Some Ideas about the Imagination (excluding Kant)

For those of you writing on imagination and the power of the imagination, the brief discussions below might be helpful. It offers a few quotes from some the key thinkers of the 17th and 18th century and from the Romantic era tracing the evolution of the imagination from tied to the production of images and memory to something more like the grand creative center championed by the Romantics (and still thought of that way by us).

Concepts of the Imagination

Hobbes

Time and Education begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgment and Fancy; Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the Ornaments of a Poem. The Ancients therefore fabled not absurdly in making memory the Mother of the Muses. For memory is the World . . . in which Judgment . . . busieth herself in grave and rigid examination of all the parts of Nature . . . Whereby the Fancy, when any work of Art is to be performed findes her materials at hand and prepared for use (“Answer to Sir William Davenant’s Preface before ‘Gondibert’” in Volume 4 of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by William Molesworth).

Locke

The dominion of man, in this little world of his understanding, being muchwhat the same as it is in the great world of visible thing; wherein his power, however managed by art and skill, reaches no farther than to compound and divide materials that are made to his hand; but can do nothing towards the making the least particle of new matter, or destroying one atom of what is already in being. The same inability will every one find in himself, who shall go about to fashion in his reflection from operations of his own mind about them (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, chapter iii, section 2).

Hume

[Unlike memory,] the imagination is not restrain’d to the same order and form with the original impressions . . . [it is however] governed by the fixed laws of association, and when not governed by such laws, dangerous. [This dangerous imagination is that which is capable of producing such absurdities as] winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants (from Treatise on Human Nature)

David Lowenthal, writing on Hume’s idea of memory:

Remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity: . . . to know what we were confirms that we are.  Self-continuity depends wholly on memory; recalling past experiences links us with our earlier selves, however different we may since have become.  ‘As memory alone acquaints us with the . . . succession of perceptions’, Hume reasoned, ‘tis to be consider’d . . . as the source of personal identity.  Had we no memory, we never shou’d have any notion . . . of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person.’ (The Past Is a Foreign Country, 197)

Burke

. . . the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination; and to this belongs whatever is wit, fancy, invention, and the like. But it must be observed, that this power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything absolutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses (from “Of Taste” in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful)

Wordsworth

Imagination . . . has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition, governed by certain fixed laws . . . [Wordsworth discusses examples from Virgil, Shakespeare and himself to show how imagination changes external objects by adding or subtracting properties from them] . . . Thus far of images independent of each other, and immediately endowed by the mind with properties that do not inhere in them, upon an incitement from properties and qualities the existence of which is inherent and obvious. These processes of imagination are carried on either by conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses, and thus enabling it to react upon the mind which hath performed the process, like a new existence.

I pass from the Imagination acting upon an individual image to a consideration of the same faculty employed upon images in a conjunction by which they modify each other . . . [for example]

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Wonder to all who do the same espy
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead
Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether if it move at all.

In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison . . . Thus far of an endowing or modifying power: but the Imagination also shapes and creates; and how? By innumerable processes; and in none does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number,—alternations proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers . . .  As I do not mean here to treat this subject further than to throw some light upon the present Volumes, and especially upon one division of them, I shall spare myself and the Reader the trouble of considering the Imagination as it deals with thoughts and sentiments, as it regulates the composition of characters, and determines the course of actions: I will not consider it (more than I have already done by implication) as that power which, in the language of one of my most esteemed Friends, ‘draws all things to one; which makes things animate or inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects with their accessories, take one colour and serve to one effect.’ The grand storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of poetical, as contra-distinguished from human and dramatic Imagination, are the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton; to which I cannot forbear to add to those of Spenser. (“Preface to Poems, 1815”)

Coleridge

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (From Chapter 13, Biographia Literaria)