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

perspective) fragmentary and                 largely incoherent” (4).

This brings us to the twentieth century, and Sartre (who seems to have respected the idea of imagination), stands against an array of “analytical philosophers (who)….seem to doubt whether the imagination even exists.  Gilbert Ryle declared, in The Concept of Mind, that “There is no special Faculty of Imagination, occupying itself single-mindedly in fancied viewings and hearings” 91949), and this soon became the widely accepted viewpoint” (4).

The fundamental concept of internal imagery and functioning imagination as a real process of mind has received some support from “cognitive psychologists such as….Paivio…Shepard, and….Kosslyn” as it has become once more ‘respectable as a topic for experimental psychological investigation” (4).  But that doesn’t mean that “imagination” has regained status as anything more than “a representationally dependent auxiliary to other, more fundamental forms of mental representation, and current theories of image formation hardly aspire to the central place in cognitive theory once occupied by the imagination’ (5).

This is actually quite a fall from an almost pre-eminent position of consideration in the cognitive/creative processes as envisioned by Coleridge and others in the Romantic movement, even when the difficulties that Hume brought to its definition divided opinions: “According to Hume ‘Tis an established maxim in metaphysics, That…nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible (Treatise, I,ii,2)” (5).  Without wading through examples that can prove to us how we can imagine some impossible things, and that the converse of Hume’s observation can lead to prickly non sequiturs, there is some

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