The Imagination: its Functions and its Culture

The Imagination: its Functions and its Culture

George MacDonald's "The Imagination: its Functions and its Culture" argues against those who would treat education as a means of producing repose by suppressing faculties, particularly the imagination, and insists instead that education's end is a noble unrest. He answers the objection that imagination distracts from facts by asserting that inquiring into what God has made is precisely the imagination's main function: it is aroused and nourished by facts but seeks laws beyond mere science. MacDonald defines imagination as the faculty that gives form to thought, likening it to the creative power of God, though he reserves the word "creation" strictly for God's calling things from nothing, since man only rearranges forms already existing in nature. He contrasts how God creates directly (making Shakespere rather than writing dramas himself, making worlds as his stage) with how man's imagination works secondarily, lighting up meanings already latent in natural forms. He illustrates this through Shelley's "Adonais," showing how the poet combines existing images (glass, dome, sky) rather than inventing wholly new material. He extends imagination's reach beyond poetry into language itself, citing Carlyle's "Past and Present" on how words like "attention" originated as bold metaphors before hardening into prose. He argues imagination governs even scientific discovery: hypotheses, the "prudent question" Bacon speaks of, and experiments all originate in imaginative guesswork later tested by intellect, citing a mathematician's algebraic discovery and a detective's reliance on constructing a working "idea" before facts cohere. He discusses paleontological reconstruction from fragments and Goethe's discovery of the leaf as an imperfect flower as instances of the scientific imagination. Turning to history, he holds that imagination is required to discern the laws and cycles behind events, illustrating this with Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution" and a passage on Time from Shakespere's "Rape of Lucrece." He also treats Shakespere's historical plays and the device of dying characters prophesying. Discussing poetic creation proper, MacDonald analyzes Tennyson's "Bugle Song" from "The Princess," contrasting nature's dying echoes with the enduring echoes of human love and truth, and shows how Tennyson expanded a spare line from the "History of Prince Arthur" describing Sir Bedivere's report of the waves. He also raises whether imaginative embodiments are truly the poet's own conscious creation, siding with Ruskin that such forms arise unbidden from an unconscious region, which MacDonald attributes ultimately to God's presence within the person rather than mere unconscious mechanism. Returning to critics who would restrict imagination to prevent it from breeding "wild fancies" in the young, MacDonald insists the remedy for indulgence is development, not suppression, and that repressing imagination breeds selfishness, avarice, and cruelty instead. He examines the danger of a repressed or corrupted imagination through Lady Macbeth, who denies the reality her imagination represents to her and is ultimately overtaken by it in her sleepwalking, and contrasts this with the real case of the murderer Dr. Pritchard, whose habitual lying is diagnosed as a total absence of true imagination. He also addresses concerns about women and imagination, arguing that a woman of cultivated imagination will be more discerning, not less practical, in matters such as marriage, favoring true gentlemanliness (invoking Chaucer's definition) over wealth or position alone. MacDonald closes by describing the imagination's end as harmony with the divine order and turns to practical culture of the faculty: it requires "food and exercise," meaning exposure to the best art and literature (citing Goethe's advice to keep excellent art before one's eyes) combined with disciplined engagement with nature, careful reading of history (including the Bible) and of individual lives, and guidance from a teacher who shows rather than merely praises excellence, discourages indiscriminate reading, and distinguishes fancy and reverie from true imagination. He invokes Solomon and Bacon on the "glory of God to conceal a thing" and the honor of kings in finding it out, and closes with imagery of children gathering daisies, the man of science studying stars and herbs, and both alike engaged as "playfellows" with God in seeking out his hidden works.

By George MacDonald · First published 1893 · Genre: Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Essay · 13,432 words

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[Footnote: 1867.]

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imagination · creativity · culture · psychology · literature · art · fantasy · philosophy · childhood · narrative · symbolism · myth

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