[Addison's importance to Faraday is not reflected in the number of times he is cited in the Mental Exercises. As Table 3 in the Introduction indicates, Addison and The Spectator rank far below Johnson and The Rambler in numbers of direct references in the contributions. However, Addison's influence on one essay in particular—Faraday's ‘On the Pleasures and Uses of the Imagination’—is profound. Faraday's unfinished index to The Spectator in CPB does not include no. 411; nevertheless, a comparison of its arguments shows unmistakeably the debt that Faraday's essay owed to this paper, as I outline in the footnotes to that essay.]

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments. The sense of feeling can indeed give us a notion of extension, shape, and all other ideas that enter at the eye, except colours; but at the same time it is very much straitened and confined in its operations to the number, bulk, and distance of its particular objects. Our sight seems designed to supply all these defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of touch, that spreads itself over an infinite multitude of bodies, comprehends the largest figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote parts of the universe.

It is this sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the pleasures of the imagination, or fancy (which I shall use promiscuously) I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.