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3, July 2003
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF
IMAGINATION
Leslie Stevenson
(1) The ability to think of something not presently perceived, but spatio-temporally
real. (2) The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the
spatio-temporal world. (3) The liability to think of something that the subject believes
to be real, but which is not. (4) The ability to think of things that one conceives of as
fictional. (5) The ability to entertain mental images. (6) The ability to think of
anything at all. (7) The non-rational operations of the mind, that is, those explicable
in terms of causes rather than reasons. (8) The ability to form perceptual beliefs about
public objects in space and time. (9) The ability to sensuously appreciate works of art
or objects of natural beauty without classifying them under concepts or thinking of
them as useful. (10) The ability to create works of art that encourage such sensuous
appreciation. (11) The ability to appreciate things that are expressive or revelatory of
the meaning of human life. (12) The ability to create works of art that express
something deep about the meaning of life.
TO DIGEST all that has been written on the extremely flexible notion of imag-
ination would be a lifetimes work. Since I have misspent most of my life in other
ways, I cannot claim much authority on the topic. What I offer here is a phil-
osophical overview, and I hope some conceptual clarification, of the most
influential conceptions of imagination. The topic sprawls promiscuously over
philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics, poetry, and even religion.
The most basic notion of imagination is surely the first sense given in the
Oxford English Dictionary, namely having an image or concept of something not
presently perceived. This skates over the philosophical question involved, about
the relation of concepts to images (as is the wont of dictionaries). I will touch on
that later, but let us start from the simple thought that imagination is different
from sensory perception.
According to Aquinas, imagination is distinct from sense-perception proper:
Two types of activity occur in the sensory parts of the soul. One is simply a modifi-
cation: operation of the sense-faculty is brought to completion by the modification
effected by the perceptible object. The other is a creative activity, whereby the
imagination forms for itself an image of something absent, or something perhaps
never seen.1
1
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I 85 ad 3.
The cognitive powers belonging to sensibility (the power of intuitive ideas) are
divided into the senses and the imagination. Sense is the power of intuiting when the
object is present; imagination, that of intuiting even when the object is not present.2
However, Kant gives a different definition of imagination at one place in the first
Critique: Imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its
presence in intuition.3 In the latter quotation, intuition (Anschauung) must
mean sense-perception, whereas in the former, Kant is using the term to cover
imagination as well. On the second account, to imagine something is to represent
it without perceiving it.
This negative definition covers several different kinds of case, however. In
what will be the first of my numbered conceptions of imagination, the imagined
item (a material object or event or state of affairs) is real enough, but cannot
presently be perceived by the subjectit may be in the past, or though presently
existing it may be spatially inaccessible, or perhaps it does not yet exist, but is
forthcoming in the future.
1. The ability to think of something that is not presently perceived, but is, was or will be
spatio-temporally real
1a. The ability to think of something that one has previously perceived (but is not currently
perceiving)
2
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 15, Ak. VII: 153.
3
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B151. There are other conceptions of imagination in Kants critical
philosophy, some of which we shall discuss below.
4
G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), ch. 5.
240 LESLIE STEVENSON
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent
fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my
imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft.5
One can also think of things one has only heard about by testimony. In such
cases there is a causal connection which is yet more indirect (the information may
have passed through many minds, perhaps over centuries):
1b. The ability to think of something that one has never perceived, but which others have
perceived and told one about
In another kind of absence, one thinks of something that one infers must have
existed, or must exist elsewhere, or will exist in the future. Such is the stock in
trade of cosmologists, geologists, palaeontologists, archaeologists, detectives,
investors, and weather forecasters:
1c. The ability to think of something that one has never perceived and that no one has told
one about, whose existence one infers from perceived evidence by induction, or scientific
method in a wider sense
In some cases the inference is so familiar, for example from present ashes to
past fire, or from present fire to future ashes, as hardly to deserve being called
imaginative. In other cases, involving vast regions of space and time, or intricate
webs of scientific theory, or detective work worthy of a Sherlock Holmes, it
seems more appropriate to speak of a feat of scientific imagination.
A further sort of inference or imaginative leap is involved in knowledge of
other minds.6 Some philosophers may insist that we can often see the anger on
anothers face or hear it in their voice, but they will have to concede that in other
cases we can only infer someones suppressed anger from small cues, or from an
intimate background knowledge of the person and the context. Many states of
other minds thus fall under the formula not present to perception, and require
an imaginative effort or inference or leap for their recognition. Thus we have yet
another subspecies of 1:
5
Hamlet, V.i. But, as so often with Shakespeare, one can find more than one meaning. When Hamlet
says that his gorge rises, has he got a lump in his throat at the memory of Yoricks frolics
(conception 1a), or is he feeling nausea (abhorrence) when he imagines fleshy lips on the grimy,
smelly skull in his hand (which suggests conception 2 below). Or is it perhaps a bit of both?
6
According to the argument from analogy, this is a subspecies of inductive inferencebut that is
only one position on knowledge of other minds, and a much controverted one.
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 241
1d. The ability to think about a particular mental state of another person, whose existence
one infers from perceived evidence7
We may identify with deprived or persecuted people though our imaginative under-
standing of their plight. Such understanding is an instance of moral knowledge. How
much do we know, what do we know, about what it is like to be other people? As
moralists, as political moralists, we specialise, we have favourites. We sympathise with,
know about, some sufferers not others, we imagine and desire some states of affairs
not others.8
3. The liability to think of something which the subject believes to be real, but which is not
real
He hath shewed strength with his arm; He hath scattered the proud in the imagination
of their hearts.9
The grammar of the poetic phrasing may be obscure, but the meaning is plain
enough: it is not being said that God has scattered those who imagine that they
are proud, still less that the proud have merely imagined that He has scattered
them, but rather that He has scattered those who were proud in that they
imagined in their hearts that they were greatthey thought they were great, but
they were not really so great, when measured by the proper standards. Another
example is in Shakespeare:
Here Shakespeare compares the lunatic and the lover in having false beliefs
(though the madman may see devils where there is nothing to be seen, whereas
the beloved exists all right, it is just that she lacks the beauty her lover sees in her).
But, at risk of pedantry, we must surely insist that the poet (or dramatist, or
novelist) is not normally under any misapprehension that the things and people
he writes about exist somewhere in the spatio-temporal world. In this case a
different conception of imagination applies, in which one can imagine things
which are not even possibilities, they are not candidates for spatio-temporal reality,
but are freely acknowledged to be completely fictitious.11
9
St Luke, 1:51, as rendered in the Authorized Version. A recent translation, He has used the power
of his arm, he has routed the arrogant of heart (the New Jerusalem Bible), may be more accurate
in not using the term imagination, but somehow lacks the poetic ring of the King James Bible, for
it does not feed the imagination in sense 9 below.
10
A Midsummer Nights Dream, V.1.722.
11
There are mixed cases, when someone writes fictitious stories about real people, or locates
fictitious characters in real places and times.
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 243
4. The ability to think of things one conceives of as fictional, as opposed to what one believes
to be real, or conceives of as possibly real
The latter depends on memory and testimony in a parallel way to 1a and 1b:
hearing or reading as fictional takes the place of perception at the beginning of the
chain of information.
Thus far we have been examining various ways of thinking of things, without
going into the question of what role images play in thought. But there has long
been a conception of imagination as the faculty of imagery:
The result is that I now have no difficulty in turning my mind away from imaginable
things [i.e. things which can be perceived by the senses or imaginedas Descartess
12
K. L.Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1990), see ch. 1, especially
1.5. Walton takes the notion of imagination as primitive, whereas I am trying to explore it, though
I am not offering a conceptual analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but
something more like a Wittgensteinian family-resemblance account.
13
De Anima, III.3, 427b27ff, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
14
Ibid., III.7, 431a16. Hamlyns rather severe judgement on the imagination in Aristotle is that it has
an unsatisfactory halfway status in between perception and the intellect, and its exact position is
never made clear (ibid., Introduction, p. xiv).
244 LESLIE STEVENSON
French version of the Meditations puts it] and towards things which are objects of the
intellect alone and are totally separate from matter.15
. . . our simple ideas are clear, when they are such as the objects themselves from whence
they are taken did or might, in a well-ordered sensation or perception, present them.
. . . So far as they either want anything of the original exactness, or have lost any of
their first freshness and are, as it were, faded or tarnished by time, so far are they
obscure.19
. . . thus it is with our ideas which are, as it were, the pictures of things. No one of
these mental draughts, however the parts are put together, can be called confused (for
15
Meditations, Adam and Tannery edn, VII.53. See also Descartess reply to Hobbes in the Third set
of objections and replies, VII.181, where he rejects any suggestion that idea should refer only to
the images of material things which are depicted in the corporeal imagination.
16
Ibid., VII.72.
17
R. Pasnau, Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2002), ch. 9.
18
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.i.8; hereafter Essay.
19
Essay, II.xxix.2
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 245
they are plainly discernible as they are) till it be ranked under some ordinary
name . . .20
This conception of ideas as mental draughts (that is, drawings) which are plainly
introspectable just as they are, with perfectly determinate intrinsic properties like
drawings on paper, betrays Lockes view in all its crudeness.
Humes distinction between impressions and ideas makes only a terminolog-
ical variation on Lockes conception, reserving the former term for the immediate
objects of awareness in sensory perception,21 and the latter for the faint images of
these in thinking and reasoning.22 He tries to reformulate the distinctions
between memory and imagination, and belief and mere consideration, in terms of
degrees of introspectable vivacity or force and liveliness of these image-like
mental contents. The inadequacy of this does not need rearguing here. The
interest of Humes Treatise Book I for our enquiry is that in it the imagination
undergoes an extraordinary and confusing expansion. We need to distinguish
several conceptions of imagination in his thought.
As we have noted, the empiricists are committed to the thesis that all the con-
tents of human thought are images (in a wide sense of the term that incorporates
Humean impressions as well as ideas). If the imagination is defined, according
to conception 5, as the ability to have images, the human mind as a whole can be
loosely identified with the imagination. Here is a passage where Hume sub-
stitutes one word for the other in successive sentences:
I have often observd, that, beside cause and effect, the two relations of resemblance
and contiguity, are to be considerd as associating principles of thought, and as capable
of conveying the imagination from one idea to another. I have also observd, that when
of two objects connected together by any of these relations, one is immediately present
to the memory or the senses, not only the mind is conveyd to its co-relative by means
of the associating principle; but likewise conceives it with an additional force and
vigour . . . (THN, I.iii.ix, p. 107, my italics)
This most general conception of all can also be arrived at by a different route
having nothing particularly to do with mental imagery. Consider conception 3
the liability to believe something falseand reflect that to have a belief is to be
committed to a claim that may turn out to be either true or false, so it must be the
20
Essay, II.xxix.8.
21
And of emotions and other mental states in the case of impressions of reflexion.
22
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.i.i., p. 1. My page references are to the edition by L. A. Selby-
Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, repr. 1967); hereafter THN.
23
This corresponds to sense 5 in the Oxford English Dictionary (described as rare or obsolete!).
246 LESLIE STEVENSON
same mental faculties that are involved in forming all beliefs, whether true or
false. Imagination in conception 3 is what makes false belief possible, which
turns out to be exactly that which makes belief possible, that is, the whole
representational power of the human mind, as in conception 6.
But there is another conception of imagination distinguishing it as one kind of
mental operation as opposed to others, which is distinctively new in Hume. He
often uses the imagination to refer to our natural, innate tendency to associate
ideas that we have experienced together in the past, and he offers reductive
accounts of the concepts of substance and causation in terms of this:
The idea of a substance as well as that of a mode, is nothing but a collection of simple
ideas, that are united by the imagination . . . (THN, I.i.vi, p.16, my italics)
Since it appears, that the transition from an impression present to the memory or
the senses to the idea of an object, which we call cause or effect, is founded on past
experience, and on our remembrance of their constant conjunction, the next question
is, Whether experience produces the idea by means of the understanding or of the
imagination; whether we are determind by reason to make the transition, or by a
certain association and relation of perceptions. (THN, I.iii.vi, pp. 8889, my italics)24
The latter passage is particularly significant for our purposes, for here Hume
explicitly distinguishes the imagination from the understanding, the difference
being explained (after the semi-colon) as that between a transition caused merely
by an association or conjunction of perceptions in previous experience, and
an inference that is determined by reason, by which he presumably means
justifiable as rational (note the two different sense of determined thereby
invoked).
In a later, rather less noticed, section of Part III Hume gives a similarly re-
ductive, causal, non-rational account of the process of education, the acquisition
of beliefs from the testimony of other people:
As liars, by the frequent repetition of their lies, come at last to remember them; so the
judgment, or rather the imagination, by the like means, may have ideas so strongly
imprinted on it. . . . But as education is an artificial and not a natural cause . . . it is
never upon that account recognizd by pilosophers; tho in reality it be built almost on
the same foundation of custom and repetition as our reasonings from causes and
effects. (THN, I.iii.ix, p. 117, my italics)
24
See also p. 92, where Hume contrasts reason with imagination.
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 247
7. The non-rational operations of the mind, that is, those kinds of mental functioning
which are explicable in terms of causes rather than reasons
Non-rational does not mean irrational, contrary to reason, involving some sort
of cognitive error. The movements of the planets, the chemical reactions of acids,
and the growth of plants are non-rational, but they do not go against any law of
logic or epistemology: such norms simply do not apply to physical, chemical, and
vegetative processes. The same is true of our own physiologythere are causes
for the flow of blood, the processes of digestion, and the subtle electrical and
chemical interactions between the neurons in our brains, but we do not have
reasons for any of these, for they are not things we do, or can choose not to do.
Hume claims that some of what we call our reasonings can be explained in
terms of causes rather than reasons, and this may prompt us to ask whether all
reasoning can be reduced to mental causation.
Hume was a pioneer of the naturalist approach to human beings; his big idea
was advertised in the subtitle of his Treatise of Human NatureAn attempt to
introduce the experimental [i.e. experiential, or scientific] method of reasoning
into moral [i.e. human] subjects. But just how far can the naturalist programme
be pushed? If causal explanation is conceptually different from explanation in
terms of reasons, are we to limit the rational to a restricted part of the mental
and if so, which? Or should we try to eliminate all explanation in terms of
reasons, and all application of rational norms? (Are we then to give up offering
reasons for our own views, and discussing reasons for and against other claims?)
These questions are at the heart of contemporary controversy in the philosophy
of mind, the methodology of social science, and evolutionary psychology. For
Hume, they arise in the form: what does he mean by reason or rational, or the
understanding, when he contrasts these with the imagination?
If there is to be a contrast class for Hume, if the domain of genuine human
reasoning is non-empty, it must include deductive inference in logic and
mathematics.25 His main claim still seems to be that inductive inference is only
the way our minds are caused by experience to operate, it is not really inference
or reasoning at all:
Thus all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. . . . Objects have no
discoverable connexion together, nor is it from any other principle but custom
operating upon imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of
one to the existence of another. (THN, I.iii.viii, p. 103)
Yet Hume still describes the relevant mental process as probable reasoning, and as
25
In I.iv.i he says that even in demonstrative sciences (like mathematics) all knowledge degenerates
into probabilitywhich threatens to empty the class of genuine reasoning completely! However,
he does not let this most radical sceptical thought affect the rest of what he says.
248 LESLIE STEVENSON
inference of some sort. It seems that he must end up saying that we can perform
reasonings or make inferences which are not determined by reason, that is, for
which we can offer no reasons:
For we here find, that the understanding or imagination can draw inferences from past
experience, without reflecting on it; much more without forming any principle
concerning it, or reasoning upon that principle. (THN, I.iii.viii, p.104)
In general we may observe that as our assent to all probable reasonings is founded on
the vivacity of ideas, it resembles many of those whimsies and prejudices, which are
rejected under the opprobrious character of being the offspring of the imagination. By
this expression, it appears that the word, imagination, is commonly usd in two
different senses; and tho nothing be more contrary to true philosophy, than this
inaccuracy, yet in the following reasonings I have been obligd to fall into it. When I
oppose the imagination to the memory, I mean the faculty, by which we form our
fainter ideas. When I oppose it to reason, I mean the same faculty, excluding only our
demonstrative and probable reasonings. When I oppose it to neither, tis indifferent
whether it be taken in the larger or more limited sense, or at least the context will
sufficiently explain the meaning. (THN, I.iii.ix, footnote on pp. 117118)26
26
If Hume had had a conscientious supervisor for his research when writing the Treatise in his
early twenties, he might have been made to go back over his drafts and sort out his use of the
imagination!
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 249
So that upon the whole our reason neither does, nor is it possible it ever shoud, upon
any supposition, give us an assurance of the continud and distinct existence of body.
That opinion must be entirely owing to the IMAGINATION: which must now be
the subject of our enquiry. (THN, I.iv.ii, p. 193)
8. The ability to form beliefs, on the basis of perception, about public objects in three-
dimensional space which can exist unperceived, with spatial parts and temporal duration
I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent,
irresistable, and universal; such as the customary transition from causes to effects, and
from effects to causes: And the principles, which are changeable, weak, and irregular;
such as those I have just now taken notice of [namely the tendency to believe in substantial
forms and occult qualities, and to project human emotions onto inanimate things]. The former
are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, so that upon their removal human
nature must immediately perish and go to ruin. The latter are neither unavoidable to
mankind, nor necessary, nor so much as useful in the conduct of life; but on the
250 LESLIE STEVENSON
contrary are observd only to take place in weak minds, and being opposite to the other
principles of custom and reasoning, may easily be subverted by a due contrast and
opposition. For this reason the former are received by philosophy, and the latter
rejected. (THN, I.iv.iv, p. 225)
Here Hume at last realizes that he needs to make a clear and principled
distinction between (i) those operations of the human mindsuch as inductive
inference and the formation of beliefs about material objectswhich, although
they cannot be justified by appeal to any deeper level of reasoning, he accepts as
an inevitable part of our human nature, without which we could not have any
sort of reasons for our beliefs and actions; and (ii) those mental tendencies which
may be very common, but are not necessary to human existence, and can reason-
ably be resistedfor Hume these include superstition, most religious beliefs, and
a good deal of traditional metaphysics.
Kant is committed to a similar distinction, but he claims that the fundamental
principles governing belief-formation in (i) are not just blankly empirical, but can
be rationally justified (by transcendental argument) as necessary conditions for
experience. The categories of causation and material substance are not optional
concepts which some rational beings might happen to lack, rather, applying them
is part of what it is to be a rational, belief-forming being perceiving the world.
There is a verbal agreement with Hume, for Kant argues that the imagination is
crucially involved in even the most ordinary perception, in that a non-rational
mental process of synthesis is operating whenever we recognize a material object
as such.
Kants basic idea is sketched in the opening sentences of the first Critique:
There is no doubt whatever that all our cognition begins with experience; for how else
should the cognitive faculty be awakened into exercise if not through objects that
stimulate our senses and in part themselves produce representations, in part bring the
activity of our understanding into motion to compare these, to connect or separate
them, and thus to work up the raw material of sensible impressions into a cognition
of objects that is entitled experience?27
27
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B1, in the English translation by Guyer and Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge U.P., 1998); hereafter CPR.
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 251
unconscious. Strictly speaking, they are not inferences at all, for they do not have
conceptualized, propositional premises; they are just causal mental processes,
which, in principle, psychologists or cognitive scientists can study.28
Later on, Kant introduces his technical term synthesis for these mental
processes, and attributes them to a mental faculty which he labels imagination:
By synthesis in the most general sense, however, I understand the action of putting
different representations together with each other and comprehending their
manifoldness in one cognition. (CPR, A77/B103)
This is very much the same thought as Hume expressed in the passage referenced
in THN, I.iv.ii. But Kant has no sceptical tendency to think the resulting beliefs
in the continued and independent existence of material objects are false.29 Thus
Kant postulates imagination as a third mental faculty which mediates between
sensibility (our passive liability to be affected by the physical world through our
sense-organs) and understanding (our active, spontaneous power to apply
concepts and make judgements):
28
Kant was not perhaps quite as clear on these points as I here suggest. I am interpreting him in the
light of recent cognitive science. For more elaboration see my paper Synthetic Unities of Experi-
ence, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. LX (March 2000), no. 2, pp. 281305.
29
Strawson noted similarities and differences between Hume and Kant (and Wittgenstein) on the
imagination in his well-known paper Imagination and Perception in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson
(eds), Experience and Theory (London: Duckworth, 1970), reprinted in P. F. Strawson, Freedom and
Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974).
252 LESLIE STEVENSON
Although the word imagination is not used, in the last few lines Wordsworth is
alluding to a creative power in the human mind that is at work in the most
ordinary perception of the external worldsurely conception 8.
Let us now take note of Kants use of the concept of imagination in his account
of aesthetic judgement in the Critique of Judgment. At the very beginning he writes:
. . . the cognitive powers brought into play by the presentation are in free play, because
no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. Hence the
mental state in this presentation must be a feeling, accompanying the given
presentation, of a free play of the presentational powers. . . . (CJ, 9, V.217218)32
We might expect that the imagination that we meet here is the same mental
faculty as that to which we have been introduced in the first Critique. But
although there are connections, it is not clear that it is exactly the same faculty at
work in ordinary perception and in aesthetic perception. (There are problems in
individuating mental faculties, anywayfor they are theoretical entities invoked
to explain what we actually do.) Perhaps when we appreciate abstract art, part of
what we do is play with interpreting the shapes on canvas as representations of
30
Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, from lines 9591014; published in 1814 in the Preface to The
Excursion, as a prospectus to Wordsworths never-completed plan for a lengthy philosophical poem
to be entitled The Recluse.
31
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1, Ak. V.203, trans. W. J. Pluhar (Indianopolis: Hackett, 1987); hereafter
CJ.
32
See also 21, V.238; 35, V.287; 59, V.354; 2nd Introduction, VII, V.190.
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 253
9. The sensuous component in the appreciation of works of art or objects of natural beauty
without classifying them under concepts or thinking of them as practically useful
10. The ability to create works of art that encourage such sensuous appreciation
Kant gives some account of such genius or creative imagination. Genius is the
talent for producing something genuinely original, something for which no
determinate rule can be given, so that not even the artist or author can say how he
or she came by his or her ideas (CJ, 4650, V.307320):
For the imagination (in its role as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when
it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. . . .
In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the
empirical use of the imagination); for although it is under that law that nature lends
us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely,
into something that surpasses nature. (CJ, 49, V.314)
11. The ability to appreciate things that are expressive or revelatory of the meaning of human
life
254 LESLIE STEVENSON
A peak experience, in every sense! The use of Imagination in that last line is
not, however, the use I am now concentrating on, but a more general notion of
mindakin to conception 5, but with a connotation of stream(!) of conscious-
ness rather than representation. Wordsworth conceives of the whole scene as
having a kind of mind or soul, expressed in the voice of the waters coming up
through the gap in the cloud. He goes on:
33
This and the following quotations are from The Prelude (1805 version), Book XIII. I risk murder-
ing to dissect by presenting these bleeding chunksbut mercifully, the uncut text remains
available for anyone to read.
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 255
The distinction between gross and higher minds reeks of litism. Wordsworth is
unashamedly concerned to make distinctions between lower and higher spiritual
states, but it is clear from his oeuvre that he would want to insist that the higher
states are open to people of all social classes, and that the lower states are not
absent in the most cultivated or civilized circles. He continues:
The term imagination still does not appear here, but I suggest that in talking of
building up greatest things from least suggestions, and of going beyond sensible
impressions to the invisible world, Wordsworth is invoking conception 11. He
wants to claim that when performed by higher minds, this going beyond is not
merely subjective or imaginary, but involves the grasping of moral truth, true
religion, and the secret of true happinessthe meaning of life, no less!
Wordsworth thus offers Imagination and Love as the twin peaks of human
achievement or aspiration. Each word is used in a special sense: imagination we
have identified as conception 11. Love would of course need another paper or
book. Wordsworths adjective intellectual does not now sound quite right when
applied to love: what he means seems closer to the Christian concept of agape
(archaically translated as charity in the King James Bible), for like C. S. Lewis,34
34
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles 1960).
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 257
he is at pains to distinguish the higher or divine kind of love from the merely
human form(s) of love. Imagination in conception 11 sounds more cognitive
(though not purely so), and the higher love more affective, but the claim is that
neither can be fully and properly developed without the other. Given that
imagination is here connected with faith and surely also with hope, we have in
Wordsworth an implicit thesis of the unity of the theological virtues.35
Along with Wordsworth, Coleridge fastened on something like conception 11
as the central notion of their joint artistic creed when they spent an ecstatically
creative period together in the west country in 1798: and he too used the concept
in interpreting his own spiritual journey. It is surely the loss of this sort of
imagination that he mourns in Dejection: An Ode:
I take it Coleridge had not lost imagination in sense 8he could still recognize
trees as trees, for instanceto lose that would be agnosia, a different kind of
mental disablement that has been studied by neurologists such as Oliver Sachs,
who wrote about the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Coleridges deprivation
was affective and not merely cognitive. In this poem he was surely expressing his
experience of repeated bouts of depression, the absence of all positive feelings, a
loss of the ability to appreciate the beauty of the world, to perceive a deeper sig-
nificance in things and to find meaning in lifethe loss of conception 11, in fact.
This exalted conception of imagination is still alive two centuries later, in two
English philosophers writing in the 1990s. Iris Murdoch contrasts fantasy as
somewhat mechanically generating narrowly banal false pictures with the
imagination as:
. . . freely and creatively exploring the world, moving toward the expression and
elucidation (and in art celebration) of what is true and deep. Deep here invokes the
sense in which any serious pursuit and expression of truth moves toward fundamental
questions, as when a political problem refers us to a view of human nature. Truth is
something we recognise in good art when we are led to a juster, clearer, more detailed,
more refined understanding.37
35
The connected trio of faith, hope, and love reappear on the last page of John Cottingham, On the
Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003).
36
Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode, lines 7677, 8286
37
Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 321.
258 LESLIE STEVENSON
Like Wordsworth, Roger Scruton connects imagination with a sense of the sacred:
The ennobling power of the imagination lies in this: that it re-orders the world, and
re-orders our feelings in response to it. Fantasy, by contrast is frequently
degrading. . . . Where imagination offers glimpses of the sacred, fantasy offers
sacrilege and profanation.
. . . when religion dies, and the common culture evaporates like a mist beneath the
sun of reason. . . . imagination acquires its modern rolethe role of ennobling,
spiritualising, re-presenting humanity as something higher than itself.38
Both Murdoch and Scruton make a contrast between great (or at least, good)
works of art, namely those that demand imaginative appreciation, and those items
which only stimulate fantasy (whether supposedly high culture, films, science
fiction, advertising, childrens books or programmes, kitsch, or pornography).39
We can thus distinguish a final conception of creative imagination:
12. The ability to create works of art that express something deep about the meaning of
human life, as opposed to the products of mere fantasy
I close with one more quotation from Shakespeare, that supreme exemplar of
conceptions 10 and 12:
HIPPOLYTA (watching the play performed by the rude mechanicals): This is the silliest
stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if
imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA: It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
THESEUS: If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass
for excellent men.40
38
Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Persons Guide to Modern Culture (London: Duckworth 1998), pp. 55,
57.
39
This distinction between imagination and fantasy is derived from (but not identical with) that
between imagination and fancy made by Wordsworth in the Preface to his Poems (1815) and by
Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, vol. I, at the end of ch. 13.
40
A Midsummer Nights Dream, V.i.
TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 259