MR. GOSCHEN ON IMAGINATION.
WE regard it as the principal lesson of Mr. Goschen's very striking and delightful Rectorial address last week to the University of Edinburgh, that the imagination has achieved a vastly more effective work in reconstructing the past, than in forecasting the future. Mr. Goschen showed clearly enough, that for him at least, the most effective work it has ever done has been the interpretation of the past ; and we imagine that almost all men of great imagination would agree with him in holding that in Shake- speare, in Scott, in Goethe, in Dante, in Chaucer, in Virgil, in Homer, the work of the imagination has proved far more effective in its retrospective effort to interpret in some real fashion the present and past history of man, than it has ever proved, except perhaps in the very limited field of political economy, when it was asked to do the work of anticipation and to forecast the future. For the most part, visions of the coming age have been rather fanciful than imaginative,—capricious Utopias whose grave defect it has been, as Mr. Goschen inti- mated, that they have dropped out of man all those conditions of his nature which would in any way interfere with the Utopian dream which it pleased their authors to imagine. Even the economists, in assuming that every individual man would always as a rule do what seemed to him likely to conduce to his best interests, have assumed much more than can be universally conceded,—at all events for any scientific purpose such as
would enable us to arrive at general conclusions as to what their best interests are,—first, because there are a good many men who are much too indolent to do what they would yet admit it to be for their best interest to do ; and next, because there are a good many enthusiasts who conceive it to be for their best interest to do what nine men in ten who attempted to predict their actions, would think it absurd and even monstrous to attribute to them. Still, so far as man's commercial interests are concerned, the ground is narrow enough, and the conditions are general enough, to furnish us with a very useful set of working hypotheses, at least for a given time and a given place. But the moment the imagination attempts a higher flight, and tries to anticipate, not the imme- diate future of economic development, but the general progress of human development, the imagination breaks down, or faints away in pallid aerial fancies like Shelley's. By the help of solid history, a great imagination like Shakespeare's or Scott's, disciplined by the habit of penetrating the present, can do a great deal to revivify the past. And even if it paints, as it doubtless often does, rather a vision which might have been true than one which certainly was true,—rather a coherent interpretation of the hints which the old chroniclers have pre- served for us, than an accurate intuition of the actual past,— it still does a great deal more for us than any dry chronicle without the help of the imagination could effect at all. It is better far to have a living conception of something approxi- mately trae,—and fitting, at least, the vestiges which the past has left us,—than to have no vivid conception at all of what the traces of past events really suggest. We have to choose, not between the exact truth of past life and the vision of it which a powerful imagination conversant with the records conjures up, but rather between a miscellaneous assortment of antiquarian curiosities that bring no instruction at all to our minds and hearts, and a vision of the past which, though it may deviate a good deal from the reality, con- stitutes at least what might have been a reality, if the traces left us were not so gravely defective that the im- agination of the novelist or poet had not adequate material on which to work. And after all, it matters much more to us to be able to conjure up the Tudors or Stuarts, the Plantagenets or Brunswicks, the Leicesters or Argylls, the Burleys or Claverhouses, who might have been even if they were not, and who represent at least so much of the actual circumstances and conditions of the times in which they lived as to vivify those circumstances and conditions for us, than to repeat to ourselves long strings of dates and names and barren incidents without coherence and without vitality. In dealing with the past, a vivid conception of parts of the reality is a great deal better than a lifeless and unmeaning inventory of the whole.
But when Mr. G-oschen reminds us of the extraordinary diffi- culty of using the imagination adequately for the anticipation of the future, he seems to us sometimes to ask more of it than can fairly be expected. For he reminds us of the extraordinary interlacing of the physical laws of Nature, of the tendency of some kinds of vegetable and animal life to multiply excessively under new conditions which happen to favour it,—as the water- cress, for example, and the rabbit, when transplanted to Australia, will multiply themselves till they become a danger and a pest to human beings instead of an assistance, the former blocking up the rivers with its twelve-foot-long stems, and the latter destroying all the herbage with their voracious appetites,—and he warns us of the danger of suppressing hastily any one kind of natural check on the powers of Nature, by the examples of the interdependence of the cat, the field-mice, the humble-bee, and clover. If the cat were too completely extirpated, the field-mice would multiply ex- cessively; and then they would destroy the nests of the bumble- bee; and if the humble-bee were extirpated, the clover would no longer be fertilised. All this is true ; but surely it is the function rather of observation than of imagination so to bring out the force of such links as these in the great chain of physical causation as to warn us against rash experiments. Mr. Darwin, who awakened us to this class of dangers, and who taught us the wonderful lessons to which Mr. Goschen here re- ferred, had rather starved than cultivated his imagination, and lamented that he had starved it. It was not his imagination that taught him the close mutual relations of the cat, the field-mouse, the humble-bee, and the clover, in the great chain of natural causation, but rather vigilant observation. The
use of man's imagination is to fill up the details of an un- fsmilinr scene of human life by help derived from the scenery of motive and action, of emotion and resolve, with which he is familiar. No effort of the imagination could ever have enabled him to anticipate that the watercress transplanted to a semi-tropical climate would develop stems twelve feet long, and fill up the rivers with a sort of rope-work. If the water- cress itself had a consciousness and an imagination, and knew its own cravings for heat and knew the impulse which heat would give to its growth, that watercress's imagination might perhaps have anticipated such a result ; but clearly that is not the kind of work for which the human imagination (which has no experience of the cravings of the watercress) is fitted.
On the other hand, we think that there is a good deal which Mr. Goschen properly requires of the imagination of man, in which it might have succeeded more than it actually has succeeded, even in anticipating the future. With the knowledge that man has of his own arbitrary and despotic instincts, and especially of the illegitimate influence which men find it so difficult not to exercise over races and classes of inferior knowledge and inferior capacities, English- men might well have anticipated the horrible evils which would result from importing African slaves into such a country as North America, on the eve of the day when it was to be peopled by shrewd immigrants from Europe. Again, French imagination might have anticipated more or less the evils likely to spring from the simultaneous spread of a temper of doubt and mockery like Voltaire's, and a gospel of sentimentalism like Rousseau's, the cruelty of the one combining with the enthusiasm of the other to produce a moral cyclone at once overwhelming and deadly. And at the present time, it seems to us quite probable that any European of high imaginative power who is really inti- mate with Chinese modes of thought, might forewarn both his own countrymen and the Chinese of the kind of catastrophe likely to arise from the spread in China of European culture without European faith,—if, unfortunately, the Chinese habit of thought should be found to be proof against European faith,—amongst a people so careless of life, so terribly indus- trious, so earthy in their conceptions, and so tenacious in their purposes, as the Chinese. The emptiness of Utopian speculation is, as Mr. Goschen very wisely insisted, due in great measure to the vagueness and emancipation from all practical conditions in which poets and philosophers have chosen to indulgewhen they wished to revel in the prospect of a golden age. But there is much which a great imagination, willingly submitting itself to the actual conditions of particular times and particular races, might really anticipate for us, that would forewarn and forearm us against evils to come. Still, the imagination must work from a basis of self-knowledge. And knowledge of the effect which a variation of physical conditions might produce on the vegetable and animal world, is rather an achievement of faithful observation than a product of the magic of intuitive insight and genius.
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