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

discussion of phantasia, its Latin translation imaginatio, and their etymological descendants, continued to be rooted in the concepts introduced by Aristotle and the problems arising from his rather elliptical explanation of them” (http:1).

And for a long time, it might be argued,  people really didn’t stray very far from this earliest known standardized definition for Imagination:

Very arguably this is true of all Western philosophical schools: Stoics, Epicureans               and Neoplatonists quite as much as avowed Aristoteleans; Muslims as much as              Christians; and, come to that, Empiricists quite as much as Rationalists” (http:1).

While “the connection between imagination and perception is the more fundamental,” it should also be pointed out that it is also ‘postulated’ that a difference exists between common sense [sensus communis] and phantasia, either of which can generate phantasmata,

“but when their immediate cause is an object directly before us the tendency is to refer to them as percepts, and to the process as perception; when memory of previously observed things is the source, reference will more likely be to memory and imagination. Thus imagination came to be particularly associated with thinking about things that are not actually currently present to the sense: things that are not really there” (2).

Though this is an oversimplified overview, it does roughly correspond to the situation as I have investigated it, and it only took a few lines of reading time to tell it to you.

Today, the ideas behind the words ‘fantasy’ and ‘imagination’ are likely to evoke these sorts of thoughts:

“…we sometimes find modern writers making a distinction

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