Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

136
The Wholeness Of Imagination
by
A. C. Harwood, MA.
(A Lecture given at Attingham Park Adult College, first printed in Child
and Man in 1959)
Every language possesses words of special historical value. Such words
are windows through which we may catch glimpses of the developing human
consciousness. Perhaps the word which of all modern words gives the
most profound view into this changing landscape is Imagination. It is a
word which has had a growth almost opposite to that which generally obtains
in language.
It is the usual fate of words to lose their original active quality and
die into abstraction. ‘Imagination’ began as a thing, a noun, meaning a
concrete pictorial representation: then at a definite point in history it
sloughed off its noun-skin, and appeared all new and glistening as a force,
an active principle of the mind, as in essence a verb. (See History in English
Words by Owen Barfield [Faber & Faber].)
The transformation occurred about the year 1800, and was accomplished
by the great poets of that extraordinary age, by Blake, by Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats and above all by Coleridge, who being a philosopherpsychologist
as well as a poet gave definition to the new word within a
theory of knowing and being. Shakespeare was almost alone in anticipating
the never active use of the word when he made Duke Theseus in the Midsummer
Night’s Dream say that in the poet’s mind Imagination “bodies forth
the shape of things unknown.” But the general use of the word in his time
was that of the Magnificat in the Authorised translation of the Bible: “He
hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts”; which means,
of course, “He has destroyed the picture they have of themselves.”
There is a deep historical reason why the poets of the time of the
industrial revolution needed to attach a new meaning to the word Imagination.
From the earliest ages men had always thought in pictures. Mediaeval
thinking still lived in such a world of pictures, which it had received from
the Greeks, who had in part received it from the Chaldaeans, who had
received it from, literally, God knows where. It was a world in which the
heavens and the earth were part of one great spiritual being, in which stars
and planets lived on the earth as influences in stones and plants and animals,
in which man, as the supreme of creatures, was an image or microcosm
of the universe; a world, therefore, into which man could place himself
with all his powers of heart and mind and soul, as scientist, as artist, as
poet, as philosopher, as mystic. But after the sixteenth century a new world
had come into being, the world of Bacon, of Descartes, of Locke, of Newton,
where mechanical forces worked on each other at a distance, or ‘ bil-