Abstract

The faculty of imagination is a cogitative faculty rather than a cognitive one. Great artists, scientists, and philosophers create original works of art, construct novel scientific theories and achieve new philosophical insights through the exercise of their imagination. We speak of picturing things to ourselves, of having, making and conjuring up images in our imagination. There are connections between perception and imagination, but imagining something perceptible is not at all like perceiving something. Before commencing on any such research as Galton's, one must be clear what is meant by ‘mental image’ or ‘image in the imagination’. The horizon of the imagination is far wider than the horizon of possible mental images one may have before one's mind's eye. The voluntariness of imagining is similar to the voluntariness of thinking — and this displays the kinship of the concepts of thought and imagination.