ABSTRACT
We associate much with the imagination: the power to evoke images of absent objects and people, to generate inner pictures of past events or memories, and to create artistic representations of important experiences and desires. We attribute the highest order of moral, intellectual, and emotional growth to the ability to engage the imagination; we see “imaginative play” as necessary for the development of empathy and thus healthy familial and social bonds. In art, such associations and attributions arise from a history of understanding the imagination as more than the passive ability to recollect images and instead as an active and transformative faculty of the mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and others argued that, through the productive or constructive power of the imagination, we literally create the world by giving order or larger meaning to seemingly disparate and discrete elements. In light of these notions, an impaired imagination might manifest itself in a lack of empathy, literal-mindedness, or a tendency to get caught up in the individual and distinct impression. Within a continuum of definitions that elevate the liberating (and humanizing) nature of the imagination, such qualities suggest profound limitations-and a vision of the world that closes off the possibility of great art and wisdom.
