These lectures, supported by a generous grant from the Frank Gerstein Charitable Foundation, were delivered at York University during the 1962–63 academic session. At that time, York was in its third year of operation, and the theme selected, “Imagination and the University,” was considered appropriate, for it is in its early years that a university is sufficiently flexible to utilize imagination in its structure and in its curriculum.

All universities, however, should be challenged by imaginative ideas. It is trite to say that we in the Western world have demonstrated great initiative and creativity by pushing into an age...

My subject in the two lectures I shall be giving in this series concerns the arts and the sciences, and in this first lecture I shall confine myself to the arts. The art from which I shall draw most of my illustrations is literature, and more particularly poetry. I choose the field of literature because it has the advantage that its raw material is something that we all use and understand, for its raw material is simply words. But I ought to say at once that this raw material is no less subtle or less sophisticated than that of any...

This lecture is a continuation of my first: its theme is to draw not the differences but the likenesses between the imaginative faculty in art and in science.

The art which I chose to illustrate my first lecture was the art of poetry. The raw material of this art is words—but words as human beings use them, not as animals do. The language of most animals, as I noted in this first lecture, has about forty distinct words in it, and they are all words of command or communication and nothing else. An animal can say “come” and “go”...

I direct your attention to the role of imagination in politics. When we speak of imagination we mean, I think, creativity. Few things are more interesting now than the search, almost the feverish search, for creativity in the social sciences, creativity that can match that displayed so ostentatiously in the realm of natural sciences and so delightfully in the realm of arts. Traditionally we all think of creativity in terms of science, or art, or music, rather than of politics or law, or education, and rightly so if we think of it as some single dramatic discovery or some bold...

Some people will shudder at the very thought that psychology may develop more imagination than it has. They will say, “Look at what you psychologists have already done. You have addled us with teaching machines, computers, and simulators; and have measured all of our quotients (IQ’s, EQ’s, AQ’s and even PQ’s—personality quotients). You have submitted us to truth drugs and lie detectors, to opinion polls and questionnaires, to mazes and other crazes; and worst of all you have mistaken us for that strange and upsetting Viennese family of Oedipuses. . . . We want no more of your imagination....

The basic dilemma which engages a university professor arises from the concept that education must embrace both specialism and generalism. Here also is the source of the most pervasive conflict.

The concept stems from a tradition as ancient as the creation of the university itself—the advancement of learning and its transmission to youth. A university has always been a place where exploration of the unknown has been stressed, where new data have been discovered, and new understandings achieved. So vast has been the accumulation of the centuries, and so accelerated the process in recent decades that first professions had...