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Prose

Notes considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of touch, that spreads itself over an infinite
multitude of bodies, comprehends the largest figures, and brings into our reach some of the most
remote parts of the universe.
It is this sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas ; so that by the pleasures of the
imagination, or fancy, (which I shall use promiscuously,) I here mean such as arise from visible
objects , either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our
minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion. We cannot, indeed, have a
single image in the fancy that did not make its first entrance through the sight ; but we have the
power of retaining, altering, and compounding those images, which we have once received, into
all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination ; for by this faculty
a man in a dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with scenes and landscapes more beautiful
than any that can be found in the whole compass of nature.
There are few words in the English language which are employed in a more loose and
uncircumscribed sense than those of the fancy and the imagination. I therefore thought it necessary
to fix and determine the notion of these two words, as I intend to make use of them in the thread
of my following speculations, that the reader may conceive rightly what is the subject which I
proceed upon. I must therefore desire him to remember, that by the pleasures of the imagination,
I mean only such pleasures as arise originally from sight, and that I divide these pleasures into
two kinds my design being first of all to discourse of those primary pleasures of the imagination,
which entirely proceed from such objects as are before our eyes; and in the next place to speak of
those secondary pleasures of the imagination which flow from the ideas of visible objects, when
the objects are not actually before the eye, but are called up into our memories, or formed into
agreeable visions of things that are either absent or fictitious.
The pleasures of the imagination, taken in their full extent, are not so gross as those of sense, nor
so refined as those of the understanding. The last are, indeed, more preferable, because they are
founded on some new knowledge or improvement in the mind of man; yet it must be confest, that
those of the imagination are as great and as transporting as the other. A beautiful prospect delights
the soul, as much as a demonstration; and a description in Homer has charmed more readers than
a chapter in Aristotle. Besides, the pleasures of the imagination have this advantage above those
of the understanding, that they are more obvious, and more easy to be acquired. It is but opening
the eye, and the scene enters. The colours paint themselves on the fancy, with very little attention
of thought or application of mind in the beholder. We are struck, we know not how, with the
symmetry of anything we see, and immediately assent to the beauty of an object, without inquiring
into the particular causes and occasions of it.
A man of polite imagination is let into a great many pleasures, that the vulgar are not capable of
receiving. He can converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion in a statue. He meets
with a secret refreshment in a description, and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of
fields and meadows, than another does in the possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of property
in everything he sees, and makes the most rude, uncultivated parts of nature administer to his
pleasures: so that he looks upon the world, as it were in another light, and discovers in it a
multitude of charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of mankind.
There are, indeed, but very few who know how to be idle and innocent, or have a relish of any
pleasures that are not criminal: every diversion they take is at the expense of some one virtue or
another, and their very first step out of business is into vice or folly. A man should endeavour,
therefore, to make the sphere of his innocent pleasures as wide as possible, that he may retire into
them with safety, and find in them such a satisfaction as a wise man would not blush to take. Of
this nature are those of the imagination, which do not require such a bent of thought as is necessary
to our more serious employments, nor, at the same time, suffer the mind to sink into that negligence
and remissness, which are apt to accompany our more sensual delights, but, like a gentle exercise

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