It is a metaphor, taken from a _passive_ sense of the human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence _not_ passive,--to intellectual _acts_ and _operations_.

The word, Imagination, has been overstrained, from impulses honourable to mankind, to meet the demands of the faculty which is perhaps the noblest of our nature.

In the instance of Taste, the process has been reversed; and from the prevalence of dispositions at once injurious and discreditable, being no other than that selfishness which is the child of apathy,--which, as Nations decline in productive and creative power, makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging.

Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts.

Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is competent to this office--for in its intercourse with these the mind is _passive_, and is affected painfully or pleasurably as by an instinct.