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So, if he would be a whole man, if he would realise all that is implicit in his humanity, he must actualise his relationship with this supernal plane of Being: and he shall do it, as we have seen, by simplification, by a deliberate withdrawal of attention from the bewildering multiplicity of things, a deliberate humble surrender of his image-making consciousness.
The partisans of the linguistic theory have been able to maintain that at this moment every word is a myth, because every word is a name designating a quality or an act, transformed by the imagination into substance. Max Müller has translated a page of Hesiod, substituting the analytic, abstract, rational language of our time for the image-making names.
But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination the cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-making faculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the world within. The separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone is due the building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. For there is no impassable gulf between the two.
Whatever we mean by inspiration a something not ourselves, supernatural or sub-liminal a "vision" of Blake, the "voices" of Joan of Arc, the "god" that moved within the Corybantian revelers it is an excitement of the image-making faculty, and not that faculty itself.
There are certain happy accidents which have the power of inducting man for a moment into this richer and more vital world. These stop, as one old mystic said, the "wheel of his imagination," the dreadful energy of his image-making power weaving up and transmuting the incoming messages of sense.
There is absolutely no image-making art in the practice of our people, except only this art of rags and contumely. Or, again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were that of anger for a certain cause, the destruction would not be the work of so thin an annual malice and of so heartless a rancour.
Whatever may be the value, for students, of trying to analyse the image-making and image-combining faculty, every one admits that it is a necessary element in the production of poetry.
Yet Demosthenes when moved by passion attains the sublimity of intensity and strikes like lightning. Both in oratory and in poetry sublimity is attained by image-making, as when "moved by enthusiasm and passion, you seem to see the things of which you speak, and place them under the eyes of your hearers." It would be difficult to phrase better the conditions of imaginative realization.
We may be sure that both are more characteristic of the image-making and structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value or the value of any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived abides wholly in the content: the quality of the material thus worked up.
The general description of the two-horned beast, however, brings into prominence an evil characteristic the disposition to lead people into deception by making an image to the beast and then worshiping it. The evil does not inhere in the work of bringing down "fire from heaven," but in image-making and image-worship, for which the Spiritual work simply furnished an occasion.
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