Imagination as Constructive

Imagination is a form of construction or combination. Its materials are the elements drawn from reality by the methods, and under the conditions, described. These abstract or ideal contents it puts together and makes of them new wholes of thought, the like of which have not been seen or heard. Now we have already seen something of the constructive activity of the mind in its less pretending forms. I place Millais' two portraits of Mr. Gladstone side by side in the mind and compare them, though I could not actually see them at one and the same moment. So far, however, I imagine nothing. I reproduce only; for though I frame the idea of a whole which has never been given as a whole, yet both the elements of the wholes have been given, and nothing is added to them. If, now, it is suggested to me that these portraits represent different sides of Mr. Gladstone's character, and that the real man is a fusion of the two, I try to make a different kind of construction, in which the fire of the one portrait would be blended with the repose of the other—in short, I attempt a fusion of the two instead of a mechanical addition of one to the other. What precisely happens would be difficult to follow in such a case, even supposing the fusion to be successfully performed. Take a different case. I want to give you a rough idea of an ornithorhynchus, and describe it as having the body and legs of a quadruped and the bill of a bird. Imagine a four-legged animal of any familiar type and append to its head a bird's bill, and you get a very rough idea of the creature. Now, it is not enough to say that this is a union of two ideas, for there is a union of them in merely asserting them at one and the same moment, or in any relation to each other. In this case there is an actual application of one idea to the other; they are joined, as the physical bill is joined to the physical head of the ornithorhynchus, and the union involves precisely the same thing, a common point in which they touch. In very many eases of application this common point is the actual possession of spatial surfaces, such as can be brought into contact in the manner called for by the act of imagination. Whenever that is done, whenever in an ideal content a certain point is singled out as falling under some other idea, then the two ideas are applied to one another and combined in the sense requisite for imagination. A new whole is formed, which is not a mere summing up of the elements, but consists of the elements placed in a new relation ¹ to one another by the identification of some one point in each with some one point in the other.