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Prose

Notes

Man in a Dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with Scenes and Landskips
more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole Compass of Nature.

11.1 Text-Pleasures of The Imagination

The Pleasures of the Imagination is a long didactic poem by Mark Akenside, first published in
1744. The first book defines the powers of imagination and discusses the various kinds of pleasure
to be derived from the perception of beauty; the second distinguishes works of imagination from
philosophy; the third describes the pleasure to be found in the study of man, the sources of
ridicule, the operations of the mind, in producing works of imagination, and the influence of
imagination on morals. The ideas were largely borrowed from Joseph Addison’s essays on the
imagination in the Spectator and from Lord Shaftesbury. Edward Dowden complains that “his
tone is too high-pitched; his ideas are too much in the air; they do not nourish themselves in the
common heart, the common life of man.” Samuel Johnson praised the blank verse of the poems,
but found fault with the long and complicated periods. Akenside got the idea for the poem during
a visit to Morpeth in 1738. The Pleasures of the Imagination may also refer to The Spectator papers
numbered 411 through 418. These specific papers differed from the rest in that they were non-
narrative and philosophical, and contained less obvious social commentary.
Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest
Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in
Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments. The Sense of Feeling can indeed
give us a Notion of Extension, Shape, and all other Ideas that enter at the Eye, except Colours; but
at the same time it is very much straightened and confined in its Operations, to the number, bulk,
and distance of its particular Objects. Our Sight seems designed to supply all these Defects, and
may be 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 in 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 Landskips more
beautiful than any that can be found in the whole Compass of Nature.
“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 Expence of some one Virtue or
another, and their very first Step out of Business is into Vice or Folly”.
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
Eye; 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.

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