ters of Chinese earthenware be confounded with
the Faun, Satyr, or Centaur.

Sec. 30. Imagination now vulgarly understood.

How different this definition of the imagination may be from the idea of
it commonly entertained among us, I can hardly say, because I have a
very indistinct idea of what is usually meant by the term. I hear modern
works constantly praised as being imaginative, in which I can trace no
virtue of any kind; but simple, slavish, unpalliated falsehood and
exaggeration; I see not what merit there can be in pure, ugly, resolute
fiction; it is surely easy enough to be wrong; there are many ways of
being unlike nature. I understand not what virtue that is which entitles
one of these ways to be called imaginative, rather than another; and I
am still farther embarrassed by hearing the portions of those works
called especially imaginative in which there is the most effort at
minute and mechanical statement of contemptible details, and in which
the artist would have been as actual and absolute in imitation as an
echo, if he had known how. Against convictions which I do not
understand, I cannot argue; but I may warn the artist that imagination
of this strange kind, is not capable of bearing the time test; nothing
of its doing ever has continued its influence over men; and if he
desires to take place among the great men of older time, there is but
one way for it; and one kind of imagination that will stand the immortal
light: I know not how far it is by effort cultivable; but we have
evidence enough before us to show in what direction that effort must be
made.

Sec. 31. How its cultivation is dependent on the moral feelings.

We have seen (Sec. 10) that the imagination is in no small degree
dependent on acuteness of moral emotion; in fact, all moral truth can
only thus be apprehended--and it is observable, generally, that all true
and deep emotion is imaginative, both in conception and expression; and
that the mental sight becomes sharper with every full beat of the heart;
and, therefore, all egotism, and selfish care, or regard, are in
proportion to their constancy, destructive of imagination; whose play
and power depend altogether on our being able to forget ourselves and
enter like possessing spirits into the bodies of things about us.

Sec. 32. On independence of mind.

Again, as the life of imagination is in the discovering of truth, it is
clear it can have no respect for sayings or opinions: kno