System of the Fine Arts/Book 1/Chapter 1

Imagination, mistress of error, according to Pascal. Montaigne, of the same, speaking of those who "believe they see what they don't see at all", brings us back to the center of the notion, and discovers for us all the extent of it according to this which exacts the common language ["The madwoman of the house" (La folle du logis) is a French idiom for the word "imagination"]. For, if one intends this word according to the usage, the imagination is not solely, nor even principally, a contemplative power of the spirit, but above all the error and the disorder entering in the spirit at the same time as the tumult of the body. As one can see in fear, where the effects of the imagination, if one is familiarized with them, holds first among those indubitable perceptions of the body proper, as contracture, trembling, heat and cold, beatings of the heart, strangling, and whereas the images of the supposed objects which would be the cause of those reactions are often completely undetermined and always vanishing, understand that the attention dissipates them and that they reform themselves as behind us. It imports to recognize first, by a severe examination, that this power to evoke the appearances of absent objects does not go as far as one says it goes, that one does not believe it either, and in other terms, that the imagination fools us also about its own nature.

There is some ambiguity, if one does not keep guard against it, in what one says of a strong imagination. Strong (it is necessary to understand it by its effects) which goes easily to malaise and even to malady, as fear shows it; but it is necessary to guard oneself from judging of the consistency of the images according to the physiognomy, the gestures, the movements and the words which are the accompaniment of them. The delerious state that one may also call sybilline, in the fever or in the paroxysm of the passions, is by itself eloquent, moving, contagious; this is one reason not to believe too quickly that the delirious see all that they describe. Someone has recounted to me that at Metz, during the other war, a crowd was believing it saw the liberating army in the windows of an old mansion. They were believing they saw. But what were they seeing? Some reflections of the sun, or some iridescent colors no doubt. A live hope, resent from the crowd to the crowd, was deforming their discourse, but to say that the hope was deforming also their perceptions, this is to say more than one knows. The psychology of our times will not recover at all from its principal error which is to have too much believed the madmen and the ill.

I add that it is prudent to not too much at all believe oneself as soon as a strong passion or solely the passion to testify animates us. Let us return still to the example of fear, where the game of the imagination is powerful and the belief so strong, even when the power to evoke is uncertain and groping. In place therefore of believing, what is properly the folly of the imagination, that it is the object supposed which effects proof and produces the emotion, it is reasonable to think that it is the emotion which effects proof, and gives in this way sense and consistency to some impressions by themselves poorly determined. When one imagines a voice in the ticking of a clock, one still does not hear but a clock ticking, and the least attention assures us of it. But in that case, and without doubt in all, the false judgment is aided by the very same voice, and the voice created a new object which substitutes itself for the other. Here we fabricate the thing imagined; fabricated, it is real through that act and perceived without doubt of it at all.

One tries to say further where these images come from, and so much as one can speak of it, what they are. But it is useful to consider first in the imagination what is most evidently real, and which carries all the rest; to know on one hand the reactions of the body, so tyrannically felt, and on the other hand this deceiver judgment, so firmly supported on the emotions and afterwards looking for the images and waiting for them, often in vain.

In view of confirming the first case and of directing it where it is necessary, let us give ourselves some example of imagination where the false perception misses completely. This has happened to you without doubt: to see to bring near each other and to almost strike against each other two heavy cars in one of which you were. At the moment when the shock was expected, and although it does not occur, you have felt in your body a revolution of the blood and an intimate convulsion of the muscles, sensible everywhere, but more sensible in the part menaced, which is the leg. Living disorder, living enough for a doctor posted there to have been able to measure an abrupt leap in the blood pressure of this party, some muscular expenditure also, although without movement; and if you consider some cases like those at hand, so ordinary, the possibility of an injury more or less durable, pain and marking at the same time, will not appear to us unverisimilar. Now that is there, according to the manner of common speaking, always exact and sovereign, an effect of imagination. You have believed and you have reacted, without any deliberation and as an automaton. Now here the image of the accident has not at all formed itself; the gait of the vehicles has been perceived exactly, without any clouding of vision; but one can well say also that the movement of the blood and of the muscles has designed in your body an image only feeble but very affecting of the awaited crushing.

It suffices from this example to bring back to just proportions the elements which characterize what is imaginary; I understand that the mechanism of the body makes its power felt there, that a strong emotion is felt and perceived, inseparable from the bodily movements, and at the same time that a belief verisimilar, but anticipated and finally without object has produced itself; the whole together has the character of an empassioned expectation, imaginary in one sense, but very real in the tumult of the body. It is of first importance to retrieve these domineering characters even in the case where this is, as one says, a sort of image or of vision or of hearing that is fantastic which retains the attention and is fixed principally in the memory.

Considered under this aspect, imagination is mad and unruled by its nature. At first it is clear enough that the judgment and the tumult of the body continually react, the one on the other, as anxiety, fear, anger testify of it. And after the disordered and counteracted movements of the body have assured the false judgment, that I am in danger, or that this man scorns me, or that this town will be fatal to me, as soon as this judgment follows a new agitation resulting from actions commenced, retained, counteracted, as the same way it happens when the object is missed; and this agitation reanimates the emotion. Thus the judgment, if it does not find anything at all from the object finds at least some evidences; for the trembling and the flight does not cure me at all from the fear, all to the contrary. Disorder therefore in the body, error in the spirit, the one nourishes the other, there is the reality of the imagination, not without some visions of an instant, or indeed some perceptions badly controlled, of which it is necessary now to speak. But it was necessary at first to protect the spirit investigator against this descriptive eloquence proper to the passions, and which would make belief that the visions are even more keen than the recounting. If the reader considers in this prudent manner, as Descartes teaches us, perhaps he will perceive that the imagination has need of objects. Thus the arts show themselves already as remedies to reverie, always wandering and sorrowful. Système des Beaux-Arts/Livre premier/1