CHAPTER II.
THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE.
§ 62. The relations of imagination and reason to forms of social life present or suggest great problems which have never received a tithe of the attention they deserve. Although it is impossible to separate these two great faculties of the human mind, although at their extremities, so to speak, they fade into one another in a manner which seems, and perhaps must always be, inscrutable, yet to distinguish them in general outline, without attempting minute distinctions, is not impossible. Perhaps the essential features of imagination are two—the building up of generalisations and abstractions out of individual facts, and the transition from the individual self to the collective conception of humanity on a more or less extensive scale. Similarly, perhaps, the essential features of reason may be stated as the analysis of generalisations and abstractions into individual facts, and the transition from the social or collective conceptions of action and thought to the individual. If we accept some such view of imagination and reason, we shall be able to explain that decadence of imagination which Macaulay, in his essay on Dryden, elevates into a general law of literary progress. Macaulay failed to observe the dependence of imagination upon social sympathies, a
