Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft on the

Imagination and Its Seductive Power in

Human Relationships
These emotions appear to me to be the distinctive
characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of
that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which
the common herd of eaters and drinkers and childbegeters, certainly have no idea.
By Maria Popova
Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft on the Imagination and Its Seductive Power in Human
Relationships
Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every
virtue, philosopher and political theorist Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759
September 10, 1797) wrote in her 1792 proto-feminist masterwork A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants,
though I were to live on a barren heath. Independence became the animating force of
Wollstonecrafts life, and there was no form of it she valued more highly than the
independence of the imagination something her second daughter, Frankenstein
author Mary Shelley, would come to inherit.
Wollstonecraft saw the imagination as the gateway to liberation, the most vitalizing
nectar for the mind, and the most seductive aphrodisiac; she saw love as the domain in
which the imagination mingles its bewitching colouring for better or for worse, to
enchant into rapture as well as to delude into despair. (A quarter millennium later,
philosopher Martha Nussbaum would come to write brilliantly about the imperfect
union of the two.)
Wollstonecraft found herself afflicted with the reveries of a disordered imagination,
which frequently caused her embarrassment and dejection nowhere more so than in
the passions of the heart, which coexisted with equal vigor alongside her formidable
intellect.
The pictures that the imagination draws are so very delightful that we willing[ly] let it
predominate over reason till experience forces us to see the truth, she wrote to her
sister in a letter found in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (public library).
But a pure love, she believed, was a region where sincerity and truth will flourish
and the imagination will not dwell on pleasing illusions.
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Keenan, 1787

In December of 1792, shortly after the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman and a month before the execution of Louis XVI furnished a cornerstone of the
French Revolution, Wollstonecraft left London for Paris. There, she met and became
besotted with the American diplomat, businessman, and adventurer Gilbert Imlay.
Although in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she had renounced sexual passion as
complicit in womens oppression, Imlay awakened in her a magnitude of desire both
dissonant with her political views and personally disorienting in far exceeding what she
had previously thought herself capable of experiencing.
Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant and gave birth to her first daughter in the spring
of 1794, just as Britain was preparing to declare war on France. Imlay had made clear
his disinterest in marriage and domesticity but, alarmed by the political turmoil and the
danger in which it placed British subjects in Paris, he registered Wollstonecraft as his
wife in order to protect her and the baby, even though no legal marriage took place. It
was an act more necessary than noble many of Wollstonecrafts compatriots in Paris
had no such protection and were either arrested or guillotined but it was also the
beginning of the end of their romance. A slow-seething commitment panic began
bedeviling Imlay, who eventually left Wollstonecraft heartbroken and alone with an
infant amid a raging revolution.
But even in their parting letters, as it becomes clear to Wollstonecraft that her lover
wouldnt return, her beseeching despair is laced with a lucid sense of her unassailable
independence. Radiating from them is an awareness of how she had grown infatuated
with the fantasy of a man whose reality of character was wholly unworthy of her love.
Where her imagination had been the aphrodisiac responsible for her passionate
infatuation a state Julian Fellowes has called a distortion of reality so remarkable
that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with
the sympathy of fellow-sufferers Imlays lack of imagination became the agent of
disillusionment.
Art from In Pieces by Marion Fayolle , a wordless exploration of human
relationshipsArt from In Pieces by Marion Fayolle, a wordless exploration of human
relationships
In a letter to Imlay from September of 1794, she makes no apologies about calling out
his fatal flaw:
Believe me, sage sir, you have not sufficient respect for the imagination I could
prove to you in a trice that it is the mother of sentiment, the great distinction of our
nature, the only purifier of the passions animals have a portion of reason, and equal,
if not more exquisite, senses; but no trace of imagination, or her offspring taste, appears
in any of their actions. The impulse of the senses, passions, if you will, and the
conclusions of reason, draw men together; but the imagination is the true fire, stolen
from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies
that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving
them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.
In a letter to Imlay from the following June, as his protracted abandonment drags on,
she returns to the subject of the imagination and its role in human relationships. With an
eye to the perennial question of telling love from lust a question to which young E.B.

White and James Thurber would provide a most delightful answer a century and a half
later and to the role the imagination plays in it, Wollstonecraft writes:
The common run of men, I know, with strong health and gross appetites, must have
variety to banish ennui, because the imagination never lends its magic wand to convert
appetite into love, cemented by according reason. Ah! my friend, you know not the
ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and
desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, that
renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions, over which
satiety has no power, and the recollection of which, even disappointment cannot
disenchant; but they do not exist without self-denial.
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, 1797
And yet for all the personal pain that her intense imagination caused her, it was also the
wellspring of her creative and intellectual genius the very thing that rendered her one
of the most influential minds of her era. In a sentiment that echoes Anas Nins assertion
that emotional excess is essential for creativity, Wollstonecraft adds:
These emotions, more or less strong, appear to me to be the distinctive characteristic of
genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of
which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no
idea I consider those minds as the most strong and original, whose imagination acts
as the stimulus to their senses.
The English political philosopher William Godwin, whom Wollstonecraft married after
recovering from the heartbreak with Imlay and who fathered Mary Shelley, would later
edit her posthumous works and laud these very letters as having superiority over the
fiction of Goethe and being the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart
penetrated with the passion it essays to describe perhaps supreme proof the kind of
sincere love Wollstonecraft imagined possible, for Godwin transcended the jealous
egos knowledge that these letters were written to a former lover and instead celebrated
Wollstonecraft for the faculty she valued above all else: her imagination.
Complement this particular portion of The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft
(public library) with Wollstonecrafts contemporary William Blakes searing defense of
the imagination and pioneering computer programmer Ada Lovelace, whose own ascent
as a woman of intellectual accomplishment was shaped by Wollstonecrafts legacy, on
the imaginations three core faculties.