Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/60

6 before it attempts to create, begins by reasoning upon what it sees and knows. Nor is this all. In the faculty of Imagination, both Reason and Memory are, to a certain extent, combined,—the mind never imagining or creating objects but such as are analogous to those whereof it has had previous experience. Where this analogy is wanting, the combinations are extravagant and displeasing; and consequently, in that agreeable imitation of nature, at which the fine arts aim in common, invention is necessarily subjected to the control of rules which it is the business of the philosopher to investigate.

“In farther justification of this arrangement, it may be remarked, that Reason, in the course of its successive operations on the subjects of thought, by creating abstract and general ideas, remote from the perceptions of sense, leads to the exercise of Imagination as the last step of the process. Thus metaphysics and geometry are, of all the sciences belonging to Reason, those in which Imagination has the greatest share. I ask pardon for this observation from those men of taste, who, little aware of the near affinity of geometry to their own pursuits, and still less suspecting that the only intermediate step between them is formed by metaphysics, are disposed to employ their wit in depreciating its value. The truth is, that, to the geometer who invents, Imagination is not less essential than to the poet who creates. They operate, indeed, differently on their object, the former abstracting and analyzing, where the latter combines and adorns;—two processes of the mind, it must, at the same time, be confessed, which seem from experience to be so little congenial, that it may be doubted if the talents of a great geometer and of a great poet will ever be united in the same person. But whether these talents be, or be not mutually exclusive, certain it is, that they who possess the one, have no right to despise those who cultivate the other. Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes is perhaps he who is the best entitled to be placed by the side of Homer.”

D’Alembert afterwards proceeds to observe, that of these three general branches of the Encyclopedical Tree, a natural and convenient subdivision is afforded by the metaphysical distribution of things into Material and Spiritual. “With these two classes of existences,” he observes farther, “history and philosophy are equally conversant; but as for the Imagination, her imitations are entirely confined to the material world;—a circumstance,” he adds, “which conspires with the other arguments above stated, in justifying Bacon for