Imagination in the Contemporary World and the Legacy of Romantic Literary Thought

between “memory                    imagery” and “imagination imagery”, or even restricting the use of “imagination”                  (and, a fortiori, “imaginary”) to thoughts about things that have never (or never                     yet) been actually experienced….(f)or some reason, words…such as “fantasy”,                  “fancy”, or “phantasm”, seem to…connote unreality even more strongly than                         “imagination” and its cognates…” (2).

And then we have Descartes, who links everything scientifically to flesh, brain and matter, the rational mind connected, it seems, to the body via the “Cartesian imagination/sensus communis” at the “pineal surface,” “the lynchpin that holds together the two metaphysical worlds of Cartesianism.  As it had done for Aristotle, the imagination/sensus communis mediated between the bodily senses, and the {now incorporeal) rational mind” (3).

When the Romantics came along, the ideas of Philostratus (among others) were given fresh life as

“discussion concerning imagination shifted away from cognitive theory and                       epistemology, and towards its role in original, creative thinking, especially in the                arts” (3). In other words, imagination was given value, along with passion, and                       even Coleridge [despite all his attempts to formalize his definitions along                               philosophic lines] “relied heavily on Kant and post-Kantian German idealism (and                      Plotinus….)…(with) results (from a philosophical

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