The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought

Abstract

Attacked from many angles and on many grounds, the terms 'image' and 'imagination' have maintained a precarious foothold in psychology for the last quarter of a century. At present writing, with the epithets 'eidetiker' and 'introvert' in the air, only the hardier dare avow the persistence in our daily thinking of the imaginal taken in its more flagrant forms. Yet the most scrupulous of objectivists, after carefully expunging the offending terms from his professional diction, must admit a grain of curiosity as to the sources of the strange delusion which the words connote. This curiosity Professor Bundy's scholarly and readable narrative is eminently calculated both to whet and to allay. Planned originally as an excursion into critical sources, in the interests of the time honored literary controversy over the respective provinces of fancy and imagination, the study expanded in the author's hands, taking on new objectives. The volume issued is announced as the first installment only of a comprehensive survey of theories of imagination and fancy, from the dawn of Greek thought to the present. Thought is a unity, asserts the author in the Preface; the history of critical and esthetic terms must inevitably be bound up with the contemporaneous conclusions of epistemologist, metaphysician, and psychologist. Hence the rational procedure of the critic is simply to allow representatives of successive ages to speak for themselves; explaining their utterances, not in the light of his own theory but as having come from certain schools of thought, from certain personalities, at certain times; thereby revealing the drift of certain great traditions. In Bundy's Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought the psychologist may therefore trace not merely the varying fortunes of the two terms in question (EiKaala from the verb ElK AW, to copy-later imaginate--and 0avrao-a, from the verb faivw to appear, or Cavrd'sw, to render apparent). He will find also a lucid and fairly leisurely account of descriptive psychology itself in the making; from the first tentative differentiation of the 'existential' and the 'experimental' in Pre-Socratic fragments, through the painstaking piling up of observation, the gradual clarification of the boundaries between stimulus and sensation and image, at the hands of classical philosophers and medieval schoolmen; a story told in large part through the medium of copious quotations from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Philostratus, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante (to mention only the more prominent sources); the whole linked by a lucid running commentary by the author, who furnishes also a final and definitive summary. Especially significant from the point of view of the esthetician is the evidence (gathered from many quarters) of the gradual re-infiltration of the terms ELKaOia and cavraotLa into esthetic criticism, from which they had been rigorously excluded by Aristotle, on metaphysical rather than critical premises. Excerpts from the works of Dante, illustrative of the final synthesis of medieval theories of the function of the imagination, in Chapter XI, are perhaps of interest to the literary critic rather than to the psychologist.

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