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Types of Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

At first sight it may seem as if Imagination can easily be characterized as a continuous process of having images; but this is very soon found to be inadequate and misleading. On the one hand we have a great number of good witnesses who insist that in their best imaginative work they have made use of no images, or of very few; and on the other, everybody makes distinction between flights of fancy, for example, which certainly involve successions of images, and true imagination. Perhaps a better method of approach is found when we examine how the material dealt with in the imaginative process is built together. In the flight of fancy image follows image, and the transition from one to the next seems to be determined by something in the nature of each individual step of the whole chain, or by each individual act of imaging. Thus the train as a whole is very apt, to the outsider, to appear jerky, ill-connected,

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1928

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References

page 78 note 1 London, 1918.

page 79 note 1 English translation by Duff, J. M. , London, 1916.Google Scholar

page 82 note 1 Cf. Mare, Walter De La : Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, London, 1919, p. 13.Google Scholar