Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/768

 754 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

taining movement of the imagination by which we mean that it inhibits impulsive and instinctive activity. Gummere has shown that the development of poetic sentiment is a result of the separa- tion of the individual from the old singing throng. ^^ The throng suggests activity, instinctive and impulsive. Only as the indi- vidual separates from it can he sustain a prolonged imaginative movement.^^ Paradise Lost is an imaginative and convention- alized form of Milton's experiences in the Puritan War. But it was not until defeat and blindness and persecution and isolation had thrown him back upon himself that his imagination, in its struggle to raise him above agitation, produced Paradise Lost}"^ This was followed by Paradise Regained, an imaginative and conventionalized form of the thrill of triumph and the rest which follows strife.^^ This sustained movement of the imagination with its two divisions and the varieties of sentiment of each, constitutes the important phase of the first level of expansive cognition.

With this brief exposition of the first and second levels, I turn to the third level of expansive cognition. As I have said,

'^ Beginnings of Poetry, chap. iv.

but spiritual, that is, must be elevation." — Emerson, Essay on "Self-Reliance."
 * "We must get alone. .... But the isolation must not be mechanical,

" "To regret that Milton should, at this crisis of the state, have turned aside from poetry to controversy is to regret that Paradise Lost should exist. .... He tells us that controversy is highly repugnant to him : 'I trust to make it manifest with small willingness I. . . . leave a calm and pleasing solitariness .... to embark in a sea of noises '

"But he felt that if he allowed such motives to prevail with him, it would be said of him : 'Thou hast the .... parts, the language of a man, if a vain object were to be adorned and beautified ; but when the cause of God and his church was to be pleaded .... thou wert dumb as a beast.' A man with Paradise Lost in him must needs so think and act, and, much as it would hav2 been to have had another Comus or Lycidas, were not even such well exchanged for a hymn like this .... ?" — Gamett, Milton, pp. 68, 69.

Of Milton's condition when he began Paradise Lost, Trent writes : "Blind, reviled, despised by his own children, his ideals shattered, his health impaired, he had but one .... hope — the completion of the great poem he has already begun." — John Milton, p. 47. See also p. 195.

""He resolved that, in Christ's triumph, he would shadow forth Satan's ultimate defeat and the final acquisition of Paradise by Adam's race." — Trent, John Milton, p. 237.