Question: [via translator] Good afternoon, I'm from Monterrey. I have a question for you, which is very pertinent, I think. How do you know if the imagination is founded on reason? How do we know when it is our imagination, can not limit us? [Trans: I kind of lost the question here.] How do you know how to make your imagination grow without degenerating, and how do you find that thin line between growth and degeneration?

LaRouche: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! [chuckling] You have the famous drawings, cartoons by Goya. One is particularly interesting; it's very famous, we've used it often. A fellow is falling asleep, and all kinds of monsters are flying against the background around him. And, Goya has a reference to that, about what comes in the night during sleep.

And, when imagination is merely sleep, as Goya warns us, we don't know what kind of monsters may suddenly attack our awareness.

But, the contrary is, the imagination, in the positive sense--hypothesizing--is based on experimental demonstration of the validity of a discovered idea. And, "experimental" means that, in some way, intervene into a world where the principles involved are not seen by our senses; but, by knowing that they exist, we are able to control the world of our senses, by operating according to the principles, the unseen principles, which we know only in the mind, and not in sense perception.

Therefore, the question of scientific validity, as experimental scientific validity of a discovered idea, is the basis for solving this problem of this crazy "night of dreams," as opposed to fantasy.

And now, this comes into art in the same way. The greatest Classical art, does the same thing. It is a special kind of experiment: But the experiment in this case, is social, rather than simply scientific. We don't usually think of science, as man's mind, looking at man's individual relationship to nature. We call that, generally, "physical science." But, when we apply the same method to social relations, and social processes, we don't think of it as physical science any more. We think of it as, how to communicate an idea to the other person's mind, which will cause that person to act in a certain way.

Now, actually, it's physical, because whether society fails or succeeds, depends upon the kinds of cooperation, which depend upon social principles. So therefore, it's also a physical principle, but it's relationship to the physical universe, as such, of the individual, is indirect, as opposed to being direct, in the case of the so-called "physical principle." But, the methods are the same. For example: What do we call this study of social processes, as to principle? Experimental study? We call it "history." The study of history; the history of music; the history of art, aspects of art; and history in the explicit sense: We study history of mankind, as a science.

And, we have a lot of history to go with. For example, in European civilization, we have two basic parameters we use. One--I'm talking about globally extended European civilization, not to exclude Mexico! But, we're all part of this civilization. We have have two things. We have a trace of history, which we know fairly well, in terms of principles from Solon of Athens and the poem he wrote to the Athenians, who were being bad boys, at the time that he was an older man. And, we have from Greek civilization onward. Then, we have the impact of Christianity, especially as reflected as the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, which shaped the way the Greek Platonic tradition came down into modern, globally extended European civilization. This is what Schiller recommended in his Jena lectures on history: Is to take European civilization, from Solon to the present, and look at it as a continuous process, and learn the lessons of the progress and retrogression of humanity's condition, from that point on.

So, it is a field experiment. You can find, also in the case of musical composition, or drama. What works in drama? What conforms to Classical principles? What works in music? What kind of performance works? These are all things that can be demonstrated, and ultimately are physical principles, even though their immediate expression is not what we think of as "getting our hands dirty" in the dirty of nature, hmm?

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