Lud. Dutens, a Frenchman resident in Britain, as I learn from Erdmann's Preface, in which it is mentioned that neither his collection nor that of Raspe, who added posthumous works of Leibnitz, contains all his philosophical writings, and that both the one and the other frustro a bibliopolis quæres, imo in publicis bibliothecis desiderabis. The former however is at the British Museum, presented by himself in 1800. The new edition comprehends only the philosophical works,— the Specimen Dynamicum is classed among the mathematical,but, as Erdmann himself observes, it is often very difficult to judge utrum scriptio aliqua philosophica indolis sit an non sit. See Appendix S. S. C.] 3 Synesii Episcop. Hymn. III. 1. 231. |