"The Imagination... generally appropriated by the best writers of the present day... enables us, by voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another. This power constitutes the poet insofar as he does anything but melodiously utter his own actual feelings. It constitutes the dramatist entirely. It is one of the constituents of the historian; by it we understand other times... Without it nobody knows even his own nature further than circumstances have actually tried it and called it out; nor the nature of his fellow-creatures, beyond such generalizations as he may have been enabled to make from their outward conduct." - J.S. Mill [from his essay (and criticism of) Bentham]
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 21:34:58 +0000
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