To Miss Jane Norton.

Jan. 5, 1875.

All the incidents of the New Years of my boyhood, which recur to my recollection readily, were very pleasant, I believe; and yet, like nearly all the rest of what has found lodgement in the garret of my memory, have a tinge of melancholy. This, I think, is not an indication at all of the surrounding love and kindness, or the reverse, in the circumstances of childhood, but is in accordance with a constitutional peculiarity.

I hold and have maintained with you, I believe, that memory is one of the most fallacious of our faculties (if a power so fundamental, the essential mind itself, is properly called a faculty), when not checked by other records or by rational criticism. The fallaciousness is not so striking as that of the single senses, perhaps, because its fallible testimony is in general not so important as that of the eye or ear to present interests. Yet the things remembered are not just and truly proportioned pictures of the past, but incidents which were impressed on account even of their abnormality, and through the predominance of feelings which temperament determined, rather than the actual and normal surroundings of life. I do

not account, however, that youth or woman unhappy, unlucky, or less level with the realities of life whom melancholy has marked for her own. He may, if not too deeply marked, be even happier in the early renunciation of all expectation or wish for happiness. This abstraction, “happiness,” is objectively a dream, and has no simple, single, answering feeling or passion in our natures. Its meaning is realized only in the concrete; in the particular desires, purposes, and passions, which happen to have their way, unopposed by others equally strong, or by untoward circumstances. The wish for a happy New Year is from this point of view an affectation. What we really, simply, and sincerely wish is the furtherance of the particular projects in the contemplation of which the present happiness or realized interests of the human mind so largely consist.

It is not to a general happiness through the year that we immediately aspire. The rational Promethean human mind is composed of hooks and eyes for the particular felicities of the morrows, the indefinitely recurring mornings of life and strength. “Good morrow” is a genuine wish, a sympathy with the real efficients of activity and happiness.

You write to this effect in what you say of the paltry value of the good resolutions of this season. I go farther, and assert their positive injury to the moral nature. Their reinvigorating effect on one’s morality is like that of a stimulant that calls out an energy which it does not replace. Though meant for a future, they only serve a present occasion, most likely at the expense of the future, and are very damaging to conscience. The true moral strategy is to surround one’s self with objective safeguards and incitements, and not to trust these raw recruits (these seasonal resolutions that are only spasms of enthusiasm in an enfeebled will), which may desert at the first occasion of real need. It is not wisdom, but conceit which relies on them. . . .

I have continued the warfare which I had begun, when we parted, against the æsthetic imagination, — against the word “imagination,” as used by æsthetic writers, not against what they denote by the word.

I had in a club-talk, a few days ago, a good illustration of the misleading influence of this misnaming, and of the pretence of explanation which namings often involve, when they are, at best, only true classifications or divisions; the name unhappily connoting attributes that are not the real grounds of the classification. The a priori philosophy surreptitiously introduces itself into theories of art and genius through such misnamings, — though my chief objection to this use of the word “imagination” was on account of its being already appropriated to a precise scientific meaning; a meaning whose limits and precision are disregarded in the æsthetic use of the word. Such words as “wit” and “humor,” or even “fancy” (though not this as in any true antithesis to what should be meant by imagination), are unscientific terms, and æsthetic writers are at liberty to wander at their own sweet wills within the limits of vagueness which these terms cover. But for the other count, — the misleading character of the theory implicated in “imagination” as the name of the poet’s faculty (his faculties, one should say, for his equipment is not in one single point or faculty alone): I had asserted that Kepler’s third law, “that the times of the planet’s revolutions are in the sesquiplicate ratio of their mean distances,” did not imply so much invention on his part, nor (as was more properly the case) so much learning and discipline in mathematics, as some of his earlier, untrue hypotheses; which, because they proved false, are now called fanciful. My opponent said that this true hypothesis is properly referred to the inventor’s “imagination,” because it was in accordance with the nature of things (!) As if this omniscient but long-time dumb faculty were a natural algebraist, and knew a priori the meaning of

sesquiplicate. Here you see a natural consequence of the fallacies of naming. My friend had gathered from this false naming that somehow there existed a faculty in us which is independent of the discipline's and tests of experience, and guides us rightly in our imaginations when freed from the disturbances of capricious fancy. Our familiarity with what to Kepler must a priori have seemed as fanciful as many of his failing hypotheses, being thus mistaken for imagination in him, becomes proof of the want in any one, so thinking, of the faculty or faculties so badly misnamed.

The fact that there is a heap of truth in the inference so drawn only makes the matter worse. Experience itself, and not any faculty independent of it, is what makes the imagination work more steadily toward the truth in some minds than in others, or on certain subjects better than on different ones. Thorough acquaintance with what is already known or accomplished on any subject guides the guess or device, especially in a negative way; or leads to the speedy rejection of many inventions, which a priori are just as good as the true ones.

But this experience is often in the intuitive mode of mental apprehension, or is not distinctly, reflectively, or discursively apprehended. Our judgments of inventions as they arise in imagination are in the form of common-sense judgments, though founded none the less on experience, and in fact on the inventor’s own experience.

This is especially the case in æsthetic judgments. They are in the common-sense shape, or are judgments for which the reasons or grounds do not distinctly appear in thought; the very subtlety of which, indeed, is impaired by habits of analysis. So that an artist with theories is generally the worse artist for them. Now, the man of genius, whether poetical or scientific, has greater capacities with given opportunities to gather this sort of experience, and the fertility of his imagination is correspondingly greater than that of

common minds; but it is not in this fertility — it is not in imagination at all — that his characteristic excellence consists. It is in the tests he can immediately apply from experience either through his culture or superior spontaneous observation; or where these fail (as they generally do, with reference to any great originality) it is in his patient self-directed study and his power of prolonged application, or in the efficient motives to these, that his superiority lies.

But artistic or poetic genius requires for its full determination some further qualification of this definition. Such a genius has, I think, either originally, or by early discipline, greater voluntary power over modes of feeling. Feeling plays a greater part both in the spontaneous and in the controlled imaginations of such a mind than is common. Now, it is a universal fact in psychology that in a state of passion, or simple, definite feeling, the ideas, images, and expressions that are congruent with such a state arise alone. All irrelevant fancies are excluded by it. This therefore serves as a test or standard, analogous to the objective standard of experience in which the waking eye or ear governs the dream of thought, suppressing all that is irrelevant to clear perception; and we are said to perceive the truth or the reality. This “truth” of imagination, though analogous to that accordance, that agreement in significance, of thought with experience, of the universal with the particulars of experience, — in which truth really consists, though analogous to such truth in being a controlled or rectified fancy, is yet more properly called the “fit ,” the “becoming;” or when it is a revelation by the poet or artist of that in the harmony and justness of expression, which the common mind cannot attain without his aid, it is properly the beautiful or the fine. The ancients honored this name, “the beautiful,” more than we do, and thought it an equal of the true. With us, the word has acquired a less serious meaning, and a taint of sybaritism; so

that serious, moralizing art critics, to assist the appearance of levity in their favorite study, and with a just sense of the moral worth of beauty, have abused the name of truth. But allowing their aim and study to be called “truth,” or “truth of imagination,” it is no more properly an essential element of an internal faculty to be called imagination, and distinguished from fancy, than proper truth is an attribute of imagination in clear, objective perception. In neither case does the imagination contain the test of truth. It is rather rectified by the real standard. In poetic or artistic perception, capacities of simple, sincere, unaffected feeling is the rectifying standard. In outward perception, the standard is in our waking senses. In both cases, the imagination becomes true. In itself, it is no other than the fancy, and is neither true nor false a priori; though more likely false than true, when very fertile, and not governed by the excellences of mental equipment, which have been unjustly attributed to it. That which is misnamed “imagination” is the capacity of taking in truths from experience, not that of evolving them from within, in any other sense than implicit or common-sense judgments are from within; — unless we include also in this faculty connections of feeling with expression, so far, at least, as these, without discipline, may go.

You demanded, in our talk on this subject, what name I would substitute for “imagination,” when speaking, for example, of studies which are said, with real meaning, “to educate the imagination.” You objected to “cultivating studies,” because of its pretension; and to “the sentiments,” as smacking of affectation. Feeling, I know, is a favorite word; and lest pretension and affectation should approach too near, or lay rude, sacrilegious hands on what is so foreign to their nature, let us say the studies we seek to define are those that require, and, when genuinely pursued, develop through exercise true capacities of natural feeling.

Or let us say that certain studies educate, refine, and furnish with appropriate materials the natural feelings or the genuine sentiments of the man. The word “liberal” would hardly, do, and is affected by both technicality and vagueness. But what if one cannot find an equivalent expression to take the place of what is, on other grounds, objectionable?

Terseness is a good quality in a phrase; but when it is at the expense of periphrasis elsewhere, or compels a writer like Professor Tyndall to import the German Vorstellung in order not to get confused with æsthetic writers, it is proper for the latter to take a lesson in lexicography.

But my talk has run too continuously on from our last debate ; and true feeling would perhaps have put more vividly before my imagination the change in your interests and circumstances. Metaphysics might do as a diversion from your cares at home, but may not so well season your relaxations. Still, I find a new problem in your letter, — that on belief in dreams. Dr. Maudsley somewhere says that the development of incipient diseases are sometimes anticipated in dreams, and, he thinks, naturally from the altered proportions of our feelings in sleep; for symptoms scarcely perceptible in the presence of vivid waking sensations may assert themselves enough in sleep to govern the dream. And I may add that ideas, not unfounded in our experience, and really true, but opposed to some waking conviction or decision of our judgments, may assert themselves in dreams, and attach themselves vividly to interests which will give them weight in waking reflections; especially if we are in the habit of recalling dreams. But in this case the true ones remembered are as likely to be in the same small proportion to the false as in the case of rarely recollected dreams. The sensitiveness of certain conditions of ill-health is perhaps a more frequent cause for concern at dreams than race-peculiarities, nationality, temperament, or even habit. But into what a didactic vein I have fallen!

The following memorandum of a conversation with Wright, on “Living according to Nature,” was taken down by one of his friends in January, 1875: —

It is permissible to use the word Nature as the name of the harmony of things, but it is not permissible to confound the harmony in the whole, the laws of nature and the invisible orders both without and within us, — to confound the law of causation, whose formula is, “If thus, then so,” with the harmony we seek as moral beings, which without our seeking would not, and does not, exist. This (cosmically considered) lesser, but (morally considered) greater, or more important harmony sounding in our very ears, always alluring, though never actually or invariably regulating, like proper laws of nature, the agency of moral beings, is, in its completeness, an ideal harmony. What are properly called the laws of nature pervade the (cosmically speaking) lesser harmony; for we are parts of fate: our lives are also made up of the inevitable, when looked at from the cosmic scientific point of view.

The mistake of mystical philosophy is to suppose this lesser harmony to pervade also, or to be a part of the cosmically greater. This is Plato’s realism. The laws of this harmony are of a wholly different order, different in meaning, out of the other’s sphere, neither contradictory to nor in conformity with those of the scientific cosmos; though involving them as the laws of living structures involve those of matter generally, or as the laws of mechanical structure involve those of its materials and surrounding conditions. Mechanical structures, living structures, artistic and moral structures, are all fittings to ends; and these, though not absolute accidents (since nothing in the cosmos is absolutely accidental), yet relatively to any discoverable principles of the cosmos, are accidents. Now, the conditions which determine these several

forms of fitness are in the cosmos, but the ends are not, — except so far as human imaginations preconceive them, or as the actualities of constructions in living forms in art and in moral character are their embodiment. Being embodied more or less perfectly according to the standard of what can be conceived, they seek, or stimulate to action (by a law which is one of the cosmic ones), for their perpetuation and for their perfection; according to the abstract or ideal standard of that which they alone are, or which exists alone in them.

But this ideal standard has its determinants partly in inherited dispositions, and still more in those which early religious training induces. M. Antoninus was not a profound thinker upon what had made him what he was or felt himself to be. Innate predispositions to perceptions and actions, which, if right in their directive agency, are in accordance with reason, — that is, with the results of experience and observation, — are not thereby made a standard, or at any rate an independent standard, for self-culture. The way to follow Nature is to observe the means which, in accordance with the cosmic laws or conditions of Nature, and of human nature, are found to be conducive to self-sanctioned ends in the higher social or moral life of man, or in his reflective social nature; naturam observare is the way naturam sequi. This research observes the conditions of necessity, the laws of inevitable sequence in cosmic nature, and seeks to join to them the ideals of life in such manner as will realize or make actual these ideals as perfectly as possible in outward action. In this relation, Nature is not a teacher, but only a part of the lesson, and is a guide only in the sense in which a mountain-pass is a guide; namely, the limits within which our efforts are saved from total failure.

While, therefore, it is not permissible, in respect to the harmony of ideal ends with the outward activities of life, to confound it with those laws of universal nature that are not to be

obeyed, since they cannot be violated; yet the theoretical fault of this confusion is in some sort compensated by the practical value and force it has had with many minds of the poetical type. To imagine an ideal to be embodied somewhere or actualized, and to have an independent existence which, instead of being determined by reason, — that is, experience, — is what determines it, and especially determines the innate, intuitional, or spontaneous reason, seems to be a very natural tendency of the human imagination. Reverence, or at least the poetical form of it, demands that power and goodness or moral harmony should exist in actu, in a being in real nature, as well as in posse or ideally. Historically, this tendency has been of the greatest service to moral advancement. The Nature appealed to as a standard has been, in fact, a realized abstraction, an imagined embodiment of moral convictions, whether called the will and the laws of the gods or of universal nature or of common nature, or called a harmony which is objective or actually external to the idea of it. But, while theoretically wrong, its practical effect as against the superstitious reverence for idealized realities, dead forms, institutions, and sanctions, has been immense. Natural rights were pragmatically real, so long as divine rights remained so. The Nature still deserving our worship is the harmony of an elevated ideal standard, pragmatically opposed to the claims of traditional institutions and sanctions.