ABSTRACT
Imagination is like Adam’s dream, he awoke and found it true. (John Keats)
What most distinguishes the modern philosophies of imagination from their various antecedents is a marked affirmation of the creative power of man. The mimetic paradigm of imagining is replaced by the productive paradigm. No longer viewed as an intermediary agency-at best imitating some truth beyond manthe imagination becomes, in modern times, the immediate source of its own truth. Now imagination is deemed capable of inventing a world out of its human resources, a world answerable to no power higher than itself. Or to cite the canonical metaphor, the imagination ceases to function as a mirror reflecting some external reality and becomes a lamp which projects its own internally generated light onto things. As a consequence of this momentous reversal of roles, meaning is no longer primarily considered as a transcendent property of divine being; it is now hailed as a transcendental product of the human mind.1
