The second of the four ways of knowing, which lies above sense-perception but below reason and intelligence. Imagining something captures the object’s “shape as constituted in matter,” but does not require that the imagined object is actually present. Because the imagination lets a knower “survey all sensible objects,” Philosophy argues, it includes the insights of sense-perception. Philosophy concludes that many animals have imagination, which they use to make predictions and take actions pertaining to the future.
Imagination Quotes in The Consolation of Philosophy
The The Consolation of Philosophy quotes below are all either spoken by Imagination or refer to Imagination. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Book V, Part V
Quotes
In the same way, human reason refuses to believe that divine intelligence can see the future in any other way except that in which human reason has knowledge. This is how the argument runs: if anything does not seem to have any certain and predestined occurrence, it cannot be foreknown as a future event. Of such, therefore, there is no foreknowledge: and if we believe that even in this case there is foreknowledge, there will be nothing which does not happen of necessity. If, therefore, as beings who have a share of reason, we can judge of the mind of God, we should consider it most fitting for human reason to bow before divine wisdom, just as we judged it right for the senses and the imagination to yield to reason.
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Imagination Term Timeline in The Consolation of Philosophy
The timeline below shows where the term Imagination appears in The Consolation of Philosophy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book V, Part IV
...or by touching it. Similarly, one can understand human beings through four different methods: “sense-perception, imagination, reason and intelligence.” Sense-perception looks at humans’ “shape as constituted in matter,” imagination at their...
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...of all. So through intelligence, one can understand “universals,” “shape,” and “matter”—the domains of reason, imagination, and sense-perception, respectively—all through “the single glance of the mind.” Similarly, reason includes the insights...
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Book V, Part V
...mussels and other shellfish,” can only know through sense-perception, while other animals have sense-perception and imagination, and only humans have reason in addition to these. “Intelligence,” in turn, “belongs only to...
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