Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/41

26 of the open secret of the world as the manifestation of a central life and spirit. But if what it conveys is in principle an illusion, then our imagination has nothing to support it but just this machinery of transferring our own activities to an object, with which they really have nothing to do. And in this case the special theory which explains how the transference is possible seems necessary to justify our aesthetic attitude, though really in explaining it, it explains it away. It is the difference between a fancy and a revelation.

We have often referred to imagination. There is a tendency to think of imagination as a sort of separate faculty, creative of images; a tendency which puts a premium on the arbitrary and fantastic in beauty, rather than the logical and the penetrative. But this, I take it, is simply a blunder. The imagination is precisely the mind at work, pursuing and exploring the possibilities suggested by the connection of its experience. It may operate, of course, in the service of logical enquiry,