Joseph Addison discusses the attributes of the imagination, in seven essays published in the June 1712, Spectator Issues 412-418. Addison, The pleasures of the imagination result from “greatness, novelty or beauty.”
Greatness could be the the amazement at a magnificant work of nature, such as a spacious horizon. Novelty raises pleasure in the imagination such as waterfalls, when a scene is perpetually changing. Beauty “strikes the mind with an inward joy” such as delight in colours seen at sunrise or sunset. Poets are known to borrow “more of their epithets from colours that from any other topic. Other senses awaken the pleasures of the imagination such as sounds of a waterfall or the music of birds singing.
The essays continue to search the causes of delight, how our imagination is affected by the works of nature, how a scene of imagery can awaken ideas that slept in the imagination. Addison gives the example of Homer whose writing describes sublime persons godlike and terrible. He refers to Ovid, in his Metamorphosis who “has shown us how the imagination may be effected by what is strange … and gives us the sight of some new creature” at the end of each of his stories. He examines other views of the imagination which are disagreeable and questions why we take delight in being terrified or dejected by a hideous description. Addison tells us that our fear does not come from the hideous object but comes from the reflection we make and “the pleasure we feel from the sense of our own safety.” Addison’s essays lead us towards the Gothic imagination where a pleasing kind of horror amuses the mind of the reader, in his reference to ancient times when our forefather’s “looked upon nature with more reverence and horror, in their belief in ghosts, fairies, witchcraft, haunted churches and spirits….ties into Defoe’s, “TheApparition,” a Ghost appears…written in journalistic language and set in a highly christian framework…..There has to be some kind of a threat in Gothic…
