British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 43, No.

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.

British Society of Aesthetics 2003 238

 TWELVE CONCEPTIONS OF IMAGINATION 239

Perception is thus understood as a causal relation in which the perceived object

affects the perceivers sense-organ(s), whereas imagination involves no such
presently active modification of the perceiver. A similar account is found in
Kants Anthropology:

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

This conception is general enough to include cases based on memory. (Aquinass

something absent can be an object previously perceived.) Sometimes one can
recall vivid sensory images of how something looked, but in other cases one may
retain only what Evans calls an information-link, in that there is an indirect
causal connection between ones previous encounter(s) with the object and ones
present thought of it.4 A subspecies of conception 1 is thus:

1a. The ability to think of something that one has previously perceived (but is not currently
perceiving)

Shakespeare gives a memorable example of this usage in the case of Hamlet

holding Yoricks skull:

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

Iris Murdoch has deployed the concept of imagination in this connection:

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

There may be something more to imagining what is it like for S to be F than

merely realizing that S is F. As with 1c, there is a tendency to reserve talk of imag-
ination for the more dramatic cases in which there is some degree of difficulty in
knowing how someone thinks and feels, perhaps indeed some element of moral
effort in arriving at an understanding of their mental state. But presumably the
same faculties and inferential methods are involved in the easier and harder cases.
When the verb to imagine is used according to conception 1, it has success-
grammar, so that to say that someone thinks of X is to imply that X is an actual
denizen of the world of material objects, events, and persons. But there is
obviously another usage, according to which one can imagine things that one
does not believe to exist. In one such usage, the imagined objects are things that
the subject thinks may exist (or may have existed, or come to exist). They are con-
ceived of as real possibilities, states of affairs that we may fear, worry about, plan,
or hope or yearn for:

2. The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatio-temporal

world

This is a first-person or internal conception, in which each person knows beyond

doubt, just by introspection, what they are thinking of (the so-called intentional
objects of their mental states).
Of course, people often imagine states of affairs that do not actually obtain or
come to pass, and occasionally someone imagines an object that does not exist.
But to say this, we have to take a third-person or external point of view, and use
the verb imagine with failure-grammar: thus, to say that a person imagines object
X, or that p, is to imply that X does not exist, or that p is false (the entailment is
made explicit if one says merely imagines). In such cases we say the intentional
object is imaginary. This can be described as a liability rather than an ability:
7
If it is objected that mental states are not literally in space, we can reply that they are wherever their
owners are at the time, and are thus as spatial as other human events such as conversations,
concerts and weddings.
8
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto, 1992), p. 391.
242 LESLIE STEVENSON

3. The liability to think of something which the subject believes to be real, but which is not
real

An example of this usage can be found in the Magnificat:

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:

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helens beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poets eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poets pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.10

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

Obviously, I am helping myself to the notion of conceiving something as fic-

tional, merely as a story. Any preferred analysis of it can be plugged in here: such
as Kendall Waltons account of fictional status in terms of participation in a game
of make-believe, which in turn is explained as a species of imagining governed by
props plus principles of generation or make-believe.12
The obvious subspecies of 4 are:

4a. The ability to create (or think up) fictions

4b. The ability to think of already-created fictions as fictional

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:

5. The ability to entertain mental images

In the De Anima, Aristotle explained phantasia (usually translated as imagination)

as that in virtue of which we say that an image occurs to us.13 And later on he
says the soul never thinks without an image.14 So for Aristotle all thought or
representation involves imagery.
But for anyone who holds that there is a non-imagistic way of thinking of
things, conception 5 will be only a subspecies of thought or representation. Descartes,
at the beginning of the Fourth Meditation, having already claimed knowledge of
his own mind and of God, which are incorporeal things, said:

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

Descartes thus offered an account of imagination as a faculty of the mind differ-

ing from sense-perception and memory on the one hand, and from conception by
the understanding or reason on the other. In the Sixth Meditation he distinguished
imagination from pure understanding, in that when imagining a triangle he can
see the three lines with my minds eye as if they were present before me,
whereas he cannot similarly imagine all the sides of a chiliagon (a thousand-sided
figure), although he can just as readily understand the definition of a chiliagon as
that of a triangle, and use it in mathematical deductions.16 We can add in here the
reflection that there can be non-imagistic thoughts of material things, too. One
might know that the Great Reform Bill was passed in 1832 without having any
mental imagery of that event, and one might remember that one once met
Great-Aunt Agatha, without remembering how she looked or sounded or smelt.
Aquinas said that all human thinkingat least in this life, in the embodied
stateinvolves a conversio ad phantasmata, that is, a turning of our attention to
images. But according to a recent interpretation, his position is more like that of
Descartes, allowing that we have some thoughts which do not involve imagery, but
claiming that human thinking requires frequent comparison with sensible
things.17
It is the British empiricists, exponents of the way of ideas, who were most
firmly committed to the view that all thinking is conducted in terms of mental
images. Locke explained his ubiquitous term idea as standing for whatsoever is
the object of the understanding when a man thinks,18 and it emerges in many
places in the Essay that he thinks of ideas as introspectable mental images. One
particularly explicit passage is when he distinguishes clear and obscure, distinct
and confused ideas:

. . . 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)

So we can add to our list:

6. The ability to think of (conceive of , or represent) anything at all23

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)

In all three places, Hume is operating with a conception of the imagination as

the non-rational workings of our minds, not subject to rational norms or explicable
by reasons:

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)

But here Hume identifies imagination with understanding, whereas in a previous

passage (I.iii.vi) he had distinguished them! Plainly, his terminology has got out
of control. He shows some awareness of this in a footnote, rather late in the day:

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

In applying conception 7, everything depends on what is to count as non-

rational. When he distinguishes imagination from memory, Hume presumably
has in mind fictions (conception 4) and envisaged possibilities (conception 2)
both of which might be called whimsies, as well as false beliefs (conception
3)which might be called prejudicesthough his talk of fainter ideas disables
him from making these distinctions properly. But in excluding probable
reasoning from the imagination in this footnote, Hume obscures his central
message that inductive inference is due to the non-deductive operation of the
mind. To render consistent the passages referenced above (I.iii.vi, I.iii.viii), we
need to take the imagination in the latter as conception 6, the mind as a whole;
whereas in the former the imagination has to be understood as conception 7,
distinguished from understanding or deductive reason.
In Part IV of Book I, Hume finds imagination also at work in the formation of
beliefs about mind-independent material things and events in the spatio-temporal
world (the objects that he has taken for granted in Part III). He digs deeper into
the human mind, finding further non-rational operations at this level. He is here
concerned with the transition from fleeting, subjective, sensory impressions to

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

beliefs in relatively enduring, objective things, states of affairs, events, and

processes. He argues that such inferences cannot be justified either by appeal to
the senses (for they go beyond what is given in sense-perception), or by reason
(for they are not deductively valid):

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)

We have here a further conception of imagination:

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

Hume finds this propensity to be in conflict with reflection, by which he means

not just that we cannot justify such beliefs rationally (which was the case with
induction), but that we actually know such beliefs to be false, which is a stronger
condemnation than anything said about inductive inferences in Part III. If Hume
is right, we enter into the realm of the irrational, or contra-rational, not just the
non-rational (the fiction which he talks of here is not conception 4, it is
downright literal falsity):

This propension to bestow an identity on our resembling perceptions, produces the

fiction of a continud existence; since that fiction, as well as the identity, is really false,
as is acknowledged by all philosophers. . . .
But tho we are led after this manner, by the natural propensity of the imagination,
to ascribe a continud existence to those sensible objects or perceptions, which we find
to resemble each other in their interrupted appearance; yet a very little reflection and
philosophy is sufficient to make us perceive the fallacy of that opinion.
(THN, I.iv.ii, pp. 209210)

Here we confront a deeper aspect of the sceptical tendency of Humes epis-

temologywhich it is not my business to discuss here. The point for our present
purpose is that he is eventually forced to review his somewhat loose talk of the
imagination yet again, and thereby clarify his whole conception of the human
mind:

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

He is saying that all our conceptualized perceptual experience is the result of

certain fundamental kinds of mental processing. If we are to think about per-
ceived objects and make judgements about them, there must be psychological
processes by which the raw sensory input (the immediate effects of the world on
our sense-organs) are somehow integrated and organized into conscious,
conceptual representations of objects and states of affairs. For Kant these mental
processes are not conscious inferences from mental recognitions of Lockean
ideas or Humean impressions; they are preconceptual, and almost entirely

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)

. . . since every appearance contains a manifold, thus different perceptions by

themselves are encountered dispersed and separate in the mind, a combination of
them, such as they cannot have in sense itself, is therefore necessary. There is thus an
active faculty of the synthesis of this manifold in us, which we call imagination. . . .
[and in a footnote] No psychologist has yet thought that the imagination is a necessary
ingredient of perception itself. (CPR, A120)

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):

Synthesis in general is . . . the mere effect of the imagination, of a blind though

indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all,
but of which we are seldom even conscious. Yet to bring this synthesis to concepts is
a function that pertains to the understanding, and by means of which it first provides
cognition in the proper sense. (CPR, A78/B103)

In these passages we have Kants version of conception 8. He goes on to offer

some notoriously obscure theorizing about levels of synthesis and further work-
ings of imagination, but (readers may be relieved to know) I will not go into this
here. Instead, let me quote a passage from Wordsworths poetry which displays
some intuitive awareness of these mysteries of perception:
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

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

Of the whole species) to the external world

Is fitted: and how exquisitely too -
Theme this but little heard amongst men -
The external world is fitted to the mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish: this is my great argument.30

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:

If we wish to decide whether something is beautiful or not, we do not use

understanding to refer the presentation to the object so as to give rise to cognition;
rather, we use imagination (perhaps in connection with understanding) to refer the
presentation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or displeasure.31

Kant appeals to the two presentational powers of imagination and understanding

to try to explain how it is possible for aesthetic judgements to be both universal,
claiming validity for everyone, and yet at the same time based only on the
subjects own responses of pleasure and displeasure (CJ, 3840, V.2905). This
explanation involves his rather obscure theory of the free play of imagination
and understanding in aesthetic perception. Here is one of his many attempts to
explain this:

. . . 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

three-dimensional objects; when listening to music we may sometimes play

with hearing instruments as human voices, themes as representations, develop-
ment as a material process through time. But such play with concepts does not
seem essential to aesthetic appreciationit certainly does not have to be
conscious, and if the claim is about what goes on at a pre-conscious level, then we
need criteria for how such claims are to be tested. This is to start another hare,
which we cannot chase now. For the purposes of this paper, we can add another
conception of imagination to our list:

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

There is also a special kind of imagination involved in the production of works of

art:

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)

The German Romantic movement in aesthetics followed up on these themes

from Kants third Critique, and Coleridge helped to introduce such thought into
England. In the poetry and prose and prose of Wordsworth and Coleridge, we
find Imagination, dignified with an initial capital letter, used to mean something
like the ability to discern a deeper or higher significance in almost anything
whether natural beauty, unsophisticated human behaviour, works of art, or
human artefacts of any sort. And there is in this usage the positive connotation
that the significance thereby discerned is not just imaginary (as in conception 4)
but is objective or true, in some sense already there, and discernible by those with
the appropriate sensitivities. Perhaps we can summarize this conception as:

11. The ability to appreciate things that are expressive or revelatory of the meaning of human
life
254 LESLIE STEVENSON

Of course, to put it in such solemn and truth-claiming terms is to invite

scepticism and even ridicule in these postmodern times. Nevertheless, I venture
to suggest that such a conception of imagination still deserves our attention. It is
surely different from conception 9for many works of art or natural objects can
be sensuously appreciated as pretty, attractive, charming, pleasing to the eye or
ear, and, yes, beautiful, without involving anything as deep as 11 pretentiously
claims.
Wordsworth is one of the great defenders of conception 11. His 200-page auto-
biographical poem, The Prelude, is a subtle study of the growth of his own mind,
and in particular of the mental power(s) that he labels imagination. Towards the
end we find the more overtly theoretical or philosophical parts: Books XI and XII
bear the title Imagination, How Impaired and Restored, and the concluding
Book XIII includes a climactic paean to Imagination, stimulated by the poets
recollection of a night-time climb up Snowdon, coming out above the clouds into
moonlight:

The Moon stood naked in the Heavens, at height

Immense above my head, and on the shore
I found myself of a huge sea of mist,
Which, meek and silent, rested at my feet.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still Ocean . . .

At distance not the third part of a mile

Was a blue chasm; a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.33

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

A meditation rose in me that night

Upon the lonely Mountain when the scene
Had passed away, and it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty Mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an underpresence,
The sense of God, or whatsoer is dim
Or vast in its own being; . . .

. . . That even the grossest minds must see and hear

And cannot chuse but feel. The Power which these
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
Thrusts forth upon the senses, is the express
Resemblance, in the fulness of its strength
Made visible, a genuine Counterpart
And Brother of that glorious faculty
Which higher minds bear with them as their own.

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:

. . . they [i.e. higher minds] build up greatest things

From least suggestions, ever on the watch,
W illing to work and be wrought upon.
They need not extraordinary calls
To rouze them, in a world of life they live,
By sensible impressions not enthralled,
But quickened, rouzed, and made thereby more fit
To hold communion with the invisible world.

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!

Such minds are truly from the Deity,

For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That can be known is theirs . . .

. . . hence religion, faith,

and endless occupation for the soul . . .

. . . Hence chearfulness in every act of life;

256 LESLIE STEVENSON

Hence truth in moral judgments and delight

That fails not, in the external universe.

Before he gets round to identifying this mighty mental power as Imagination,

Wordsworth makes a connection with love (again running the risk of bathos):

. . . From love, for here

Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes,
All truth and beauty, from pervading love,
That gone, we are as dust. . . .

. . . in some green bower

Rest, and be not alone, but have thou there
The One who is thy choice of all the world,
There linger, lulled and lost, and rapt away,
Be happy to thy fill: thou callst this love
And so it is, but there is higher love
Than this, a love that comes into the heart
With awe and a diffusive sentiment;
Thy love is human merely; this proceeds
More from the brooding Soul, and is divine.

This love more intellectual cannot be

Without Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute strength
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And reason in her most exalted mood.
This faculty hath been the moving soul
Of our long labour: we have traced the stream
From darkness, and the very place of birth
In its blind cavern . . .

. . . And lastly, from its progress have we drawn

The feeling of life endless, the one thought
By which we live, Infinity and God.
Imagination having been our theme,
So also hath that intellectual love,
For they are each in each, and cannot stand
Dividually.

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:

There was a time when, though my path was rough,

This joy within me dallied with distress
...
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.36

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.

and with the disenchantment (Webers Entzauberung) of social life:

. . . 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

Shakespeares poetry, or word-play, whizzes by so quickly that one can hardly

follow it conceptually, yet (by the magic alluded to in conception 9) we intuitively
grasp the main pointin this case, that Theseus is generously prepared to see
more of worth in the ridiculous play and its amateur performers than the tartly
superior Hippolyta (who, soon afterwards, finds herself moved, against her will).

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

I leave it as an exercise for the reader, to decide which conceptions of imagination

are here invoked.

Leslie Stevenson, School of Philosophy, University of St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL,

Scotland. Email: ls@st-andrews.ac.uk