§ 5: On Imagination

The power of the soul that represents in consciousness images of existing or also non-existing objects is called the imaginative or imagination.

Imagination is a power of the Mind of the soul and therefore rational, insofar as it relates to sensory knowledge, which it attempts to harmonize, or tries to harmonize toward the ideal and perfect; and it is distinguished into iconic, creative, and perfective; and iconic is called what when it forms a true image of a past deed in harmony with the conception of the mind from the connection of the past to the present. Creative is when from careful observation upon the past it forms an original course or creates an original work not in harmony with the past, but always looking toward the perfect. Hence its function aims to produce new ideas or new objects, but more perfect. For this reason it also becomes perfective, when as free creative in its relation to the perfect it works the perfect in sensory activity.

Imagination connects to the sensory powers and determines its activities in action and in sensory activity; but when it only refers to the ideal, it becomes chimerical and does not fulfill its purpose. It produces plastic images and daydreams, through which often weak characters are turned toward reverie and monmania; hence it ought to proceed with judgment. A result of imaginative activity is frenzy, ecstasy, reverie, and monmania.

But frenzy and ecstasy refer to the ideal perfect, through which ideas and instructive precepts were often transported into action, accomplishing the greatest things in the perfection of man’s spiritual powers. But reverie and monmania refer to sensory phenomena that are iconic, and never served to produce anything useful; because they become objects of the appetitive and thus lower the worth of man and make him material and dependent on worldly needs.

Imagination as a power of the mind, as creative, draws from the mind; as iconic and perfective, from the Word. It takes its first starting point for creation from attention and investigation, and that for imaging and completing from memory and knowledge. It is sensory when it refers to art, spiritual when it refers to poetry, and rational when it refers to philosophy and rhetoric. Imagination coming as an aid to art reveals great artists; taking part with science reveals great creators and learned men of science. Imagination lifting the poet and transferring him to unknown lands which it itself created and adorned, supplies as another Pythia to his mouth divine verses adorned with purple and fine linen and shining with celestial beauty. Imagination guided by right reason reveals great philosophers and great orators.

When imagination does not proceed from attention and investigation and its images are not completed by memory and knowledge, it presents tragic images similar to those appearing in high fevers. Hence in order to imagination reshape an image, it requires perceptions, investigation, memory, and knowledge.

We now ask those who ascribe to animals a vivid imagination through which they represent meadows and hunts and such things; what kind of imagination do they have, is it similar to that of men or resembles that of animals? Does imagination inspire them as it does poets, are they seized by ecstasy as Brutus and Socrates and introduced into a spiritual world, or do they ramble as Lucullus or suffer from melancholy from monmania as the love-stricken? What kind of imagination is theirs? Sensory, spiritual, or rational? Why have animals never shown artistic inclinations or poetic tendency or inclination toward philosophy? How can we be assured that animals have such imagination as man, if we do not see the results of such a power? How can we grant that it occurs in animals what is not possible to occur in man? When has the animal attended to something? When has it received perceptions? When has it investigated and distinguished the objects from one another? When has it acquired knowledge? When has it remembered, since it never learned anything? How therefore can it imagine since this is impossible for it? Animals perhaps have some kind of sensory imagination that is reflected, but similar in all respects to their memory; because they never showed any sign of the existence of imagination. How in the construction of their nests do animals ever maintain from the foundation of the world the same unchanging rule? How has their imagination not benefited from the works of others and added not even a line to the design that has existed from all time and is being executed?

One can ascribe many virtues to animals, but ought to prove their existence through examples. The existence of imagination presupposes a rational soul, and the rational soul and a body corresponding to the needs of the rational soul. The existence of imagination in irrational animals would be an inapplicable power and therefore superfluous. But God has made nothing superfluous; he made everything in wisdom. Animals do not have imagination.