The only point which I am tempted to criticise in this account is Prof. Huxley's identification of these generic images with 'abstract or general ideas' in the sense of universal conceptions. Taine gives the truer view. He writes:
"Some years ago I saw in England, in Kew Gardens, for the first time, araucarias, and I walked along the beds looking at these strange plants, with their rigid bark and compact, short, scaly leaves, of a sombre green, whose abrupt, rough, bristling form cut in upon the fine softly-lighted turf of the fresh grass-plat. If I now inquire what this experience has left in me, I find, first, the sensible representation of an araucaria; in fact, I have been able to describe almost exactly the form and color of the plant. But there is a difference between this representation and the former sensations, of which it is the present echo. The internal semblance, from which I have just made my description, is vague, and my past sensations were precise. For, assuredly, each of the araucarias I saw then excited in me a distinct visual sensation; there are no two absolutely similar plants in nature; I observed perhaps twenty or thirty araucarias; without a doubt each one of them differed from the others in size, in girth, by the more or less obtuse angles of its branches, by the more or less abrupt jutting out of its scales, by the style of its texture; consequently, my twenty or thirty visual sensations were different. But no one of these sensations has completely survived in its echo; the twenty or thirty revivals have blunted one another; thus upset and agglutinated by their resemblance they are confounded together, and my present representation is their residue only. This is the product, or rather the fragment, which is deposited in us, when we have gone through a series of similar facts or individuals. Of our numerous experiences there remain on the following day four or five more or less distinct recollections, which, obliterated themselves, leave behind in us a simple colorless, vague representation, into which enter as components various reviving sensations, in an utterly feeble, incomplete, and abortive state.—But this representation is not the general and abstract idea. It is but its accompaniment, and, if I may say so, the ore from which it is extracted. For the representation, though badly sketched, is a sketch, the sensible sketch of a distinct individual.... But my abstract idea corresponds to the whole class; it differs, then, from the representation of an individual.—Moreover, my abstract idea is perfectly clear and determinate; now that I possess it, I never fail to recognize an araucaria among the various plants which may be shown me; it differs then from the confused and floating representation I have of some particular araucaria."[53]
In other words, a blurred picture is just as much a single mental fact as a sharp picture is; and the use of either picture by the mind to symbolize a whole class of individuals is a new mental function, requiring some other modification of consciousness than the mere perception that the picture is distinct or not. I may bewail the indistinctness of my mental image of my absent friend. That does not prevent my thought from meaning him alone, however. And I may mean all mankind, with perhaps a very sharp image of one man in my mind's eye. The meaning is a function of the more 'transitive' parts of consciousness, the 'fringe' of relations which we feel surrounding the image, be the latter sharp or dim. This was explained in a previous place (see Vol. I, p. 473 ff., especially the note to page 477), and I would not touch upon the matter at all here but for its historical interest.
Our ideas or images of past sensible experiences may then be either distinct and adequate or dim, blurred, and incomplete. It is likely that the different degrees in which different men are able to make them sharp and complete has had something to do with keeping up such philosophic disputes as that of Berkeley with Locke over abstract ideas. Locke had spoken of our possessing 'the general idea of a triangle' which "must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once." Berkeley says:
"If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a triangle as is here described, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him out of it, nor would I go about it. All I desire is that the reader would fully and certainly inform himself whether he has such an idea or no."[54]
Until very recent years it was supposed by all philosophers that there was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such faculties as 'the Imagination.' Lately, however, a mass of revelations have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are imaginations, not 'the Imagination,' and they must be studied in detail.