58 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

Only it is very necessary in the outset to mark clearly wherein consists the essence of fallacy, as distinguished from fancy.*

APHORISM 9. The nature and dignity of imagination.¹

§ 3. For it might be at first thought that the whole kingdom of imagination was one of deception also. Not so: the action of the imagination is a voluntary summoning of the conceptions of things absent or impossible; and the pleasure and nobility of the imagination partly consist in its knowledge and contemplation of them as such, i.e. in the knowledge of their actual absence or impossibility at the moment of their apparent presence or reality. When the imagination deceives, it becomes madness. It is a noble faculty so long as it confesses its own ideality; when it ceases to confess this, it is insanity. All the difference lies in the fact of the confession, in their being no deception. It is necessary to our rank as spiritual creatures, that we should be able to invent and to behold what is not; and to our rank as moral creatures, that we should know and confess at the same time that it is not.²

§ 4. Again, it might be thought, and has been thought, that the whole art of painting is nothing else than an endeavour to deceive. Not so: it is, on the contrary, a statement of certain facts, in the clearest possible way. For instance: I desire to give an account of a mountain or of a rock; I begin by telling its shape. But words will not

* “Fancy;” before, “supposition,”-which was a curiously imperfect word. “Fancy,” short for “fantasy,” now must be taken as including not only great imaginations, but fond ones, or even foolish and diseased ones-which are nevertheless as true as the healthiest, so long as we know them to be diseased. A dream is as real a fact, as a vision of reality: deceptive only if we do not recognise it as a dream.3 [1880.]

¹ [The text of the aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is the whole of § 3.]

² [The MS. proceeds:-

“Hence the same words become truth or falsehood according to the faculties to which they are addressed. Homer’s description of Scylla is truth in the Odyssey; it would have become falsehood if Pliny had quoted it in his Natural History.”]

³ [See the fuller statements on this point in the 1883 edition of Modern Painters, vol. ii.; Vol. IV. p. 222, of this edition.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]