Imagination and Society

Extract

A number of books dealing with the function of imaginaton in humanu life have recently appeared. Is this because external experience is becoming harsher, as the war proceeds, shattering deli cate sensibility, so that we are forced into the internal world of images? Is it escapism? Or is it not, rather, a dawning realisation that in this interior faculty of sensation lies ‘the key to the great puzzle of our mental decay and to future remedies for civilisation? Excluding, therefore, the complications of psychology and aesthetics, of reflexes and poetic experience, we may profitably return to the simple truths about the human imagination which still throw much light on present problems.

Of the works here under review, the four-page News-Letter Supplement by Philip Mairet stands high above the rest in importance and value. He shows that the imagination, which is the property not merely of men of genius and ‘vision,’ but of all men, is a faculty of ‘etherialised’ sensations. With the memory it forms a kind of treasury of all one’s external experiences, so that a man can see, hear, touch or taste things which he has experienced in the past almost as strongly as if they were physically present and acting on his nervous system. Miss Ellis-Fermor, although she claims that this faculty ‘exists in most men,’ wrongly identifies it with a poetic faculty in the sense of an essentially active and constructive power, creating new reality from the data of experience. This is only one function of the imagination which, as Mr. Mairet seems to suggest, automatically provides a background to life, so that one can interiorly retain contact with the day-to-day physical experiences even when withdrawn from them, as in sleep.