Émile Chartier

“ But it is useful to consider first in the imagination what is most evidently real, and which carries all the rest; to know on one hand the reactions of the body, so tyrannically felt, and on the other hand this deceiver judgment, so firmly supported on the emotions and afterwards looking for the images and waiting for them, often in vain. ”

“ As one can see in fear, where the effects of the imagination, if one is familiarized with them, holds first among those indubitable perceptions of the body proper, as contracture, trembling, heat and cold, beatings of the heart, strangling, and whereas the images of the supposed objects which would be the cause of those reactions are often completely undetermined and always vanishing, understand that the attention dissipates them and that they reform themselves as behind us. ”

“ I add that it is prudent to not too much at all believe oneself as soon as a strong passion or solely the passion to testify animates us. Let us return still to the example of fear, where the game of the imagination is powerful and the belief so strong, even when the power to evoke is uncertain and groping. ”

“ And after the disordered and counteracted movements of the body have assured the false judgment, that I am in danger, or that this man scorns me, or that this town will be fatal to me, as soon as this judgment follows a new agitation resulting from actions commenced, retained, counteracted, as the same way it happens when the object is missed; and this agitation reanimates the emotion. Thus the judgment, if it does not find anything at all from the object finds at least some evidences; for the trembling and the flight does not cure me at all from the fear, all to the contrary. ”

“ It is of first importance to retrieve these domineering characters even in the case where this is, as one says, a sort of image or of vision or of hearing that is fantastic which retains the attention and is fixed principally in the memory.
Considered under this aspect, imagination is mad and unruled by its nature. At first it is clear enough that the judgment and the tumult of the body continually react, the one on the other, as anxiety, fear, anger testify of it. ”

“ A live hope, resent from the crowd to the crowd, was deforming their discourse, but to say that the hope was deforming also their perceptions, this is to say more than one knows. The psychology of our times will not recover at all from its principal error which is to have too much believed the madmen and the ill. ”

“ There is some ambiguity, if one does not keep guard against it, in what one says of a strong imagination. Strong (it is necessary to understand it by its effects) which goes easily to malaise and even to malady, as fear shows it ”

“ For, if one intends this word according to the usage, the imagination is not solely, nor even principally, a contemplative power of the spirit, but above all the error and the disorder entering in the spirit at the same time as the tumult of the body. ”

“ If the reader considers in this prudent manner, as Descartes teaches us, perhaps he will perceive that the imagination has need of objects. Thus the arts show themselves already as remedies to reverie, always wandering and sorrowful. ”

“ The delerious state that one may also call sybilline, in the fever or in the paroxysm of the passions, is by itself eloquent, moving, contagious; this is one reason not to believe too quickly that the delirious see all that they describe. ”

“ It imports to recognize first, by a severe examination, that this power to evoke the appearances of absent objects does not go as far as one says it goes, that one does not believe it either, and in other terms, that the imagination fools us also about its own nature. ”