glimpse of the reality of freedom; and because, as Kant reminds us, reason
deals only in necessities, we hear the free order of music as a necessary order:
it is when each noterequiresits successor that we hear freedom in music.^68In being alert in exploring a work to an order of elements, regarded as
developing both freely and with (rational) necessity so as to achieve a whole
that can be followed, the imagination and understanding in responding to a
work are on the lookout for concrete freedom. This seems true of the experi-
ence of art in general. (The only mistake in Scruton’s passage is the word
unparalleled: paintings, poems, movies, performance pieces, dances, and so on
when successful are all tertiary objects. They too have freely achieved orders
that can be followed by a being with imagination and understanding.) The
role of imagination and creativity in exploring the materials of a medium in
artistic making is to achieve this concrete freedom. What imagination
focuses on in exploring materials in the process of arrangement is whether
this free intelligibility or free order is being achieved.
This is what Coleridge meant in talking of imagination as anesemplasticor
shaping power. He distinguishes imagination fromfancy, which is a matter of
associating materials from experience at whim, without any attention to
making a freely intelligible order that can be followed. For example, we
might fancy that there are centaurs or golden mountains. In simply thus
fancying, there is no freely intelligible work to be explored; these are only an
immediate combination of past elements of experience in a momentary act.
Imagination, according to Coleridge, is different.
The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent ofall
human perception, and as a representation in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infiniteiam. The secondary I consider as an echo of
the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with
the primary in the kind of its agency, and different only in degree, and in the
mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate;
or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it
struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentiallyvital, even as all objects
(as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.^69
(^68) Ibid., p. 76.
(^69) Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, p. 167.
Originality and imagination 137