ABSTRACT
Philosophy records a war absurdly waged by aficionados of reason, law and order against Imagination. Plato set the style of it with his translation of experienced oneness into metaphysical unity, experienced mobility into instant eternity, experienced singularity into undifferentiated universality, limited reasonableness into universal Reason or Logos. Aristotle somewhat collapsed his teacher’s fantasy into something closer to commonsense—tempered, however, by the academic privilege of his time. Samuel Coleridge, translating the German philosophers’ Einbildungskraft into esemplastic power, reinstated in man’s original nature the creativity of imagination whereby Homo sapiens is indeed the image of God, unless it be that God is indeed an image of sapient man. The creative intelligence reshapes the new image by workings which are themselves innovative but harmonizing. A person’s memory comprehends everything he has lived through, body and soul. It is the substance of his individuality, of his personal history as he alters his selfhood by his struggles to preserve himself between birth and death.
