The vivid imagination of artists is well known, so that they are able to see and represent things and persons, either in words, with the pencil, or the chisel, just as if they were actually present.  The image so vividly realized is a necessary condition of the exercise of their respective arts.  When great poets, such as Dante, Ariosto, Milton, and Goethe, conceived and idealized their thoughts with every detail of circumstances, persons, actions, expressions, and movements, no one can deny that the images were vividly present to their minds, and that while in the act of composition these were unconsciously regarded as having a real existence.  If these poetic descriptions are presented to the attentive reader in such a vivid form as to transport him into a real world, much more must the authors of these marvellous creations have looked upon them as real at the moment of composition.  The impression of truthfulness is indeed produced by the fact that the writers saw these things as though they were real.  I speak of states of consciousness, not of reflex observation, of intense moments of sensation and imagination, which are unnoticed by the man who experiences them in his waking moments.  Such is the reader of a poem, a romance, or history, the spectator of a picture, who is able for the time to abstract himself from surrounding objects, and who implicitly believes that he sees those places and persons, or whatever the book or painter has described or represented.  If suddenly interrupted, he rouses himself, and may be said to awake to the present reality of things, as if startled from a dream.

Wigan relates that a celebrated portrait painter worked with such quickness and facility that he painted more than three hundred portraits in a year.  When he was asked the secret of his rapid execution and of the faithfulness of the likeness, he replied, “When any one proposes to have his portrait taken, I look at him attentively for half an hour, while sketching his features on the canvas; I then lay the canvas aside and pursue the same method with another portrait, and so on.  When I wish to return to the first, I take his person into my mind and place it before me as distinctly as if he were actually present.  I set to work, looking at the sitter from time to time, since I am able to see him whenever I look that way.”  Talma asserted that when he was on the stage, he was able by mere force of will to transform his audience into skeletons, which affected him with such emotion as to add force and energy to his action.  Abercromby speaks of a man who had the faculty of calling up visions with all the vividness of reality whenever he pleased, by strongly fixing his attention on mental conceptions which corresponded to them.  Yet he was a sane man, in the prime of life, perfectly intelligent, and versed in practical affairs.