generations of specialists; and it is obvious that the general theories
about the nature of imagination have shifted greatly, even within the
memory of living men. Nevertheless there are some facts, in this
constantly contested territory, which now seem indisputable. One of them,
and of peculiar significance to students of poetry, is this: in the stream
of objects immediately present to consciousness there are no images of
feeling itself.
[Footnote: This point has been elaborated with great care in Professor A.
H. R. Fairchild's _Making of Poetry_. Putnam's, 1912.]

"If I am asked to call up an image of a rose, of a tree, of a cloud, or of
a skylark, I can readily do it; but if I am asked to feel loneliness or
sorrow, to feel hatred or jealousy, or to feel joy on the return of
spring, I cannot readily do it. And the reason why I cannot do it is
because I can call up no image of any one of these feelings. For
everything I come to know through my senses, for everything in connection
with what I do or feel I can call up some kind of mental image; but for no
kind of feeling itself can I ever possibly have a direct image. The only
effective way of arousing any particular feeling that is more than mere
bodily feeling is to call up the images that are naturally connected with
that feeling."
[Footnote: Fairchild, pp. 24, 25.]

If then, "the raw material of poetry," as Professor Fairchild insists,
is "the mental image," we must try to see how these images are presented
to the mind of the poet and in turn communicated to us. Instead of
asserting, as our grandfathers did, that the imagination is a "faculty"
of the mind, like "judgment," or accepting the theory of our fathers that
imagination "is the whole mind thrown into the process of imagining," the
present generation has been taught by psychologists like Charcot, James