(paraphrased by Ann Robertson)
“This is also true with respect to the internal parts of man because after an object that has been seen is removed or we shut our eyes, we still retain an image of the thing seen, although it is more obscure than when we were looking at the object directly. This is what the Latins call “imagination,” i.e. the image that remains in our mind or the sensation that occurs with the other senses other than sight. So imagination is nothing but “decaying sense.”
When the mental image or any other sense begins to decay, the decay is not due to a diminishing of the motion in us that gave rise to it but is rather the result of an obscuring of it in the same way that the light of the sun obscures the light of the other stars.
Our senses are subjected to many stimuli due to the impact of external objects, but we are only aware of the most dominant stimulus at any one time. In the same way we are only aware of the sun and not the other stars. Once an object is removed from our presence, although the impression it made on us remains, nevertheless the objects that remain exert a greater impression so that our imagination of the object from the past is made weak, just like a voice is lost in a crowd. Consequently, the longer the time that has passed after we have seen an object, the weaker is our imagination of it. The continual change of man’s body eventually destroys the parts that were moved by the object so that the distance of both time and place has the same effect on us. If there is a great distance between us and the object we are looking at, then what we see appears dim and without distinction with respect to the smaller parts and the voices grow weak and inarticulate. In the same way, if much time has passed, then our imagination is weak and we cannot visualize all of the streets of a city. We call decaying sense “imagination” in order to emphasize that it is something mental. But when we want to emphasize the fact that it has decayed, we call it “memory.” So imagination and memory are identical.”
Memory of many things is called “experience.” Imagination arises only from things perceived by the senses and can either arise all at once or in parts. When we perceive the whole object all at once, it is called “simple” imagination and occurs, for example, when we perceive a man or a horse. When we perceive only the parts of something, it is called “compound” imagination. For example, if at one time we perceive a man and at another time we perceive a horse and then put these ideas together in the form of a centaur, then this is compound imagination and is a fiction of the mind.
museum of the mind 