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

& that too in the sublimed sense— the Image of the Creator— there               is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind  must               be false, as a system” (222).

While I cannot embrace Coleridge’s precise religious interpretations, nor, for that matter, the twofold or threefold vision of Imagination, with which we could occupy the timber of a whole tree made into paper, McFarlane makes another interesting argument that “the lineage of the secondary imagination extends not only backwards beyond Kant to Teens, but also beyond Teens to Leibniz, and finally beyond Leibniz to Plato.”

And that makes all the difference: Coleridge contemplates this unbroken succession of thought (as I think we, too, might profit from doing), and thus,

“With antecedents of this kind,….Coleridge’s threefold theory of imagination                     actually bears less on poetry than it does on those things that always mattered                     most to him— as they did to Leibniz and to Kant— that is, “the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God” (224-226).

With the advent of the computer, we entered a new frontier: we did not know how to explore it all – its functions and potential were not defined for us in advance. Of itself, the computer offered the human mind endless variations using Imagination.  Once more, marvelous, creative things can happen, because we aren’t fettered by a totally mechanistic interpretation of everything that we do. It is a new creative frontier, waiting to be expanded and developed.

It will be tamed faster than any frontier behind it, as we speed up

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23