tion.[1] If we place Reason before Imagination, it is because this order appears to us conformable to the natural progress of our intellectual operations.[2] The Imagination is a creative faculty, and the mind, before it attempts to create, begins by reasoning upon what it sees and knows. Nor is this all. In the faculty of Imagination, both Reason and Memory are, to a certain extent, combined—the mind never imagining or creating objects but such as are analogous to those whereof it has had previous experience. Where this analogy is wanting, the combinations are extravagant and displeasing; and, consequently, in that agreeable imitation of nature, at which the fine arts aim in common, invention is necessarily subjected to the control of rules which it is the business of the philosopher to investigate.
"In farther justification of this arrangement, it may be remarked, that Reason, in the course of its successive operations on the subjects of thought, by creating abstract and general ideas, remote from the perceptions of sense, leads to the exercise of Imagination as the last step of the process. Thus metaphysics and geometry are, of all the sciences belonging to Reason, those in which Imagination has the greatest share. I ask pardon for this observation from those men of taste, who, little aware of the near affinity of geometry to their own pursuits, and still less suspecting that the only intermediate step
- ↑ The latitude given by D'Alembert to the meaning of the word Poetry is as real and very important improvement on Bacon, who restricts it to fictitious History or Fables.—(De Aug. Scient. lib. ii. cap. i.) D' Alembert, on the other hand, employs it in its natural signification, as synonymous with invention or creation. "La peinture, la Sculpture, l'Architecture, La Poésie, la Musique, et leurs différentes divisions, composent la troisième distribution générale qui nait de l'Imagination, et dont les parties sont comprises sous le nom de Beaux-Arts. On peut les rapporter tous à la Poésie en prenant ce mot dans sa signification naturelle, qui n'est autre chose qu'invention on création."
- ↑ In placing Reason before Imagination, D'Alembert departs from these faculties arranged by Bacon. "Si nous n'avons pas placé, comme lui, la Raison après l'Imagination, c'est que nous avons suivi, dans le système Encyclopédique, l'ordre métaphysique des opérations de l'espirit, plutôt que l'ordre historique de ses progrès depuis la renaissance des lettres."—(Disc Prélim) How far the motive here assigned for the change is valid, the reader will be enabled to judge from the sequel of the above notation.
