Universal Principles of Art

40 IMAGINATION

A FACULTY THAT INVENTS AND ORGANIZES

Imagination is a faculty that allows us to generate mental pictures, ideas, and sensations that do not exist in the world and in some cases cannot exist. These abilities are unique to human beings and no doubt emerged from evolutionary pressures allowing us to predict outcomes of all manner of events, both social and mechanical, and to project desirable strategies for survival.

Today we tend to link imaginative and creative powers and to value them as the engine that underpins much artistic endeavor. This was not always so. Prior to the late seventeenth century, the word was generally paired with “fancy” and thought of as a somewhat mechanical faculty capable of recombining information already ...