IMAGINATION (from Lat. imaginatio, from imaginari, to imagine, from imago, image). Taken in its broadest significance, thinking in images. In this sense it is synonymous with phantasy. Thus one may imagine a mountain, the sound of tlotting water, the fatigue of a long journey, the rhythmic march of an army, or the articulatory leer of a word in the throat. The potter to image, to imagine, is dependent, lint of all, upon past experience. An individual horn blind never has visual images; one born deaf never hears mortis 'ringing in his head.' .tloreuver, the ability to image varies greatly from individual to individual. Visual images predominate in one mind, auditory in another, tactual or motor in a third. SC(' MEMORY.
In a more restricted sense, imagination covers a single class of mental images. In this signiti • mice, 'an imagination' is coOrdinate with n. 'memory image' or an 'expectation image.' faken as clusters of sensations, these three classes of images identical. They differ only in their refereliee and in their setting. A memory image refers to some part of one's past experience (one has a visual image of one's childhood home, or an auditory image of it familiar piece of music), its function is to 'reproduce' the past. Similarly, image; are set within the individual's experience, but within the part that exists only in anticipation. Their function is to connect the present with the future. Finally, an imagi nation has no direct with the course of one's personal experience. As one reads a volume of fiction, one may imagine scenes, voices, movement A, a ituntion,3. The Whole narrative is held together by a succession of imaginations, or 'imagination images,' as they might be called.
This is passive or reproductive imagination. Over against it stands active or constructi ye imagina tion. an instance of which is furnished by the artistie productions of the painter and the sculp tor. Between passive and active imagination there exists the same difference as between inns hig and 'hard thinking.' lit the passive type there is a nucleus—e.g. the text of the novel— about which are clustered various near-lying associations; in the active type, images, more or less discrete and unrelated, are brought together and wrought into a systematic whole. The dif ference is rather one of degree than of kind. Active imaginations show greater selectiveness; it disjunction of elements succeeded by an aggre gation of those most fit to express some feeling or idea. This is evident in a painting of natural scenery, where the artist has modified nature to suit his purposes.
James Alill and Rain confine imagination to those constructions which are produced under the influence of emotien—e.g. ghosts rind hob goblins evoked by terror, or the ere:ttions of the poet, and the musician. Sully, on the other hand. makes it cover three distinct forms of mental construction—cognitive imagination, practical imagination (or invention), and aesthetic (or poetic) imagination.
Consult: Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London, 1888) ; James, Principles of Psyeholog y, vol. ii. (New York. 1890) ; Sully, Out/lines of Psychology (New York, 1891) ; Ambrosi, Psi cologia dell' immaginazione (Rome, 1898) ; lIoef ler, Psychologie (Vienna, 1897).