Note * — Chapter XXIV · The Normality of the Artist

Given some impulses active others are thereby aroused in the absence of what would otherwise be their necessary stimuli. Such impulses I call imaginative, whether images occur or not, for image-production is not at all essentially involved in what the critic is interested in as imagination. Which other impulses are brought in is in part determined by which were co-operative together originally when all the impulses had their own stimuli, that is to say, in the non-imaginary experiences from which the imaginary experience derives. In so far as this factor comes in the imagination may be said to be repetitive. The imagination we are concerned with may be called formative* by way of distinction. For present circumstances are at least as important. Remember in a changed mood a scene which took place under a strong emotion. How altered is its every aspect! The selection of the impulses which take effect is changed; the impulses are distorted, they run in different courses. The imaginative construction is always at least as much determined by what is going on in the present as by what went on in the past, pasts rather, whence it springs.