The Breviary of Aesthetic 21
of the imagination, in a sort of waking sleep, from which we
rouse ourselves as soon as we are rested; and we sometimes
rouse ourselves just to devote ourselves to the work of art,
which cannot be produced by a mind relaxed. Thus either
art is not pure intuition, and the claims put forward in the
doctrines which we believed we had above confuted, are not
satisfied, and so the confutation itself of these doctrines is
troubled with doubts; or intuition cannot consist in a simple
act of imagination.
In order to render the problem more exact and more diffi-
cult, it will be well to eliminate from it at once that part to
which the answer is easy, and which I have not wished to
neglect, precisely because it is usually united and confused
with it. The intuition is the product of an image, and not of
an incoherent mass of images obtained by recalling former
images and allowing them to succeed one another capri-
ciously, by combining one image with another in a like capri-
cious manner, joining a horse’s neck to a human head, and
thus playing a childish game. Old Poetic availed itself
above all of the concept of unity, in order to express this
distinction between the intuition and imagining, insisting
that whatever the artistic work, it should be simplex et
unum; or of the allied concept of unity in variety—that is to
say, the multiple images were to find their common centre
unit of union in a comprehensive image: and the æsthetie of
the nineteenth century created with the same object the dis-
tinction, which appears in not a few of its philosophers,
between fancy (the peculiar artistic faculty) and imagina-
tion (the extra-artistic faculty). To amass, select, cut up,
combine images, presupposes the possession of particular
images in the spirit; and fancy produces, whereas imagina-
tion is sterile, adapted to extrinsic combinations and not to
More intriguing information
1. The name is absent2. Database Search Strategies for Proteomic Data Sets Generated by Electron Capture Dissociation Mass Spectrometry
3. The name is absent
4. Willingness-to-Pay for Energy Conservation and Free-Ridership on Subsidization – Evidence from Germany
5. The name is absent
6. ROBUST CLASSIFICATION WITH CONTEXT-SENSITIVE FEATURES
7. The name is absent
8. Investment in Next Generation Networks and the Role of Regulation: A Real Option Approach
9. THE MEXICAN HOG INDUSTRY: MOVING BEYOND 2003
10. The name is absent