Practical Rhetoric (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LESSON II. THE IMAGINATION. My eyes make pictures when they're shut. ? Coleridge. Imagination is the faculty of conceiving things according to their actualities or possibilities, that is, as they are or may be; of conceiving them clearly; of seeing with the eyes closed, and hearing with the ears sealed, and vividly feeling, things which exist only through the will of the artist's genius, ? not only of conceiving these, but of holding one's conceptions so well in mind as to express them, to copy them, in actual language or form. ? Edmund Clarence Stedman. The life of the imagination is the discovery of truth. ? Ruskin. The Image-making Faculty. ? As taste perceives and enjoys beauty, so the imagination, under the guidance of taste, originates beautiful thought shapes, which, when expressed in color, form, or language, are capable of imparting the highest intellectual pleasure. Such pleasure is the end of all true art. The simplest action of this faculty is the reproduction of a remembered image. Whatever impresses the mind through the senses leaves behind it a representative in the memory. Every object that we have seen is represented by a memory image. It is with memory images that imagination deals. They remain stored in the mind's treasure-house, to be reproduced, when occasion arises, in the mental field. It is easy, when at a distance from home, to construct in your mind a picture of the street on which you live, or of the library in which you study; the fact that you can do so proves to you that you have an image-making faculty. Imagination thus restores remembered sense objects. It can also construct images from the accounts of others;and much of the pleasure we derive from a novel like " Lorna Doone " depends upon the action of this faculty in giving ment...