imagination
English, from Latin · imaginatio
Imagination is the power of images: to have them when the thing is absent, and sometimes when it never was.
- imago
- image, likeness, copy (Latin)
Morphology
Latin imaginatio, from imago. In Aristotle’s Greek, phantasia is the appearance-making power. Medieval Latin made imaginatio a faculty between sense and intellect.
Semantic range
Mental imagery, invention, fancy, the faculty of the absent.
History of the word
For empiricists it recombined copies of sense. For Coleridge it became a living power. Cognitive science studies imagery and mental simulation. Romantic inflation and laboratory thinning both happen to the word.
A key source
Aristotle
De Anima III.3, on phantasia.
Associated traditions
Parallels, not equivalents. Different attempts to notice something about knowing.
Greek
phantasia
Appearance; not “fantasy” as falsehood.
Arabic
khayāl
Imaginal realm in Ibn ʿArabī; a third thing, not a mistake.
A distant linguistic echo
perception
Latin · What is given; imagination works with what is not.
How the word shifts
English often opposes imagination to reality. Older maps sometimes put it between them.
make-believe
The serious work of having an absent world present.
A story where the word matters
Nearby words
Neighbors, not translations of one concept.
From this word
Is imagining a lesser seeing, or a different office of the same mind?
One question remains
What does this word let us notice that English “consciousness” does not?
It lets us notice that much of conscious life is of what is not here.